Page 132 of Cruel Submission

And Dad… Dad is in the front row. Sitting proudly, spine straight, in a linen suit that hangs looser on him than it would have two years ago, but fits the man he is now. The man who survived to give his daughter away at her wedding.

“You may now exchange your vows,” the officiant says.

Arkady goes first. Because of course he does—even at his own wedding, he leads.

“I had a speech,” he says, and his voice tells me that he’s working to hold himself together. Not gruff. Not hard. Just… deliberate. “I wrote it down. Stefan proofread it. Made me cut a paragraph about threat matrices.”

Laughter from behind us. Stefan, somewhere in the second row, mutters something in Russian that makes Yanis snort.

Arkady’s eyes don’t leave mine. “But I’m not going to read it.” He reaches into his trouser pocket and produces a folded piece of paper, then holds it up for me to see before tucking it back. “It’s there. In case you ever want proof that I tried. But what I want to say isn’t on that page.”

He takes my hands. His palms are rough, the calluses catching against my skin, and I feel the weight of him settle into the contact—all that controlled energy finding its outlet in the press of his fingers around mine.

“Years ago, I made a mistake that I never let go of. I let that failure become a wall, and I lived behind it because living behind walls was easier than admitting I was afraid.” A muscle works in his jaw. He pauses. Breathes. “You came into my house, Mirabel. Then you came into my room. Then you found your way into every single locked space I had, and you did it with a personality that should come with a warning label.”

I laugh. The sound is wet and graceless, and I don’t care.

“You showed me that the thing I’d been protecting wasn’t a wound. It was a door. And behind it was everything I’d convinced myself I didn’t deserve.” His thumb traces a slow arc across my knuckle. “A family. Children. You.” He swallows. “Especially you.”

My throat aches. I squeeze his hands and hold on.

“So here’s my vow, zaychik.” His voice drops, intimate, as if the sixty people behind us have dissolved and it’s just us and the sand and the water. “I will choose you. Every morning. Every argument. Every sleepless night with a baby who won’t stop screaming. I will choose this life we built. And I will spend the rest of it being grateful that you didn’t listen when I told you to stay out of my things.”

I’m crying. Obviously. I’ve been crying since he said the word speech.

“My turn,” I manage, swiping at my cheek with the back of my hand. The gesture is far from glamorous. My mascara is probably halfway to my chin. Debra will be furious—she spent forty minutes on my makeup this morning while Sara screamed from her bassinet and Aleks tried to eat a lipstick.

I take a breath. Then another. Not to calm down. To savor it.

“When I took the job at Ashwater Heights,” I begin, “I told myself it was about money. Dad’s treatment. Debra’s memory. I had a list of reasons that all sounded sensible and responsible, and not a single one of them was ‘because the man who jilted his fiancée at the altar looked at me like he was drowning and I wanted to know why.’”

Arkady dips his head, a concession—his lips pressing together against the start of something amused, something fond, something that says guilty as charged.

“But that’s the truth. I was curious about you before I was anything else. Before I was afraid of you, before I was angry at you, before I was—” I glance down at the sand between us, then back up. “In love with you. Curiosity came first. And you hated it. God, you hated it. Every question I asked was a personal affront. Every door I opened was a violation. You had rules. Boundaries. An entire security infrastructure designed to keep people out.” I tighten my grip on his hands. “And I am deeply, profoundly sorry to inform you that I have not learned my lesson.”

More laughter, louder this time. Diane’s unmistakable cackle rises above the rest, and I know without looking that she’s already filming this for Instagram.

“I will keep asking,” I say. “I will keep opening doors. I will keep making you tell me the truth even when it’s ugly and complicated, and you’d rather chew off your own hand than say it out loud. Because that’s how we work, Arkady. You build walls, and I take them apart, and somewhere in the middle we find the thing that matters.”

His eyes are bright. Not wet—he’s too stubborn for that, too trained in the art of composure—but bright. Lit from somewhere deep and unguarded.

“I love you,” I say. Simply. Without decoration. “I love the man you are and the father you’ve become and the terrifying, beautiful, utterly impossible life we’ve made. And I vow to keep choosing it. All of it. Even the parts that scare me.”

The officiant clears her throat. She looks deeply satisfied. “The rings, please.”

Yanis steps forward. He’s in navy linen, clean-shaven, his dark hair parted neatly—the composed counterpoint to his brother’s barely tamed edges. He produces both rings from his breast pocket.

He hands one to Arkady, one to me. As he passes mine over, he catches my eye and gives me a single nod. Small. Private. The Laurov brother equivalent of a standing ovation.

The ring slides onto my finger—white gold, slim, perfectly warm from Yanis’s pocket. Arkady’s hand is steady as I fit his, the metal settling against his skin with a rightness that makes my heart clench.

“By the power vested in me,” Carmen says, “I now pronounce you husband and wife. You may—”

He kisses me before she finishes.

It’s not polite. It’s not brief. His hand comes up to the side of my neck, and he pulls me against him with the determination of a man who’s been waiting for permission and has decided that close enough counts. I taste salt—mine, his, the ocean air—and for a moment the applause fades to white noise. Then there’s just the press of his mouth and the grip of his fingers and the sand shifting beneath our bare feet.

When we break apart, I’m breathless and grinning, and my nose is probably red and blotchy. Arkady keeps his hand on my neck, thumb resting against the line of my jaw. He’s looking at me with an expression I’ve learned to translate over the past year. It means mine. It always means mine.