First time. Out loud. In a room full of people who will never understand how a girl who was sold became a woman who chose. But we understand it. And that's enough.
His expression doesn't change. But his hand on my back trembles. Just once. A single vibration that runs through his palm and into my spine and tells me everything his face won't.
"Say it again," he says, pulling me behind a door and out of sight of the other guests.
"I love you."
"Again."
"Dominik."
"Again, Wren."
"I love you. I'm in love with you. I love being wanted by you and fed by you and protected by you and wrecked by you. I love that you chose me. I love that you asked. I love that you're insufferable and terrifying and you wash dishes and grow rosemary on the balcony. I love you."
He pulls me against his chest but he doesn't say it back.
He doesn't have to. He said it on the first night with his actions, his jacket over my shoulders. He said it every night spent between my thighs. He said it with a million dollars and a forkful of food and the way he covered by eyes so I didn’t see the carnage that had found its way to the penthouse
Dominik Voronov has been sayingI love yousince the moment he stood at the auction.
He just didn't have the words for it until I gave them to him.
Epilogue
Six months later
Dominik
My wife is seven months pregnant and she's standing in the kitchen eating pickles out of the jar with one hand and reading a book with the other and she's never been more beautiful in her life.
I know I say that every day. Ilya told me last week that if I mention how beautiful my wife is one more time during a business meeting, he's going to shoot me himself. But it's true today in a way that rearranges the word entirely. She's in my old flannel shirt, the green plaid from Vermont, and it barely buttons over her belly now. Her hair is piled on top of her head in a knot that's coming loose. Her bare feet are on the heated kitchen floor. She's got pickle juice on her chin.
She's the most devastating thing I've ever seen.
Seven months. Seven months since a night in a hotel basement when I set my vodka down and my life split into before and after. Two years since I burned a plan and bid a million dollars and draped my jacket over the shoulders of a trembling girl who didn't know that she was about to become the axis around which everything I am would revolve.
Seven months. And the click has not unclicked. If anything, it's gotten louder.
She looks up from her book. Catches me watching her from the doorway. She doesn't startle anymore. Doesn't flinch. The woman who used to press herself against car doors and lock bedroom doors and flinch at the sound of my footsteps now looks at me across our kitchen with pickle juice on her chin and says:
"You're staring."
"I'm admiring."
"I look like a planet."
"You look like my planet."
"That's the worst line you've ever used on me, and you once told me to spread my legs in the back of a car, so again, the bar is high."
I cross the kitchen. Take the pickle jar from her hand. Set it on the counter. Cup her face and kiss the pickle juice off her chin. She laughs against my mouth and the sound of it, that full, easy, unguarded laugh that I spent months earning and will spend the rest of my life protecting, vibrates through my chest and settles somewhere behind my sternum where it will live forever.
"How's my daughter?" I ask, pressing my palm flat against the curve of her belly.
"Your daughter has been kicking my bladder since four a.m. and has opinions about pickles."
"Pro or anti?"