Chapter Seven — Isla
Chapter Seven
Isla
I signed my name in blue ink on a document I hadn’t read.
That was the part that stayed with me afterward, beyond the ceremony, the candles, the Golovin family members watching with their various expressions of curiosity, assessment, and barely contained entertainment.
The part that stayed with me was the pen in my hand and the line beside his name.
I was watching myself sign like I was another person.
It was the fact that I signed it without reading the document first, which was so profoundly unlike me that it felt like evidence of something.
I always read documents. I had read every vendor contract, every venue agreement, and every insurance addendum in my years of professional event planning with thoroughness.
I signed Alexei Golovin’s marriage certificate without reading a single line of it.
I think I knew, somewhere underneath, that reading it would make it too real too fast, and I needed the unreality to last just a little longer.
Isla Monroe-Golovin.
The hyphen was mine. I’d insisted on it, and he’d agreed without argument, which was somehow more unsettling than if he’d pushed back.
I looked at my signature on the line and felt the strange doubled sensation of recognizing my own handwriting in a context so foreign it might as well have been someone else’s.
Someone else’s life. Actually, that was the feeling.
I was standing at the edge of someone else’s life, watching myself step into it, unable to fully close the distance between the Isla who had been planning a charity gala forty-eight hours ago and the Isla who had just signed her name next to a dangerous man’s in a candlelit room full of his family.
A family that clearly saw danger as ordinary.
The officiant shook our hands with a seemingly practiced warmth. He said something about wishing us well. I said something back. I don’t remember what.
Then it was done, and the Golovins came toward us, and I made myself stand still and receive them.
Mikhail came first. I didn’t need to be told that he was the oldest brother.
The Pakhan. He was taller than I’d processed from across the room—three inches taller than Alexei.
He was a quiet man with eyes that looked like they had seen a great deal and had organized it into a private understanding that he wasn’t under any obligation to share.
He looked at me for a moment with the assessment of someone reading a document rather than a face, and then he said: “Welcome to the family,” in a tone that meant it as a statement of fact rather than a pleasantry.
Somehow, it was more reassuring than warmth would have been.
Viktor was cooler. A lean, guarded man whose skepticism was visible on the surface.
He shook my hand with the sharp courtesy of someone who had made a decision not to be impolite while reserving judgment.
His wife, Sofia, came with him. She was dark-haired and sharp-eyed.
She pressed my hand rather than shaking it, and said nothing except give me a small smile.
Then a hand found mine from the left—warm, quick, a squeeze rather than a formal gesture—and I turned to find a young and bright-faced lady smiling at me.
I recognized her instantly. She was one of the two ladies sitting with Alexei’s brothers, the two ladies who were clearly too free with the guys to be their wives.
“I’m Anya,” she said. “He told us all about your fiery nature. You’ll make a perfect pair.”
I blinked. “Oh, and he has seen all of that in how many hours?”
“He said you’re stubborn, brave and out of place.” She seemed to find this an entirely satisfactory description. “I thought that was quite a lot for him.”
I looked across the room to where Alexei was in conversation with Mikhail, his back to me, and I thought of what his youngest sister had just revealed. It was not a description I’d have chosen. It was also, as much as I didn’t enjoy admitting it, accurate.
“Anya.” The voice came from my right, and then Dmitri materialized.
He was younger than Alexei by enough years that it showed—not in the face so much as in the expression, which had retained a quality of genuine delight in things that Alexei’s had lost or deliberately set aside somewhere along the way.
He looked at me with eyes that were taking a comprehensive inventory while maintaining the expression of someone simply saying hello.
“You’re shorter than I expected,” he said, slightly squinting his right eye.
“Dmitri,” Anya cautioned, turning to face him.
“What? She is.” He tilted his head slightly, still looking at me with that open, assessing attention. “He described you, and I was expecting that you’d be, I don’t know, more imposing.”
“I made him catch me twice in two days; I’d argue that’s imposing,” I said, snorting into a chuckle.
There was a half-second of silence, and then Dmitri laughed, and Anya pressed her lips together over a smile. Right then, something in my chest loosened by a fraction I hadn’t known it was holding.
“She’s going to be excellent,” Dmitri said, to no one in particular.
I looked across the room again. Alexei had turned slightly, and across the heads of assembled family and flickering candles, our eyes met for a moment. His expression was the same controlled composition it always was, but something about it was different from what it had been in the poker room.
I looked away first.
The reception afterward was nothing like what I would have planned.
If I had planned this reception, I would have managed the pacing differently, arranged the seating to facilitate specific conversations, chosen music that shifted register at precise intervals to carry people through the emotional arc of the evening.
What the Golovins did instead was simply—be.
The formal arrangement dissolved almost immediately into something looser, warmer, unplanned.
Wine appeared from somewhere. Elena, Mikhail’s wife, directed a quiet stream of food from the kitchen without appearing to direct anything at all.
Conversations formed and reformed around me.
Someone put on music that I didn’t recognize, but that had a quality I associated with rooms where people are genuinely comfortable.
I sat at the edge of it for a while, the way I sat at the edge of every event I’d ever run—not quite inside the thing, observing its mechanics, checking for faults.
Old habit. The difference was that at my events, I was always looking outward, at the guests, at the room.
Tonight, I kept finding my gaze returning inward, to the man on the other side of it.
Alexei moved through his family differently than he moved through everything else.
Still contained—he was always contained; I was beginning to understand that this wasn’t a performance but was simply the man he was—but something in the containment was less armored.
He said something to Mikhail that made Mikhail’s mouth move in what I was fairly sure was a smile, which felt significant given the economy of Mikhail’s expressions.
He let Anya talk at him for several minutes without once looking like he was waiting for her to finish.
When Dmitri said something from across the room that was clearly aimed at him, he gave Dmitri a look that was so precisely made to quell without engaging that I felt a laugh move through me before I could stop it, and Sofia, who was sitting nearby, caught it and looked at me with the beginning of something warmer than assessment.
“He’s different here,” I said, because Sofia seemed like someone who could receive an honest observation without surprise.
“He’s less vigilant,” she said. Not as though this were a simple thing. “He works very hard at that. Here, with them, he’s allowed to put some of it down.” She looked at Alexei across the room. “Viktor took a long time to let me see that part of him. I suspect Alexei will take longer.”
I absorbed that. “But you think I’ll see it.”
She looked at me. “I think you already have.” A pause. “Or he wouldn’t have described you the way he did.”
I didn’t ask her what she meant. I was fairly sure I knew, and knowing felt like enough for one evening.
*****
The drive back to the penthouse was quiet.
We sat on opposite sides of the car like two people who have agreed to something and are now in the transition zone between agreeing and living it, where the words have run out, and only the reality remains.
I didn’t look at him, and he didn’t look at me, and yet, I was aware of him with every inch of the distance between us.
Alexei Golovin was my husband.
I had said I do to that. Out loud. In front of witnesses.
The lobby received us with its usual indifferent efficiency. The elevator came. We stepped in. The doors closed.
He pressed twelve. I watched the numbers and said nothing.
I remained silent as Alexei walked ahead of me down the hallway. I didn’t say anything as he walked past the door of the room I’d occupied since I’d been here.
Of course, couples sleep together.
Finally, we got to the second of the only two doors on the left. He opened the door and, instead of going in ahead of me like I’d expected, he stepped aside and held the door for me. I felt something warm flood my chest in that moment.
I took two steps, and I was standing in a mini-parlor, if it could be called that.
It wasn’t as large as the main one, but it was just as impeccable.
A small, open-plan dining area featuring a table and four chairs was to the right.
The left side of the room consisted of a sleek television that practically spanned the breadth of the wall, a black two-seater couch, and a beige professor’s chair.
He came to stand beside me, pointing to the only door on the right. “The bedroom.” Then he pointed to the first door on the left. “My private office. The other room is my private gym. And strategy room, on occasion.”
“Unexpected,” I said before I could stop myself.