"Mm."
"The men at this gathering. They'll know who I am. They'll know how you got me."
"Yes."
"And you want them to see me anyway."
His hands tighten on my hips. "I want them to see what I see. A woman who walked onto a stage in front of a hundredmen and didn't drop her chin. A woman who looked at the most dangerous man in the city and saidyes."
"I also saidthat's insaneandyou've only known me for eight days."
"You said those things too. But you still said yes."
He kisses the top of my head. "Ready?"
I'm not ready. But I nod.
The car ride is quiet. Not his Escalade tonight. A black sedan with a driver and tinted windows. Ilya sits in the passenger seat, shoulders tight, eyes scanning every intersection. I sit beside Dominik in the back. His hand is on my thigh over the red fabric. His thumb draws slow circles. I watch the city slide past and think about the last time I was in a car with this man, with my legs spread and my fingers wet and my dignity in pieces on the leather seat.
That girl would not recognize this one.
That girl was a transaction. An asset. A line item. This woman is wearing a diamond and a red dress with the steady, quiet certainty that the man beside her would level a city block before he let someone look at her wrong.
We arrive at a building I don't recognize. Industrial exterior. No signage. Ilya opens the door and Dominik steps out, turning to offer me his hand. I take it, and we walk through a steel door into a world I've only ever glimpsed from the edges.
The room is large. High ceilings. Exposed brick. Long tables set with white linen and crystal. Candles everywhere, hundreds of them, turning the space into something that flickers and breathes. There are maybe sixty people here. Men in dark suits. Women in expensive dresses. The air smells like cigar smoke and cologne and the kind of tension that exists in rooms where everyone is armed and pretending not to be.
The conversations stop when we walk in.
Every voice. Every glass set down. Every head turned. Sixty pairs of eyes landing on me in this red dress on the arm of Dominik Voronov, and the silence is so complete I can hear the candle flames hissing.
Dominik doesn't pause. He walks me through the room like the silence is a red carpet he ordered specifically for the occasion. His hand is on the small of my back. Firm. Possessive. Public. He's not just bringing me to a party. He's presenting me. Declaring me. Making a statement that requires no words because his body language is saying everything.
This is mine. Adjust accordingly.
A man approaches. Tall. Silver-haired. Hard eyes. He's looking at Dominik with the careful deference of someone who knows the food chain and is aware of his place on it.
"Dominik." He dips his head. Then his eyes slide to me. "And this must be..."
"My fiancé," Dominik says. His voice carries. He wants it to carry. "Wren."
The silver-haired man extends his hand. I shake it. His grip is testing, too firm, and I hold it without flinching because I have been trained by a master in the art of not flinching.
"A pleasure," the man says.
"Likewise," I say, and my voice is steady, and I don't know when that happened. When the girl who whispered her name in the back of a car became a woman who sayslikewiseto silver-haired criminals without her pulse spiking.
We move through the room. Dominik introduces me to men whose names I forget immediately because I'm too busy noticing the way they look at him. Fear. Respect. A careful, calculated wariness that tells me exactly how high he sits in whateverhierarchy governs this world. These men are powerful. These men are dangerous. And every single one of them defers to Dominik with the same instinctive caution prey shows around an apex predator.
And he's mine.
The thought surfaces without warning. NotI'm his. That thought I've had a hundred times.
He's mine.
This man who makes rooms fall silent. This man who kills without remorse and cooks without being asked and kneels between my legs like it's the only prayer he knows. This man who looked at a girl on a stage and rearranged his entire life around her. Who spent a million dollars. Who covered my eyes with a blood-soaked hand so I wouldn't have to see the violence he's capable of.
He's mine.