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“Set it up,” I say. “Get all the papers ready. We’ll sign, make it all look official, and you’ll hold off on filing.” The words taste sour on my tongue. I hate this, but I don’t see any other way.
“That works for me.” He puffs his cigar some more and waves the smoke away. “But what do we tell your wife-to-be?”
I consider for a moment.
If I tell Camille the truth, and she knows that she’s not really my wife, that will force her to lie to my family.
But Camille is a terrible liar, and I don’t want to put her in that position.
“Tell her nothing. Let me handle that.”
“Fine,” Gareth says, and it doesn’t surprise me that he has no qualms about misleading Camille. He’s a lot of things, but he’s mostly a very good lawyer. “And you don’t mind keeping this secret?”
“I’m not going to keep it from her. Even if it makes our life harder, I won’t lie to my wife.”
“Look at you,” he says, grinning. “Since when did you have a moral code?”
“Don’t be a bastard.” I glare hard at him. “This plan stays between us, do you understand? Not even Lycus will know. Only Camille. To everyone outside of this room, our marriage will be real and binding. You need to make it official as quickly as you can.”
“Understood.” He grins at me. “I guess I should say congratulations then, but maybe I’ll save it for a little over a year from now.”
“I swear, I’m going to break your knees one of these days.” I sit back down and drink my whiskey, glaring at the floor.
This feels wrong. A sick, ugly anxiety sits in my stomach, twisting my guts. I hate the idea of going through with all this paperwork but being unable to take her as my bride. If she remains my fiancée, it will be much, much harder to keep her safe from Sophia and Aunt Anissa and any of the captains foolish enough to take their side.
If she’s my wife then I can convince those captains to accept her for the good of the family.
I can spin this as a modern Kazan organization moving into the future.
This isn’t what I want. If I could choose, I’d end her pathetic marriage to that bastard Conti and take her as my own, fully and legally, this instant, but that’s not possible. Not for eighteen months at least.
And I won’t lie to her—especially not when her safety depends on it.
Maybe if I get lucky, Conti will eat the barrel of my gun, and all of this will have been for nothing.
For now, I’ll hold this close and keep her safe.
Chapter25
Camille
Work the day after dinner is surprisingly calm. There are still a dozen made men sitting around and eating through Demetrios’s stock of lamb. I notice a few of them staring at me, and when I look back, they don’t turn away like they used to. There’s an intensity to the way the guys are looking at me. I assume it’s because I’m the lord’s fiancée, but I get a weird vibe and I’m not sure what to do with it, so I just ignore them.
But otherwise it’s quiet, no angry Greek lords or ladies bothering me while I’m trying to do my job.
Except Phel, of course. “My dad was basically glowing after Evander spoke to him yesterday,” she says with a massive grin. “You should’ve seen him at home. He was like a schoolgirl with a crush.”
“I can get him Evander’s autograph if he’d like.”
“Girl, don’t joke, he’d freak out if you did that.”
I laugh despite myself. Demetrios is a good man and he’s been more than kind to me, so I don’t want to get involved in his daughter’s good-natured teasing, but it does feel good to have a friend.
And after meeting Evander’s family, I really feel like I need a friend right now.
I keep hearing the scorn in Anissa’s voice, that cold and frigid anger, like I was some kind if blood-sucking insect sitting at their table trying to feast on their bodies. Evander warned me that it might be bad, but that was infinitely worse than I ever imagined, and I could barely sleep that night.
It didn’t help that Evander didn’t come to bed at all. He disappeared soon afterward, claiming he had work to do, and I couldn’t do anything but watch him leave and never come back.
