Page 3 of Marrying the Savage

His smile thins, but his voice remains controlled. Men like Dmitri don’t lose control in public unless they can make it look intentional. “You should be grateful,” he says. “Many women would kill to be in your position.”

“Then one of them should absolutely marry you. We can hold auditions. I’ll even make little scorecards.”

“Sofia.” My uncle’s voice cracks across the table.

The room changes.

The piano still plays beyond the doors. The chandeliers still glow softly above us. The untouched dessert menus still wait beside the plates. But the air tightens. My uncle is not amused anymore. Dmitri is no longer pretending to be. I lower my bread roll.

Sergei Antonov leans forward slightly, silver hair catching the light. To outsiders, my uncle looks dignified. Almost gentle. His navy suit is perfect, his expression calm, his eyes tired in a way that suggests wisdom rather than violence.

But people in our world know better. My uncle does not need to raise his voice to remind a room that he has survived longer than crueler men.

“This marriage is not a game,” he says.

“I know.”

“Then stop behaving like a child.”

Dmitri watches us with interest, as though witnessing a family argument gives him a more intimate claim over me. I hate that most of all, the way he looks at me like my defiance is just another stage of ownership.

Temporary. Inconvenient.

Something to be corrected after the wedding.

My uncle’s voice softens, but it doesn’t comfort me. “The Antonovs and the Sokolovs have lost men for years. This alliance ends that. It gives both families stability. Protection. Power.”

“No,” I say quietly. “It gives you power.”

His jaw tightens.

I look from him to Dmitri and back again. The old anger rises beneath my ribs, hot and familiar. “You can say alliance as many times as you want, Uncle. You can print it on invitations, toast to it with champagne, and have a priest bless it under stained glass, but it does not change what this is.”

I smile, but there is nothing sweet in it. “You are trading me.”

Dmitri’s expression cools. “You’re being dramatic.”

“And you’re our beacon of hope, darling,” my uncle says. “That is not the same as being traded.”

A laugh slips out of me. Small. Humorless.

For a few seconds, no one speaks.

Outside the private room, someone laughs at another table. The sound is bright and ordinary, and for some reason, it cuts through me. Somewhere out there, people are having normal lunches. They are complaining about work. Flirting, laughing, gossiping. Checking their phones under the table. Ordering too much dessert because life is short and nobody has promised them to a man who believes smiling is a wife’s public duty.

I wonder what that feels like. To belong only to yourself.

Dmitri breaks the silence by reaching for his wine. “You’ll adjust.”

It’s such a simple sentence.

So calm. So certain.

He says it the way a man might say the weather will clear by evening, as though my obedience is not a hope or even an expectation, but a natural event waiting to happen.

That’s when I realize I don’t merely dislike my fiancé.

I loathe him.