Page 28 of Possessive Bratva’s Kidnapped Virgin

I blinked. “Oh, and he has seen all of that in how many hours?”

“He said you’re stubborn, brave and out of place.” She seemed to find this an entirely satisfactory description. “I thought that was quite a lot for him.”

I looked across the room to where Alexei was in conversation with Mikhail, his back to me, and I thought of what his youngest sister had just revealed. It was not a description I’d have chosen. It was also, as much as I didn’t enjoy admitting it, accurate.

“Anya.” The voice came from my right, and then Dmitri materialized. He was younger than Alexei by enough years that it showed—not in the face so much as in the expression, which had retained a quality of genuine delight in things that Alexei’s had lost or deliberately set aside somewhere along the way.

He looked at me with eyes that were taking a comprehensive inventory while maintaining the expression of someone simply saying hello.

“You’re shorter than I expected,” he said, slightly squinting his right eye.

“Dmitri,” Anya cautioned, turning to face him.

“What? She is.” He tilted his head slightly, still looking at me with that open, assessing attention. “He described you, and I was expecting that you’d be, I don’t know, more imposing.”

“I made him catch me twice in two days; I’d argue that’s imposing,” I said, snorting into a chuckle.

There was a half-second of silence, and then Dmitri laughed, and Anya pressed her lips together over a smile. Right then, something in my chest loosened by a fraction I hadn’t known it was holding.

“She’s going to be excellent,” Dmitri said, to no one in particular.

I looked across the room again. Alexei had turned slightly, and across the heads of assembled family and flickering candles, our eyes met for a moment. His expression was the same controlled composition it always was, but something about it was different from what it had been in the poker room.

I looked away first.

The reception afterward was nothing like what I would have planned.

If I had planned this reception, I would have managed the pacing differently, arranged the seating to facilitate specific conversations, chosen music that shifted register at precise intervals to carry people through the emotional arc of the evening.

What the Golovins did instead was simply—be.

The formal arrangement dissolved almost immediately into something looser, warmer, unplanned. Wine appeared from somewhere. Elena, Mikhail’s wife, directed a quiet stream of food from the kitchen without appearing to direct anything at all. Conversations formed and reformed around me. Someone put on music that I didn’t recognize, but that had a quality I associated with rooms where people are genuinely comfortable.

I sat at the edge of it for a while, the way I sat at the edge of every event I’d ever run—not quite inside the thing, observing its mechanics, checking for faults. Old habit. The difference was that at my events, I was always looking outward, at the guests, at the room. Tonight, I kept finding my gaze returning inward, to the man on the other side of it.

Alexei moved through his family differently than he moved through everything else. Still contained—he was always contained; I was beginning to understand that this wasn’t a performance but was simply the man he was—but something in the containment was less armored. He said something to Mikhail that made Mikhail’s mouth move in what I was fairly sure was a smile, which felt significant given the economy of Mikhail’s expressions. He let Anya talk at him for several minutes without once looking like he was waiting for her to finish. When Dmitri said something from across the room that was clearly aimed at him, he gave Dmitri a look that was so precisely made to quell without engaging that I felt a laugh move through me before I could stop it, and Sofia, who was sitting nearby, caught it and looked at me with the beginning of something warmer than assessment.

“He’s different here,” I said, because Sofia seemed like someone who could receive an honest observation without surprise.

“He’s less vigilant,” she said. Not as though this were a simple thing. “He works very hard at that. Here, with them, he’s allowed to put some of it down.” She looked at Alexei across the room. “Viktor took a long time to let me see that part of him. I suspect Alexei will take longer.”

I absorbed that. “But you think I’ll see it.”

She looked at me. “I think you already have.” A pause. “Or he wouldn’t have described you the way he did.”

I didn’t ask her what she meant. I was fairly sure I knew, and knowing felt like enough for one evening.

*****

The drive back to the penthouse was quiet.

We sat on opposite sides of the car like two people who have agreed to something and are now in the transition zone between agreeing and living it, where the words have run out, and only the reality remains. I didn’t look at him, and he didn’t look at me, and yet, I was aware of him with every inch of the distance between us.

Alexei Golovin was my husband.

I had said I do to that. Out loud. In front of witnesses.

The lobby received us with its usual indifferent efficiency. The elevator came. We stepped in. The doors closed.