Aidan
Liam is looking out of the window when I enter his office. Killian sits with one foot propped on his knee, scrolling on his phone.
I narrow my eyes.
“Why are you here?” I ask Killian, then it dawns on me.
It’s my turn.
"So," he says, turning from the window and setting an empty glass on the desk between us. "As you know, the council's enforcing marriages on all of the Orlovs."
"I'm aware." I say this with a flat affect, because it’s true. Killian was made to marry Katya not eight weeks ago, and our cousin Anton was recently made to marry his wife, Kira. “I guess it’s my turn next,” I add with a sigh.
He leans back in his chair and studies me.
"You don't seem that bothered," Liam says.
"I suppose I’m not. It’s not like I didn’t know it was coming…"
"Most men would be. Being told you have to take a wife isn't exactly a casual Tuesday, Aidan,” Killian says, dropping his foot to the floor and leaning forward.
I slide my hands into my pockets. I’m the only one of us still standing, but I prefer it that way when I’m negotiating. "I have a condition."
Both brothers raise their eyebrows. "A condition?” Liam asks as Killian sputters out a choked sound. “For the council?”
I hold up my hand to silence Killian before he even starts. They both might be older than me, but I can hold myself in a physical fight against either of them.
"For whoever needs to hear it." I shrug. "If I'm doing this, there's only one woman I'll accept."
Liam goes still. He already knows the name before I say it.
"Tanya Savitskaya," I say.
He exhales slowly. "Fuck."
Now it’s my turn to raise an eyebrow. "That's not the reaction I was hoping for. I thought you’d be pleased I wasn’t fighting you on this like some others we both know."
I swing my gaze to Killian in challenge. Everyone knows how pissed he was to be marrying Katya, not that you’d know it now with how utterly obsessed he is with her.
"It's the only reaction that makes sense." He scrubs a hand over his jaw and looks at me the way he does when he's trying to figure out how much I've already decided versus how much room there is to talk me out of it. The answer is none. There's no room. There hasn't been room since the night I touched her, and she rearranged every standard I thought I had.
"Aidan. She's Savitsky's daughter. She's cold as ice and twice as sharp, and every man who's tried to get close to her has walked away with frostbite."
An unfamiliar anger rises up my spine and I clench my jaw tight. "I know what she is."
"Do you? Because from the outside, she looks like a woman who wants nothing to do with this life. With any of it. Especially us."
I take a slow, deep breath in a bid to calm myself. Picking a fight with my brother doesn’t feel like the right thing to do at this very moment in time, even if my knuckles are itching to make contact with his nose. "She looks that way because that's what she wants people to see."
Liam pauses.
"You know something," he says. It's not a question.
I know everything. I know that two years ago, at a function in Prague, Tanya Savitskaya walked up to me at the hotel bar after midnight and ordered a drink she didn't finish. I know that she looked at me with those cool grey eyes and spoke to me like I was the only person in the room who didn't bore her. I know that when I touched the small of her back as I walked her to the elevator, she didn't flinch. She leaned in.
I know what she sounds like when she stops hiding.
I know what she tastes like when there's no one watching.
