"He was very expressive about it."
“You mean you’ve gone soft over the thing? Duke will have Fergus for breakfast when she meets him next week.”
Gregor grunted.
I grinned.
Next came Mary in pale blue, walking with a confidence she hadn't had a week ago. She caught my eye as she passed and grinned. Mary had gone from prisoner to fake bride to bridesmaid in the space of a month, and she was handling it better than most of our business associates handled a change in currency exchange rates. I liked her enormously.
Then the music swelled.
And Maeve stepped into the aisle.
The world did not stop. That was the thing. I'd read enough books and seen enough films to expect the world to stop, but it didn't. The world kept going. The candles flickering, the quartet scraped through their strings, Fergus wriggled in Gregor's grip. But all of it went slightly out of focus, like someone had turned the depth of field down on everything that wasn't her.
The dress was simple. Pale pink silk. No giant skirt, no cathedral train, no tiara. Just clean lines over the soft curves that pregnancy and birth had left on her body, the neckline cut lowenough to show the scar Finn had carved into her and the pulse beating beneath it.
She hadn't covered it.
That was what got me. Not the dress, not the flowers, not the way the light caught the edge of her collarbone. The scar. Visible. Deliberate. She was walking toward us with the worst thing that had ever happened to her bared to the room, and her chin was up and her eyes were dry and she was looking at Artem, me and Greogr like we were the only thing in the room she'd come to see.
My heart was throwing itself against my ribcage.
Beside me, Gregor made a sound so low only I caught it. Not a growl. Something worse. Something that belonged in the dark, the way prayers did.
Artem had gone completely still.
The strategist was gone. The killer. The heir. Gone. He was just a man watching the woman he loved walk toward him with a scar on her throat and a decision in her eyes.
"Breathe," I whispered.
"I am breathing."
"Could've fooled me."
"Shut up, Ivan."
"There he is."
The celebrant was an elderly man with a kind face and the slightly nervous air of someone who had been told, in no uncertain terms, what would happen if he sold photographs to the press. He beamed at Maeve as she approached the altar.
"Well, don't you look gorgeous, sweetheart."
The growl that came out of Artem was not human.
It was low and immediate and entirely involuntary, the kind of sound that belonged in a cave with a fire and something freshly killed. The celebrant took a step back and nearly tripped over his own robe.
"Stand down," Gregor muttered, shifting slightly to block Artem's line of sight. "He's an old man. You cannot kill the celebrant at your own wedding."
"He looked at her."
"Everyone is looking at her. She's the bride. That's how weddings work."
"He called her sweetheart."
"It's an American thing. They do that here."
Artem's jaw worked. His eyes had gone black at the edges. "I don't like it."
