Page 26 of Marrying the Savage

So I let them call it love. I don’t care.

Let them think I’m saving myself for Dmitri.

Let them think I’m sweet.

Let them think whatever helps them finish their champagne.

I know the truth.

The truth is that I wanted to kiss a stranger tonight because I’m terrified of losing the last pieces of myself. The truth is that I could not do it because the only mouth I imagined was Damir Volodin’s. The truth is that I have sent him an invitation, and some dark, reckless part of me is now waiting for the church doors to open.

The days pass too quickly after that. Time becomes cruelly efficient.

There are fittings, final checks, a quiet dinner with my uncle where he barely looks at me, and a visit from Dmitri, who brings a diamond bracelet I don’t want and fastens it around my wrist himself.

“It belonged to my grandmother,” he says.

The bracelet is cold against my skin.

“How touching,” I say.

His thumb brushes the inside of my wrist, and I fight the urge to pull away.

“You will wear it for the ceremony.”

“Of course.”

He smiles like my obedience pleases him. For a moment, he looks almost handsome in the way strangers might think handsome means safe. Then his fingers close too tightly around my wrist, just for a second, just enough to remind me that softness is something he intends to correct after marriage.

“I hear Anya took you out,” he says.

My heartbeat stays steady. “She did.”

“A bride should be careful where she is seen.”

“I was in a private room.”

“You are never private anymore, Sofia. Not when you are about to be my wife.”

There it is. That ugly feeling again. The one that starts in my stomach and spreads upward, thick and sour, until I feel like my skin is too tight. The one I get whenever Dmitri speaks like marriage is not something we are entering together, but something he is closing around me.

He lifts my hand and kisses my knuckles. I want to throw up.

Instead, I smile. Because I have become very good at surviving rooms by giving men the expression they expect.

The morning of the wedding arrives cold and bright. The sky outside my window is a hard, pale blue, cloudless and pitiless. The house wakes before sunrise. Footsteps move through the halls. Doors open and close. Voices murmur. Steamers hiss. Someone cries in another room, though whether from emotion or terror, I can’t tell.

I sit at the vanity while women turn me into a bride.

That’s what it feels like, being slowly stitched into something I’m not.

My hair is twisted into soft waves and pinned beneath a veil so delicate it looks spun from frost. My makeup is pale and perfect. My lips are painted a soft rose instead of the red I prefer because Dmitri’s mother apparently believes brides should look like they have never had a dangerous thought in their lives.

The dress is beautiful.

I hate that it’s beautiful.

White silk. Long sleeves of lace. A fitted bodice. A skirt that falls around me like water. Tiny pearls stitched along the cuffs. A neckline modest enough to please old women and elegant enough to photograph well from every angle.