Page 60 of Marrying the Savage

Something shifts in my heart.

Not love. God, no.

Not safety either.

I’m in a stranger’s bedroom, in a cliff house that reminds me of a fairy tale about murdered wives, wearing a bloodstained wedding dress and a ring that could knock someone unconscious if I swung my hand too fast.

But it’s the first thing today that has been given to me because I asked. It wasn’t negotiated or arranged. Not approved by Dmitri or my uncle or some old family council pretending violence becomes sacred when witnessed by a priest.

My throat feels tight.

That is inconvenient. Deeply inconvenient.

I flex my fingers, watching the oversized ring wobble slightly but stay.

“It looks ridiculous,” I say.

His gaze remains on me. “Yes.”

“You should be embarrassed.”

“I’m not.”

“Of course you aren’t.”

His thumb moves once more over my knuckle. A slow, absent touch.

My breath catches.

His eyes drop to my mouth. The room becomes too quiet.

Then Damir says, low and calm, “Now you have a ring.”

I look at him, the warning from my uncle still echoing somewhere in the back of my mind. He killed his wife.

Maybe I have walked into the monster’s house. Maybe this is the first locked door. Maybe the cliff, the portraits, the empty rooms, the ashes, the ring, all of it is just another beautiful cage.

But when I look down at the thread tied around my finger, at the heavy Volodin crest resting against my skin, I can’t stop the strange, unwanted warmth that curls in my chest.

It feels dangerous.

It feels stupid.

It feels like the first honest thing that has happened to me all day.

11

DAMIR

“You gave her the ring.”

Mikhail waits until the room empties before he says it.

That is why he remains my second.

The morning meeting has just ended, though calling it a morning meeting suggests too much normalcy. There is nothing normal about the day after a wedding conducted under armed supervision, with Dmitri Sokolov carried out of the church bleeding from the leg, Sergei Antonov humiliated in front of half the old families, and Sofia Antonova brought into my house wearing a wedding dress meant for another man and my family’s ring tied to her finger with black thread.

Still, men need orders. So we meet.