Page 243 of Lethal Obsession

My heartbeat slows. “Naryshkin?” I barely breathe the word.

His face clouds in concern. “If you don’t want it—if it carries too much of the past—say so, and we’ll forget it.”

“No.” I shake my head slowly, turning the name over in my mind. “That name is the best of the past we both share. It’s the legacy your family and mine fought for.” I touch the pendant at my neck, then the ring on my finger. “And it’s the future we chose.” I meet his eye. “I love it,” I say quietly, happiness rising inside me. “I absolutely love it. It feels like . . . family.”

He nods slowly, his face breaking into a relieved smile. “That’s how I hoped it would feel. And it’s what I want.”

Masha peers around him, her eyes dancing with mischief. “You know what the best thing about that is, ’Felia?”

“What, myshka?”

She gives a gurgle of laughter. “Deda Sergei told us once that his father was a count. Doesn’t that mean that one day Alexei will inherit his title—and you’ll be Countess Naryshkin?”

“Oh, my goodness.” Darya sits back, her eyes brimming with laughter. “Technically she’s right, you know. Not that those old titles exist anymore, or matter to anyone these days.”

I roll my eyes. “I can’t see myself asking anyone to start addressing me as my lady.”

“Quizas no.” Masha’s eyes sparkle. “But it would make a spectacular stage name, no?”

That makes us all laugh, and even Masha drinks her wine when Darya makes a toast.

Undercover of their chatter, Alexei leans close to me. “Are you sure you’re okay with this? Because one word from you, and we can choose something else.”

I smile at him, all the happiness I feel welling to the surface, and kiss him gently on the lips. “It’s perfect,” I say quietly. “Like we’ve taken all the darkness of that basement and turned it into our future.”

Alexei’s eye turns a wicked shade of blue. “Oh, angel,” he says, starting to laugh. “You have no idea how right you are about that.”

49

Benny

“So right as the dress crisis was about to reach fever pitch, Sergei and Rosa turned up with Darya’s wedding dress, which just happened to fit Ofelia almost perfectly.”

I smooth the blanket over Lars’s inert figure, trying to ignore the fierce seizure of mingled longing and pain that is no less intense for being horribly familiar by now.

“Luckily, because Ofelia was so fed up with all the fussing that she was ready to get married in a sundress—which, obviously, I wouldn’t have allowed. And Alexei was no fucking help at all.”

I shake my head, smiling despite the grim ICU surroundings. “When I told him he needed to get some designer to whip up something spectacular, pronto, he said that he didn’t care if Ofelia wore a hessian sack so long as she was happy. Then he added that if we didn’t all leave her alone he’d take her out to the Quantum Drift, get the captain to marry them at sea, and be done with the lot of us. You can see why I was so relieved when Sergei walked through the door with that dress.”

I pause.

Say what you came here to, idiot.

But despite my resolve to talk openly, I can’t seem to find the words. It doesn’t help that the only responses in the room are the mechanical beeps from the machines keeping Lars alive.

Those beeps haunt my fucking nightmares.

One of the reasons I spend so much of these visits talking absolute drivel is to drown out their sound.

“You won’t believe who I’ve been talking to, by the way,” I rattle on, still dodging the topic. “Remember that witch Seline who helped kidnap Ofelia? Well, she called Ofelia’s phone during a dress fitting, and I answered it without looking at who was calling. Don’t ask me how, but we wound up talking, and would you believe it, she was actually very cool and genuinely funny. And although I hate to admit it, she’s a bloody good tarot reader.” I give his inert body a wry glance. “I know. You hate woo-woo bullshit. But honestly, I’m starting to see why Ofelia spent so much time with her. She’s actually coming to the wedding, can you believe that? Alexei took a while to warm up to the idea, but Ofelia insisted. She got here yesterday, and we’ve been hanging out a little.”

My smile fades. “I was so burned by what happened with Lourdes that I wasn’t too sure I’d be up for making a new female friend. But—plot twist—I think Seline might just be a friend I can tolerate.”

I roll my eyes skyward. “Not to mention that she’s not remotely weirded out by the whole bratva thing, since her brother Kiril was the ultimate psychopath. Was being the operative word. Kiril ceased being anything at all after Mickey killed him, on camera, with nothing but his bare hands. If there was a Bratva Weekly, he’d have made the cover of it. From what I gather, the entirety of Miami is still talking about it, which Roman pretends to hate, but clearly fucking doesn’t at all.”

I glance hastily over my shoulder, even though I know we’re utterly alone.

“I probably shouldn’t have said any of that, even in here. But this is my life these days, Viking boy. I’m so deep in the Russian and Italian mobs that I could rewrite fucking Goodfellas.”