Chapter Six — Alexei #3
The officiant, a man we used for documents that required legal precision and minimal conversation, stood at the far end. His expression was that of someone who had learned not to ask questions about the contexts in which his services were requested.
The family arranged themselves with the decorum of people who understood that this was not a conventional event and had decided collectively to treat it with gravity rather than irony.
Even Dmitri, who had been visibly containing himself since I’d arrived at the estate, had straightened his jacket and stood properly.
Isla came in with Mira, which I’d heard had been her choice. She’d wanted a woman beside her, not a guard, and apparently, Mira had understood the assignment.
She was wearing a dress that was deep blue, simply cut, that Elena had sourced and that I was now aware had been specifically chosen by Elena rather than provided at random.
The soft lace of the dress wrapped snugly around her stomach and hips and flared out until it flowed to the ground.
It showed me—and every other person here—how curvy and truly feminine she was beneath that angry frown she often cloaked herself in.
Her honey blonde hair looked darker in the night light as it poured down both sides of her face in soft waves.
There was no color on her face except for the soft pink, glossy thing on her lips.
She looked…
She looked like herself. That was the thing.
The dress was elegant, and it suited her, but what I noticed first wasn’t the dress—it was the way she walked into the room with her chin level and her hands steady, her eyes scanning the assembled Golovins with the same rapid assessment she’d applied to the poker room.
And then her gaze found mine, and her eyes remained still for a moment.
I held her gaze, and she didn’t look away.
We stood across from the officiant and, while I was aware of the family behind us and the legal weight of what was about to occur, I was more aware of the woman standing beside me and had not once, in thirty-six hours, behaved in a way I could have predicted.
The officiant spoke in standard language. Civil, unadorned, the legal system of a binding agreement dressed in the minimum required ceremony. I answered when I was required to answer. My voice came out exactly as I intended it to—even and clear.
Then it was her turn.
The room was very quiet.
She stood with her hands loose at her sides and her chin up.
Her eyes were on the officiant as she said, “I do.”
Applause rose from the small gathering, but her words replayed in my head.
They sounded like a challenge.
It sounded like someone planting a flag in difficult terrain and daring anyone, least of all the terrain itself, to argue.
Something moved in my chest.
Not triumph—I knew what triumph felt like. I was familiar with the satisfaction of an objective achieved. This wasn’t that. This was different. It felt heavier.
It carried the weight of something that has shifted from abstraction to reality, that has moved from solution to consequence in the space of two syllables and that ‘so what’ look.
I do.
She was my wife.
The officiant pronounced it. The family made the quiet sounds after the applause died down. Dmitri, to his credit, didn’t say anything, which I suspected cost him considerably.
I looked at her.
She looked at me. The challenge was still in her eyes, but underneath it—layered below the defiance, barely visible and gone again quickly—something that might have been the same thing I was feeling.
It was like the weight of a door that had just closed, and the unclear landscape of whatever is on the other side of it.
I thought about the file on my desk. Pages of correctly executed invisibility.
A woman who had spent years being careful enough to almost disappear, who had been found anyway, who had been placed on a table in my room and had refused to go blank.
Who had shoved me, lashed out at me, asked honest questions, clutched my jacket, and agreed to this with unexpected logical composure.
She looks at me like I’m answerable to her.
I had said that to myself and my brothers and meant it as a professional observation. Standing in the candlelit main room of the Golovin estate with the legal fact of her name now attached to mine, I was aware that it was something else as well.
She was my responsibility.
Not a possession. Not an asset, which was operational language and felt, looking at her, insufficient.
Responsibility.
I had not carried that weight before. Not like this.
Not for a person.
The operations were different—you protected the operation because the operation was the structure that everything else depended on. Family was different too—family was blood, history, and obligation that predated choice. But this was something else.
My wife.
I would need to determine what to do with that information.
I had known, from the moment I stood up from that poker table, that winning her was the simplest part of this.
Everything after this was uncharted.
I was not, by nature or training, a man who operated in uncharted territory.
I was going to have to become one.