“Same stubborn tilt of the chin.”
He stopped behind me.
Close enough that I felt the heat of him through the thin fabric of my dress.
Close enough that if he lowered his head an inch, his lips would touch the place he used to kiss to make me melt.
His breath brushed the back of my neck, warm and devastating.
“But Penelope,” he whispered, “hated cigarette smoke. Triggered her asthma.”
A pause.
A sharper inhale.
“Funny.”
I forced my spine straight, chin high, heartbeat a war drum in my ears.
He drifted around me again—closer this time. Much closer—until our breaths mingled. Until my pulse had no choice but to answer his.
Face-to-face now.
Too close.
Far too close.
And for the first time...
I saw him.
Not the mafia boss. Not the monster. But the man who had slept with his hand under my cheek.
The man who carried my inhaler in his coat pocket.
The man who once stared at my body like it was the only prayer he’d ever believed in.
“Marry me, Pen,” he said.
His voice was velvet and venom, a caress sharpened into a threat.
The cigarette slipped from his fingers, ash scattering over the Persian rug. He didn’t even glance at it. His full attention—every ounce of his focus—was on me.
My heart stopped.
Time stopped.
“What?” I whispered.
“You heard me,” he repeated, voice low and absolute. “Marry me. Tonight. Right now.”
A sound ripped out of me before I could stop it—a laugh, jagged and disbelieving, the kind that hurts on the way up because it’s made of shock and old wounds.
“Tell me this is a joke,” I said, barely holding my voice steady. “Because I don’t find it funny. I don’t know you, Mr. Volkov. And you certainly don’t know me.”
His face remained a stone wall—cold, unreadable.
“She collapsed. Fell into a coma right before the vows could be finalized,” he said, his tone almost casual. “The wedding couldn’t go on. And now... I’m single. Exactly as I’ve always wanted.”
