Page 115 of Claimed in the Dark

She balanced me, and I knew that we would make it through every up and down in our chaotic lives together.

“Where’s Mama?” Brady asked next to me. He looked like a little prince in his suit.

“Any second,” I replied.

He gave me a funny smile.

“What?”

He just smiled wider, and I felt like I was missing a joke.

Adrik would be walking her down the aisle, and I couldn’t help but see the full circle in that choice. He’d told me to kill her as a target we didn’t know, and now, in the opposite symbolism, he’d be handing her to me in marriage.

“You know, this is a real wedding,” Maksim muttered behind me, standing in as a groomsman.

Carina leaned over from her lineup of the bridesmaids facing us. “Isn’t that something?”

“Okay, that shit is getting old,” Alexei growled. He stood right behind me, as my best man. It seemed like an unnecessary formality, since Paloma was Louisa’s maid of honor. I had only chosen him to piss him off.

“Yeah,” Lev said, chiming in. “You guys can’t be saying at every wedding how you didn’t have a ‘real’ one. It was arranged, but real.”

Maksim scowled at him. “We can’t joke about it?”

“What’s there to joke about?” Elena said. “You might not have had a dream wedding either, but the marriage is real.”

Well said. Thank you. I glanced in the direction of where Louisa would walk to me.

“And what the hell do you mean, every wedding?” Alexei demanded.

“Only one more to go,” Paloma teased with a big grin.

He glared at her. “Am I the only one who remembers we’re in the middle of a”—he reached out to cover Brady’s ears—“war?”

“We’ll get back to that after tonight,” I said.

Still, we waited, and I worried that she was having second thoughts. Not about me or marrying me but whether she really wanted a fancier wedding or different dress after all, now that the moment had come.

“You okay, bud?” I asked Brady.