I had things to say. I had been compressing them for hours—through the ceremony, through the reception that had followed, through the Golovin family’s method of absorbing a new member without asking whether she wanted to be absorbed, through Elena’s careful eyes and Alexei’s unreadable ones and the Golovin sisters who had spoken to me with a warmth that was genuine and infuriating because it gave me nothing to push against. I had compressed all of it into a shape I could carry through the public hours, and now the compression needed somewhere to go.
Viktor opened the penthouse door and stood aside to let me through.
I walked in. The penthouse was as I had left it this morning, transformed for the ceremony and now quietly returned to itself—flowers still present but the candles extinguished, the staff dissolved. It looked and felt like Viktor. Clean, exact, everything in its place.
I heard the door close behind me as I stepped into the room I had slept in the night before.
I turned.
“This is a transaction,” I said.
My voice came out level, which surprised me, given the pressure behind it. I had been waiting hours to have this conversation, and the waiting had not made it smaller.
Viktor stood at the door with his hand still on the handle. He looked at me.
“You don’t get to touch me,” I continued. “You don’t get to claim me. You don’t get to look at what you did today—what you built, what you arranged while I was asleep—and call it anything other than what it is.” I held his gaze across the room. “I want to be clear about that before we spend a single night in this penthouse, as whatever you have decided to call us.”
Viktor removed his jacket.
He did it slowly, shrugging it off and folding it over the back of the nearest chair. Then he rolled one sleeve to the elbow. Then the other. He did not respond. He did not interrupt, did not defend, did not produce the counterarguments I knew he had.
The silence was maddening.
“You dressed me in white and stood me in front of your family and made me say words I didn’t choose to say, and you watched me do it with that face,” I gestured at his face, “like it was a problem you’d solved. Like I was a problem you’d solved.”
“Sofia—”
“I’m not finished.” I was crossing the room without having decided to. “You think ownership is protection. You think that because you have reasons—because Cruz is real and the threat is real and the logic works—that makes what you did to me today acceptable. It doesn’t.” I stopped in front of him. The height difference was immediate, and I looked up and held his gaze. “This will never be real, regardless of what that register says, regardless of what your world believes.”
The room was very quiet.
Viktor looked at me.
And then he stepped forward.
Not fast, not aggressive, not the movements of a man taking something. Slow, deliberate, a single step and then another, and I stepped back because the alternative was standing still while he closed the distance, and I had pride enough left for that. My back met the wall. Not hard—I had felt the proximity of it, had known it was there—but final, the wall solid behind me and Viktor in front of me and no direction left that wasn’t through him.
He stopped.
Close enough that I could see the slight loosening at the collar where he’d discarded his jacket, and the faint presence of his stubble in the low light.
“I won’t force you,” he said quietly. His voice was low. “I know how your body reacts to me, Sofia. I have known for some time.” A pause. “You can lie to me.” His eyes moved once, briefly, to my mouth and back. “But you cannot lie to yourself as well as you’d like to.”
The words hit something.
Not because they were cruel—Viktor was not cruel, whatever else he was, he did not deploy cruelty for the pleasure of it—but because they were accurate.
“I despise you,” I said.
“I know.”
“I mean that.”
“I know that too.” He didn’t move. “When you’re ready—” his voice was careful here, deliberate— “it will be your choice. Not mine. I will not reach for you.” A long pause, the kind he used when the next thing mattered. “But you will come to me. And when you do, it will be because you chose it.”
The certainty of that—quiet, absolute, offered without performance—did something to the compression in my chest.
I kissed him.
