Chapter Six #5
“I’m marrying you because I want your name beside mine before the city can finish whispering about what you are to me,” I said.
“I’m marrying you because I want every door, ledger, guard, doctor, banker, and bastard with an opinion to understand that you’re my family.
I’m marrying you because you chose me when you didn’t have to, and I’m selfish enough to want the whole world corrected. ”
Nadia’s eyes filled.
This time, she didn’t tell me not to make her cry.
Mikhail made a low sound. “That will do.”
Galina looked at my father. “Generous of you.”
My father ignored her.
Nadia stepped into me in front of them all.
I put one hand at her waist and the other against the side of her face. She lifted her chin before I could bend, meeting me halfway.
The kiss wasn’t gentle enough for a formal room.
Good.
Let them look. Let them understand. Let every witness carry back the same truth.
I hadn’t taken a temporary prize from an auction.
I had found the woman who would sit beside me while the city learned new rules.
When Nadia pulled back, her cheeks were wet.
She turned without leaving my arm and faced the room.
“I’ll marry him because I choose him,” she said. “Not because Gennady shamed me. Not because Petya owes him. Not because anyone bought me. I choose Vadim because he made me safer without making me smaller.”
Petya covered his mouth with one hand and looked at the floor.
Galina’s eyes shone once before she turned toward the samovar.
Mikhail nodded slowly.
“Then it’s done,” he said.
Chairs shifted. Men lowered their eyes. Galina reached for a porcelain cup with a hand that trembled once before she steadied it.
The Kask witnesses left first, escorted by my men. The auctioneer went next, pale and silent. Petya stayed with Nadia until Lev came to take him to a protected apartment two floors above the club for the night.
Petya hugged Nadia hard.
This time, he let go first.
“I’ll call you when Lev says I can,” he said.
Nadia touched his bruised jaw. “Listen to him.”
Petya glanced at me, then back at her. “I will.”
“I mean it.”
“I know.” Petya tried for a smile and failed. “You’re scarier than he is.”
“No,” Nadia said. “I’m just more disappointed.”
Petya winced. “That’s worse.”
“Yes,” she said. “Remember that.”
He nodded once and followed Lev out.
My father was next. The doctor appeared as soon as Galina opened the door, which told me she’d been holding the man back by force of will and social terror.
Mikhail’s jaw tightened. “I can walk to the car.”
Galina turned her head. “Mikhail.”
He looked at her.
She didn’t repeat herself.
His hand closed around the cane. “Fine.”
The doctor stepped in beside him.
Before my father left, he gripped my forearm.
His hand felt lighter than it should have.
“You chose trouble,” he said.
“I learned from you.”
“You chose better trouble than I did.”
That was as close as Mikhail Sorin would come to blessing anything while sober and in pain.
He looked at Nadia. “Welcome to a difficult family.”
Nadia’s expression eased. “I’ve had practice.”
He nodded, accepting that answer as tribute.
Galina touched Nadia’s cheek before she left. Not long. Not sentimental. Just two fingers, cool and steady, against the place Gennady had tried to turn into shame.
“My son is not easy,” Galina said.
“I know.”
“Easy men are rarely useful.” Galina kissed my cheek, then fixed me with the same stare that had ended wars at my father’s dinner table. “Do not let him stand again tonight, Vadim.”
“I’ll do my best.”
“Do better than that.”
“Yes, Mother.”
She left with my father and the doctor.
At last, only Nadia and I remained.
The room looked worse in the quiet. Blood marked the table.
A crack split the plaster. Gennady’s rings sat in the dish near the samovar.
Chairs stood pushed back from the table.
One of Nadia’s fingerprints marked the polished wood where her hand had pressed hard enough to leave a faint oval in dust.
I took a clean handkerchief from inside my jacket and wiped the blood from my knuckles.
Nadia watched me. “Is it over?”
“Yes.”
“All of it?”
“The danger from Gennady is over. The debt is over. The Kask claim is broken. Petya is alive and guarded.” I threw the handkerchief onto the table. “The rest is rebuilding.”
She nodded slowly.
Then her knees softened.
I reached her before she could catch the chair. My hands closed around her waist.
“I’m fine,” she said.
“You keep using that word badly.”
“I’m upright.”
“You were.”
She leaned into me then. Not because she lacked strength. Because she didn’t have to spend it pretending.
I gathered her against my chest and held her in the wreckage of my father’s room.
Her arms came around me beneath my jacket. She pressed her face to my shirt and breathed once, then again, each breath deeper than the one before.
“You stopped,” she said.
“When you told me to?”
“Yes.”
“I heard you.”
“I know. That’s why I’m saying it.”
I rested my cheek against her hair. It smelled like my shampoo, her skin, and the cold wind from outside. “I’ll always hear you.”
“Don’t make impossible promises.”
“I won’t always agree with you.”
She huffed against my chest.
“But I’ll hear you,” I said. “Even when I’m angry. Especially then.”
Her arms tightened.
I stayed there until the tension began to leave her shoulders.
Then I lifted her.
She made a startled sound and caught my lapels. “Vadim.”
“You’re upright again, but I prefer you carried.”
“That sounds like a you problem.”
“It’s becoming a marriage problem.”
Her lips curved against my shirt. “You’re going to be very difficult.”
“Yes.”
“Good thing I have teeth.”
I looked down at her.
The softness in her face nearly ruined me.
“You do,” I said. “Use them on me when we get home.”
Color rushed up her throat. “You can’t say that in your father’s room.”
“I can. I shouldn’t.”
She laughed then.
A real laugh. Small, exhausted, disbelieving, but real.
I carried that sound out of the room like something holy and stolen.
Warm light waited for us in the penthouse.
Irina had left lamps on in the bedroom, tea on the table, and food beneath silver covers because she understood the body better than most soldiers understood weapons.
The city pressed dark against the windows.
Rain had finally come, drawing silver lines down the glass and turning Manhattan’s lights soft at the edges.
I set Nadia on the bed.
She pulled me down by my tie before I could step away.
The kiss she gave me wasn’t gratitude.
It had hunger in it. Claim. The last bright edge of fear burning itself out under wanting.
I braced one hand beside her hip and let her take what she needed from my mouth. Her fingers opened my tie, then the top button of my shirt. She touched my throat, my chest, the place where my pulse had not fully slowed since Gennady’s knife hit the floor.
“You’re shaking,” she whispered.
I looked at my hand beside her.
She was right.
A fine tremor ran through my fingers, visible only because the room had gone still.
Nadia covered my hand with hers.
The tremor stopped beneath her palm.
“You scared me today,” she said.
“I know.”
“Not because I thought you’d hurt me.”
I waited.
“Because I realized I could stop you,” she said. “And you’d let me.”
My throat tightened around words I didn’t have.
She drew my hand to her mouth and kissed my bruised knuckles, one by one. “No one’s ever trusted me with that much power before.”
“You had it before I trusted you with it.”
Her eyes lifted.
“I only admitted it.”
She reached for my coat, pushing it off my shoulders. I let it fall. Her hands moved to my shirt again, opening buttons with slow, uneven care.
“I want you close,” she said. “I’m too tired for more than that, but I want your skin against mine.”
“Then that’s what you get.”
“All night?”
“All night.”
She smiled, and I kissed it because she gave it to me. I would never stop wanting that.
I removed her boots first. Then her coat. Then the sweater, when she lifted her arms and let me draw it over her head. I kept my eyes on her face as each layer came away. Not because I didn’t want the rest of her. I wanted with a violence that had become part of my breathing.
But tonight, after rooms and witnesses and blood, I wanted her to feel the difference between being stripped for sale and being undressed by a man who would stop at the first change in her breath.
Her trousers came next. Her socks. The underthings Irina had folded into the box.
By the time she lay bare against my sheets, gooseflesh had risen along her skin and her eyes had gone dark.
“Vadim,” she said.
There was no fear in it.
I bent and kissed her knee, then the inside of her thigh, then the soft place low on her stomach. She shivered and reached for my hair.
“Not too much,” she whispered.
I lifted my head. “Tell me what you want.”
“Just you. Close. No proving anything.”
I wanted to put my mouth on her and make her forget every hand that had ever tried to turn her into a price. I wanted to bury myself inside her and keep her full of me until morning.
I gave her what she asked for.
I stripped quickly and came down beside her. She turned into me before I could arrange the covers, pressing her naked body along mine with a sigh that emptied something brutal from my chest.
I pulled the blanket over us and held her.
For a while, that was all.
Rain moved down the windows. The city breathed beneath us. Somewhere beyond the locked doors and guarded elevator, men were carrying news through private rooms that Nadia Yelchin was no longer a debt, a lot, or a loss to be collected.
Here, she was warm against me, with her cheek over my heart and one thigh slid between mine.
I reached for the tea Irina had left and held the cup while Nadia took two small sips. She made a face at the bitterness, so I fed her a piece of buttered bread from the tray and watched her swallow it before I let her settle against me again.
Her body softened against mine.
“Nadia,” I said.
“Hmm?”
“I love you.”
She went still.
The words had come out calmly. Too calmly, maybe, for what they did to me. I’d ordered men killed with more air in my lungs.
Nadia lifted her head from my chest and looked at me.
Her eyes were wet again.
“You don’t have to say it back tonight,” I said.
“I know.” She touched my jaw. “That isn’t why I’m quiet.”
I waited.
She kissed me once. Soft. Slow. Certain enough to hurt.
“I love you too,” she said. “I think I started falling for you before I was ready to admit it, and that’s terrifying, so don’t look smug.”
“I’m going to look smug later.”
“I assumed.”
“Right now, I’m busy.”
“Doing what?”
“Holding my future wife and the mother of my children.”
Her expression softened. “That’s a lot of titles.”
“You’ll wear all of them well.”
“Possessive.”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
She laid her cheek on my chest again and closed her eyes.
I stayed on my back in my bed with Nadia warm against my side, one arm around her waist, and the blanket pulled over both of us. The tea cooled on the table beside us. Rain marked the windows. Her breathing slowed against my skin, steady and alive.
No debt waited outside the door. No auctioneer called her lot number. No Kask man owned a second of her future.
Only Nadia, safe under my roof because she’d chosen to stay.
Only my woman, sleeping in my arms while the city finally learned her price had never been theirs to name.