"They're going to love you." He presses a kiss to my temple before we go in, quick and certain. "And if they don't, I'll disown them. I've been wanting an excuse."
The house smells like roasted lamb and rosemary, and the noise hits before we're even through the door, voices overlapping, someone laughing, the chaos of too many people who actually like each other crammed into one warm space. I freeze for half a second in the doorway, overwhelmed by all of it at once.
A woman with dark blonde hair and a composed, watchful face detaches herself from the group and crosses the kitchen toward us before anyone else even notices we've arrived.
"Liv." She says it like she's been waiting specifically for me. "I'm Claudia." She loops her arm through mine before I've fully decided whether I'm ready to be parted from Volody. "Come on. Let me show you the house. There's a library that i’ve completely fallen in love with."
I let her lead me away, and my shoulders drop an inch when my eyes meet Katriona’s and she gives me a wink of recognition.
The library turns out to be small and warm, lined floor to ceiling with books that look read rather than decorative. There’s a worn leather armchair tucked in the corner near a window that throws daylight just right to read by.
“How are you, really?” she asks, her finger trailing over the spine of a book before she turns to face me.
I offer a shrug. This last week has been surreal. Magical and confusing and surprising… I sigh, accepting that I can’t explain the way I feel.
"Did you know," I ask, "what you were walking into? At the auction?"
"I knew exactly what it was." Claudia's mouth curves into not quite a smile. "I just wasn't the one who got chosen the way you were. I did the choosing myself, walked straight up to Rovin and told him I was choosing him before he'd even decided whether to bid." She glances at me sideways. "Different door. Same room, in the end. Same impossible decision about whether to trust a man this dangerous with the rest of your life."
"How did you know it would work out?"
"I had liked him for a long time. I figured if he turned out to be an asshole I’d find a way out. He is a good man. I imagine his brothers are too…" She squeezes my arm once, warm and brief. "Come on. The others will think we're hiding in here."
We rejoin the noise in the main room, and Katriona finds me almost immediately, dark hair loose around her shoulders, a glass of wine already in hand.
"There she is," she says, and pulls me into a quick, fierce hug that catches me off guard. "I've been wondering how you were getting on since the auction. Didn’t realize you’d been snagged by one of this bunch.” She gestures to the Mostovoi brothers with a sideways nod of her head. “You look considerably less like you're about to be sick."
"I feel considerably less like I'm about to be sick. Most days." I glance past her, where a tall, controlled-looking man with sharp eyes is watching her from across the room like he's tracking her location purely out of habit. "Akyl, I take it."
"Akyl, yes. He'd deny being protective if you asked him directly and then immediately do something deeply protective within the hour to disprove his own denial." She says it fondly, the way you'd describe a quirk you've come to find endearing rather than frustrating. "How's yours treating you?"
"Like I might disappear if he stops paying attention for too long." I say it lightly, but my muscles go warm just saying it out loud.
"Good," Katriona says, simple and certain. "That's exactly how it should feel."
Dinner gets called not long after, and the table fills the way a family table should, plates passed hand to hand instead of served, lamb and rosemary potatoes and bread still warm enough to steam when it's torn. Volody serves himself twice before the dish has made a full circuit of the table, and I jab him in the ribs hard enough that he yelps, delighted, like getting poked by me is somehow the highlight of his entire evening.
I watch the table. Rovin's hand finds Claudia's without him appearing to look for it, like the gesture's automatic now, worn smooth with repetition. Dayan barely speaks the entire meal, but his hand stays a steady, constant presence against the small of Amelia's back whenever she shifts in her seat, like he's tracking her comfort through touch alone. Serik refills Juliette's glass before she's even noticed it's empty, an easy, practiced motion that she accepts without comment, like she's stopped finding it remarkable.
Five entirely different men, five entirely different rhythms of love, and every single one of them built around the same quiet, constant fact:I am watching you. I will not stop.
I think about that for the rest of the meal, turning it over while Rovin taps his knife against his glass and announces that the weddings are happening, all of them, sequentially, starting soon.
Serik makes some joke about not wanting to be the last brother standing, and the table dissolves into laughter, and I sit there in the middle of all that noise and warmth and easy, hard-won love, and something shifts quietly in my soul.
The drive home is quiet, the city sliding past dark and glittering, Volody's hand resting on my knee the whole way like he can't quite stand not touching me even for the length of a car ride.
"You went somewhere tonight," he says eventually. "At dinner. I watched you do it."
"I was thinking about your brothers. The way they look at their women."
"And?"
"And I think I might actually believe this could work. Us." I say it carefully, testing the weight of the words. "Which terrifies mea little, honestly, because a little over a week ago I was crying in a cloakroom convinced my entire life had just ended."
"It did end," he says, turning onto the highway that leads back toward the city lights. "The old one. I'm not sorry about that part, even though I'm sorry for how it happened to you."
When we get back to the penthouse, neither of us moves toward the bedroom right away. He pours us both a drink we barely touch, and we end up on the sofa instead, my legs tucked up under me, his arm slung loose around my shoulders, the city humming quiet and gold outside the windows.
