When we arrive, it’s much louder than usual. Voices overlap as introductions are made, heels clatter, and one of my brothers laughs at his own joke a little too loudly. I keep my hand on the small of Amelia's back as we walk in, feeling the slight tension in her spine. She holds herself like the aristocrat she is, chin up, shoulders straight, but I see the way her eyes scan everything. Taking it all in. Deciding.
The other women descend almost immediately. All strangers, but all finding themselves in the same boat, having been bid on and won at the auction.
Each of my brothers quickly introduces their future wife and Claudia offers to show Liv around the house as a way to try and ease the poor woman’s nerves. It isn’t long before all the woman are talking to each other as though they’ve known each other all their lives.
I take my seat near Rovin and watch her across the table. She laughs at something Liv says, a real laugh that reaches her eyes. Claudia leans in, gesturing wildly with her fork as she tells the story about how she ended up at the auction. Amelia listens like she belongs there already, asking questions, matching their energy without trying too hard. When Katriona teases aboutsurviving their first Mostovoi dinner, Amelia fires back with a dry remark about British garden parties that has all four women cracking up.
Rovin nudges my shoulder. "She hasn’t run yet. Good sign."
"She isn’t the running type," I say quietly.
The food keeps coming. Roasted vegetables, heavy breads, bottles of vodka that Serik keeps refilling. The brothers talk business in low voices between bites, but nothing too sharp tonight. This dinner is about the weddings. About locking things down the way Rovin wants.
Akyl brings it up first, his arm slung around Katriona's chair. "Two weeks from Saturday. Then it's official. No waiting around."
Rovin nods, satisfied. "Good. Volody, you are next?"
Volody shrugs, but his eyes find Juliette. "Soon. We are sorting the details."
Serik makes some joke about not being the last one standing, and the table laughs. My gaze stays on Amelia. She’s watching me now, that steady blue stare I felt across the auction table. I lift my glass slightly toward her.
Rovin catches it. "And you, Dayan?"
I don’t hesitate. "As soon as possible."
The words land heavy. The women at the other end go quiet for a beat, then burst into excited chatter. Amelia's eyes widen slightly, but she doesn’t look away from me. There’s surprise there, and something warmer underneath it. Relief, maybe. Like she’s been waiting for someone to claim her without conditions for her whole life.
Claudia raises her glass. "To marrying the Mostovoi’s."
Amelia clinks her glass with the others a grin spreading across her face.
I watch her relax into it as the night goes on. She fits here in a way I didn’t fully expect. My brothers are loud and protective, the women seem sharp and loyal. There are no polite masks or careful calculations dressed up as manners. Just family that would burn the world down for each other.
Later, as we stand to leave, she leans into my side without prompting. Her hand finds mine.
"Did you mean it?" she asks softly so only I can hear. "You really want to get married as soon as possible?"
"Yes." I squeeze her fingers. "I keep my word. And I want you as my wife. The sooner the better."
She’s quiet for a moment before she nods slowly, and the last of the tension in her shoulders finally eases.
Rovin walks us to the door himself. His hand lands on my shoulder and stays there a beat with no word attached to it. The silence says more than a speech would. Behind him the house is still roaring. Claudia's laugh. Serik losing an argument he started. Katriona telling Akyl he's wrong about something and Akyl agreeing. The kind of noise I spent most of my life standing at the edge of. Tonight Amelia stood in the middle of it like she'd been cut from the same cloth.
The cold outside is a relief after the heat of that dining room. I open her door and she folds into the seat, already toeing her heels off, and tucking her feet up beneath her in a way no one has ever done in this car.
“Well,” she says. “Your brothers are as equally terrifying as you, and yet together...”
I wait for her to find the word she is looking for.
“Amazing. Scarily amazing. Did you see the way Volody made everyone laugh? And how Rovin said we’re all family, even though five of us are strangers in every sense…”
The engine turns over and I slowly make my way down the drive and out through the gate, the lights of Rovin's house shrink to nothing in the mirror behind us.
She talks for the first few miles. Not because the quiet bothers her, I've worked out that much about her by now, but because she's still buzzing off the night, turning it over out loud the way some people hum. Claudia gave her the name of a dress designer she is considering for the wedding. Liv came out of her shell after precisely two glasses of Rose and Katriona thinks the British are emotionally constipated. Amelia told her she wasn't wrong.
“They've decided you and I are a fixed point,” she says. “Did you notice? Nobody asked whether. Only when.”
“I noticed.”
