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I’ve known her for less than three weeks. I’ve spent twelve years in back rooms in cities whose names I don’t say out loud. I never once thought a woman like this existed. Not for me.

And she proposed to me with a pressed daisy.

I had to stop looking at her during the vows.

Not because I didn’t want to look. Because I couldn’t do it and keep my voice steady at the same time, and I’d promised myself I’d get the words out without shaking.

She’d walked toward me in that dress, and I’d forgotten my own name.

When she reached the front, she’d looked up at me with those stormy eyes, steady and certain, and I’d had to look at the ceiling for a full ten seconds.

Kira saw. Kira will never let me forget it.

I carry her down the corridor to the door at the end. She fishes the key card out of the bodice of her dress, which nearly undoes me right there in the hallway, and leans down to swipe it. The lock clicks green.

I shoulder the door open.

The suite is dark except for the city beyond the windows. Gold and silver, spread out all the way to the black edge of the lake. Someone has lit candles on the dresser. Probably Milana. There are rose petals on the bed. Definitely Milana.

Evaria looks at the petals and starts to laugh.

“Oh my God,” she says. “She actually did it.”

“Did what?”

“She told me last week that you’d never think of rose petals, so she was going to do it for you.” She covers her face with one hand. “I told her not to.”

I think about our first time, in my truck on her father’s drive. Freezing cold, windows fogged, Garick’s men by the gate. I thought, afterward, that she’d want candles and roses. That she’d been robbed of something by a cramped cab in the middle of the night.

“Do you want them?” I ask.

She lowers her hand and looks at me.

“I want you,” she says simply. “I don’t care where.”

I set her down very slowly, letting her slide all the way down the front of me until her bare feet touch the carpet. She lost her shoes somewhere around the second landing. I’m not going back for them.

She’s still holding on to my lapels. Neither of us moves.

“You’re beautiful,” I tell her.

It comes out rough. I clear my throat and try again, and it comes out worse.

“You’re so beautiful, Evaria. I watched you walk toward me today, and I couldn’t breathe. I looked at you, and I thought, there’s no way. There’s no way she’s for me. No way Yaroslav Maximov looked at a man like me fighting in Indiana and saw someone who deserved you.” I lift a hand and touch her face. Her cheek is warm. Her eyes are shining. “I’ve never wanted anything the way I want you. I don’t think I knew how to want things before you.”

She makes a small, broken sound.

“I love you,” I say.

I’ve never said those words to anyone in my life. Not my mother. Not even Kira, out loud. They feel too big for my mouth, clumsy and enormous. I say them anyway, because I promised her the truth every day, even when it’s ugly.

This isn’t ugly. It’s the least ugly thing I’ve ever said.

She stares at me. Then her face crumples as she laughs and cries at the same time, and she pulls me down by the lapels and kisses me.

“I love you too,” she says against my mouth. “I love you. I chose you. Every day. Every single day.”

“Every day,” I agree.