I know because I’ve been counting them obsessively for the past ten minutes while Natasha’s team swarms around me like panicked bees, desperately trying to transform me from “taco-stand runaway” back into “acceptable mob boss bride.”
No one will look me in the eye.
I don’t blame them. Not after watching Konstantin deliver the kind of threat that doesn’t need to be shouted to be terrifying. The kind that makes grown men pale and competent women tremble. The kind that made my stomach drop even though it wasn’t directed at me.
Yet.
“Hold still,” someone hisses, yanking at my hair hard enough to bring tears to my eyes. I don’t complain. The rough treatment feels almost deserved after what I’ve put them through.
Natasha moves like a general surveying war damage, circling me with a tight-lipped expression and eyes that calculate every flaw.
“Thirty-eight minutes,” she announces, voice taut with barely controlled terror. “We need to fix her hair, redo her makeup, and get her into the new shoes.”
New shoes. Because the first pair?
Currently floating in a toilet bowl.
Not my brightest moment.
In my defense, when you’re climbing out of a bathroom window mid-escape, the last thing you think about is securing your heels. One bad angle, one unfortunate slip, and those Louboutins did an Olympic-level dive straight into the bowl.
There was a tragic little splash.
A brief moment of silence.
Then me, staring down at the crime scene, realizing I couldn’t just leave a pair of five-thousand-dollar shoes in a public toilet.
I had to make a choice: dignity or retrieval.
Dignity won. Barely.
Now, someone shoves my foot into the replacement pair like I’m Cinderella’s bitter, uncooperative stepsister. “Ow.”
“Stop wiggling,” Natasha barks.
“Then stop trying to break my toes off,” I snap back.
“Twenty minutes,” she says, ignoring me entirely. “We need to move—now.”
Move? That’s rich. I’m already being dragged in three different directions—someone yanking my arm, another tightening the corset of this other expensive, lacy monstrosity. A third person is aggressively dabbing foundation onto my cheek like they’re scrubbing out a crime scene.
At some point in the chaos, I was stripped down, my ruined dress discarded, and this new one—another expensive, lacy monstrosity—was shoved onto me. I barely remember ithappening, but the memory of Natasha barking orders, hands yanking at zippers and straps, flashes through my mind. They worked fast. Brutally efficient. Like a pit crew for a doomed bride.
A murmur from outside the room—more voices now, the sound of guests arriving. I can hear the distant hum of a string quartet, the kind that makes everything feel formal and permanent.
The chaos inside, though? A full-blown circus.
And then, a child’s voice breaks through the noise.
“Are you going to cry?”
The room freezes. Even the woman currently wrestling my left eyelid into submission pauses mid-stroke. I blink, mascara wand dangerously close to my cornea, and turn toward the voice.
She studies me with a smoky sapphire stare that’s sharp and assessing, unnervingly familiar.
She can’t be older than 8, but her posture screams: “I’ve fired adults twice my size.” I don’t know her name, but I don’t need to.
She looks just like him.
