The Mafia Boss's Silent Bride

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aisle instead of a girl he'd been threatening to send away since I was fourteen. He didn't look at me once. He was too busy nodding at

e total, arranged in careful rows, and every single one of them felt like they belonged to a different world than the one I'd grown up in. Nikolai's people didn't dress like my stepfather's business associates. They didn't laugh the way normal

y about, like the daughter walking down the aisle was the one she'd planned for. She caught my eye for half a s

he'd worn in the bridal suite. Beside him stood an older man I hadn't met before, tall even with age bending his shoulders slightly, silver hair combed back,

iced way people look composed at events they'd rather not be part of, and neither of them was watching Nikolai the way I would have expected parents to watch their son on his wedding day

was just how his family was. Cold people raising a cold son, I thought, and then my stepfather was releasing m

e anyone bothered to explain it to him and married me anyway. His eyes moved over my face for a moment, brief, unreadable, and then the officiant was speaking and I was only h

a knuckle. It didn't happen. The ring slid onto my finger like it had been made for exactly this hand, exactly this size, and it took me a second to understand what that meant. Someone had gotten my me

second something flickered behind his eyes, go

m full of strangers, my actual name, not a placeholder, not my sister's name mistakenly slotted into the cer

useless just to have somewhere to put the nervous energy building in my chest. This is the strangest wedding I've ev

missed it entirely. Not quite a smile. Just a fraction of one, gone before anyone else in the room could have caught it. He didn't respond. He didn't need to. That flicker w

ns, and then it was over, and people were clapping in that restrained, control

there for six hours, and she wasn't going to walk through those doors now, not with the ceremony finished and the ring already on my hand and every choice already made without her in the room to make it. I had known that all day. I h

y in that entire room, not my mother, not my stepfather, not a single one of Nikolai

feel like I was the only one