"And you want me to marry into that." I let the words sit, let him hear how they sounded. "A disgraced family with a patriarch so desperate to claw back relevance that he's offering his remaining daughter like livestock."
Liam was quiet for a moment. When he spoke, his voice was careful. "The council approved it because the alliance serves a purpose. Lazovski still has relationships in territories we need access to."
"So, I'm a political tool."
"You're my brother." Liam's voice hardened, just slightly. Just enough to remind me that beneath the diplomacy, he's still the man who took over this family at twenty-six and held it together through everything. "And I wouldn't ask you to do this if I didn't believe it could work."
"Work for whom?"
"For us. For the family. And possibly for her. Less so for Lazovski…" he trails off.
That last part caught me. I looked at him and saw something I don't often see in my brother's face. Concern. Not for the politics or the territory or the shipping routes. For the woman being traded across a table like currency.
"She's twenty," Liam said quietly. "The younger sister. Not the one who left. The one who stayed."
The one who stayed.
What does it take to remain in a house built on bitterness and shame, with a father whose pride has been gutted and a name that carries the stench of disgrace? What does it cost to be the daughter who didn't leave, who absorbed every ounce ofa broken man's resentment because there was no one else left to bear it?
"The contract includes a consummation clause," Liam continued. "And requires verification. Heir expected in due course."
I felt something cold settle in my chest. Not anger, exactly. Something older. Something that tasted like the particular disgust I reserve for men who treat women as instruments of legacy.
"They want the sheets?" I asked.
Liam only pulled a face sharing my distaste, but confirming non-the-less.
"And if I refuse the bride but accept the mandate? Choose my own wife?"
"Then you insult Lazovski publicly, the council reads it as defiance, and we spend six months managing the fallout instead of building alliances." Liam paused. "I'm not ordering you, Killian. I'm asking."
That was worse. Liam ordering me, I could refuse. Liam asking meant he'd already calculated every alternative and found them all unsuitable. It meant he was trusting my judgment to arrive at the same conclusion he had.
And I hated that he was right.
When she stepped out of the car I understood three things immediately.
The first: her father chose that dress. The rigid fabric, the severe cut, the color that has nothing to do with tradition and everything to do with messaging;she is pure, she is untouched, she is yours.
The second: she opened her own door. A small thing. Meaningless to anyone not paying attention. But I'm alwayspaying attention, and I watched her hand reach for the handle a half-second before the driver could get there, watched her step out on her own terms rather than wait to be extracted. In a life that appears to be entirely choreographed by someone else, she found a two-second window of autonomy and took it.
The third: she holds my gaze. Not defiantly or seductively. But with the careful, cataloguing attention of someone who has learned that information is the only currency no one can take from you.
She is reading me while I read her, and she doesn't flinch.
I watch her through the ceremony. I can't help it. She stands where she's placed and says what she's told to say and signs what's put in front of her. Through all of it her composure never cracks. Not once. Not a tremor in her voice, not a hesitation in her step, not a single moment where the mask slips and the woman underneath becomes visible.
It's as impressive as it is devastating.
Katya's composure isn't a tool. It's a wall. She isn't choosing to be composed. She's been trained to be, the way you train an animal to stop flinching by hitting it often enough that flinching becomes more dangerous than stillness.
The realization settles in me like cold water.
Her father watches from the front row with satisfaction painted across his face, and I want to break his jaw.
I don't, obviously. I stand where I'm supposed to stand and say the words I'm supposed to say and slide a ring onto the finger of a woman I met fifteen minutes ago, and I do it all with the same measured control that has defined every action of my adult life.
But underneath that control, something is shifting.
