Katya
The reception is small. No more than forty people in a room that could hold two hundred, which tells me the Orlovs curate their circle with precision.
I stand beside my new husband with a glass of champagne I haven't tasted and a smile I perfected at fourteen, and I let the evening happen around me.
My father works the room like a man who's been given a second chance and knows it. Shaking hands, laughing too loudly, projecting the confidence of a patriarch whose family is once again relevant. I watch him and feel the familiar numbness settle over me like a second skin.
He's happy. Not for me. Not because his daughter is married. He’s happy because his name is back in the room. Because Killian Orlov's ring on my finger means the Lazovski stain has been scrubbed, at least partially, and the alliances can begin again.
I am the cloth he's using to clean his reputation.
"You haven't touched your drink."
Killian's voice comes from beside me, quiet enough that only I can hear. I glance up at him. He's watching the room too, but his attention has a different quality to my father's. Less performance, more surveillance.
"I don't drink alcohol," I say.
"Ever?"
"I’m not twenty-one yet. Besides," I add, “I want to stay sharp.”
The words come out before I can shape them into something softer, and I feel a brief flash of irritation at myself.Stay sharpimplies I perceive a threat and that I don't feel safe. A more disciplined woman would have said she simply didn't care for champagne.
But Killian doesn't react the way I expect. He simply nods, takes the glass from my hand, and sets it on a passing tray, swapping it for a flute of orange juice, which he back hands to me.
"You need to drink something," he says.
I stare at the glass. Such a small thing. Such an ordinary act of consideration. And yet no one has ever done it before.
"Thank you," I say, and for once the words carry weight.
He inclines his head slightly, then returns his attention to the room. Beside us, his mother is speaking with a silver-haired man about her secret bread recipe, her voice pleasant but her eyes sharp. His brother Liam stands across the room with his wife Grace, who looks like the kind of woman who could dismantle a government and still make it home for dinner.
I study them all, the Orlov machine, and begin mapping the dynamics. Who defers to whom. Who speaks freely and who waits for permission. Where the real power sits versus where it appears to sit.
Old habits. My father called it eavesdropping. I call it survival.
"You're cataloguing," Killian says.
I turn to him, startled. "Excuse me?"
"The room. The people. You're building a map." A not quite smile crosses his mouth. "I do the same thing."
I don't confirm or deny. I simply look at him, this man I married an hour ago, and try to reconcile what I prepared myself for with what's actually standing in front of me.
He's not what I expected. Not loud, or domineering, and definitely not performing masculinity the way the Bratva men I grew up around always did. With their chests out, voices raised, and all available space claimed. Killian exists in a room the way a shadow does. Present but not intrusive. Part of the landscape but separate from it.
It unnerves me. The men who make noise, the ones who shout and posture and fill every silence with their own importance…those men I understand. I know how to navigate them, how to shrink into the right shape, how to become whatever they need me to be so I can stay safe.
Killian Orlov doesn't seem to need me to be anything at all, and I have no idea what to do with that.
The reception winds down in stages. Guests leave in clusters, handshakes and cheek-kisses and murmured congratulations that sound more like business transactions than well-wishes. My father is one of the last to go, pausing at the door to grip my shoulders and press a dry kiss to my forehead.
"Make me proud," he says against my skin.
I smile. The rehearsed one. The one that means nothing.
"Goodnight, Father."
