Page 16 of Marrying the Pakhan

He leaves before I can answer that, which is probably deliberate on his part, a habit of his when he wants the last word to actually land instead of getting argued back down.

After he’s gone, I sit there with a cooling coffee and a supplier meeting still ahead of me tomorrow, Kazan’s invoices still open on the tablet like they’re waiting for me to actually care about them again.

I don’t, not for another minute. I think about Thursday instead, about a courthouse I’ve driven past a hundred times without ever once thinking I’d walk into it as anything other than a witness for someone else’s trouble.

I think about what Dimitri said, about the look on my face he hasn’t seen in a decade, and I don’t bother arguing with him in my head the way I would with anyone else.

He’s rarely wrong about me. It’s part of why I keep him close.

Eventually I pull the tablet back toward me and start drafting the message to Kazan, setting the meeting for tomorrow afternoon, keeping the wording flat and businesslike, giving him nothing to read into ahead of time. It’s easier to focus on a man skimming cases of vodka than on the fact that somewhere underneath all of it, quieter than I’d like to admit, I’m looking forward to Thursday more than any part of me expected to.

And because of that, I don’t sit with the silence he leaves behind. I pull out my phone instead and call Harper before I can talk myself out of it.

She picks up on the second ring. “That’s fast. I thought you’d still be at the club.”

“I am. I wanted to ask you something before I lost my nerve.” I glance at the closed office door, half expecting Dimitri to walk back through it. “I’d like to meet Ginger. Properly, I mean, not just in passing before the wedding.”

“Oh.” A pause, and I can hear her recalibrating on the other end. “Yeah. Yeah, I think that’s a good idea, actually. She’s been asking who you are.”

“Today, if you’re free. I don’t want to keep putting it off.”

“Today works. There’s a park near her school, the one with the good swings, she calls it. We could meet you there after I pick her up.”

“I’ll be there.”

We settle on a time, and I hang up before I can second-guess the impulse, the same impulse that’s been sitting in my chest since last night on her porch, her hands against my shirt, her voice telling me goodnight like she needed the door between us to actually mean it.

The park is smaller than I expect, a patch of green wedged between two residential streets, swing set and a slide faded from years of sun. Harper’s already there when I arrive, Ginger a few feet away, inspecting something in the grass with total concentration.

“Hey,” Harper says, her voice pitched deliberately even, the sound of a woman gauging how a six-year-old is about to react to a stranger. “Ginger, baby, come here a second. I want you to meet someone.”

Ginger looks up, assessing me with the same unflinching directness her mother has, and walks over without any visible nerves, which either means she’s braver than most kids her age or hasn’t yet learned there’s a reason to be cautious.

“This is Viktor,” Harper says. “You know, the man I told you I was going to marry.”

Ginger studies me a moment longer, head tilted, and whatever she’s looking for, she apparently finds it, because she shrugs and asks, “Do you push swings?”

“I’ve been told I’m reasonably good at it.”

“Okay.” That, apparently, settles the matter entirely, and she takes off toward the swing set at a full run, already shouting something about wanting the higher one.

“Give her five minutes and she’ll forget you’re basically a stranger,” Harper says, watching her go. “She warms up fast once she’s decided someone’s safe.”

“Good instincts, then.”

We sit on a bench close enough to watch Ginger climb onto a swing and immediately demand a push from the air itself, apparently, since nobody’s actually pushing her yet.

“I need to tell you something,” I say, before I can talk myself into waiting even one more day. “About the club.”

Harper goes slightly still beside me. “Okay.”

“I don’t dance there. I never have.” I keep my eyes on Ginger, giving Harper room to react without my full attention pinning her in place. “I own the club, Harper. I have for years. The men on that stage work for me. I’m not sure why I let you believe otherwise that first night, except that you looked so certain, and I found I didn’t want to correct you yet.”

She’s quiet long enough that I finally look over, bracing for something between fury and betrayal.

Instead, relief breaks across her face so plainly it’s almost funny.

“Oh, thank God.” She laughs, a little breathless. “I’ve spent weeks trying to figure out how to feel about being married to a stripper. I didn’t want to say anything because it felt rude, but Viktor, I was building an entire secret plan for how to explain that to Ginger’s teachers eventually.”