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19

LEV

My computer chimes, and I ignore it with deliberate indifference.

I have no fucking patience left for project updates and miserable status reports today. Yelena’s parting questions are still lodged in my skull, turning over and over like something left to rot. Are you in love with her? Then say yes. The two of them have plagued me for an hour and won’t leave me be.

The computer chimes a second time, and this time the name on the screen stops me cold, and the breath catches in my throat, because it belongs to Delaney Cox.

I drop into my chair and open her email, and the world shrinks to a pinpoint.

“Please find attached the completed wedding planning proposal for your review,” it reads, cold, direct, succinct. “The full plan and budget are included. I await your feedback.”

The three words wedding planning proposal loom on the screen and set my temple pounding. I open the attachment and skim the lavish pages, and there are more than forty of them. It covers venue options, guest list logistics, bespoke floral concepts, ornate lighting design, and three separate contingency plans for the weather. She has clinically thought of every last thing, down to the color of the ribbon on the chairs, the way she always does.

Then I reach the ceremony section, and in the flash of recognition I see two names printed across the top of it, mine and hers, Lev Volkov and Yelena Lebedeva, side by side under a heading that reads exchange of vows. The fire in my chest shoots straight up into my throat, murderous and hot.

This is absurd. I never agreed to marry anyone. I open a message to her, clenching my jaw.

I never assigned this project to you. Who did?

Her reply comes back fast.

Delaney

The assignment was issued from your work account three days ago. Sablo’s events office and I were both copied on it. I have the record if you need it.

My anger changes direction with a wrench so hard it nearly knocks the wind out of me. Three days ago. Three days ago, the morning I left town, I sat in this chair before sunrise working through a port acquisition from the Italians with Yuri, and Yelena was roaming the room, and at some point she was at my computer, the way she has always been at my computer, because nothing of mine was ever off-limits to her. She sent it then, with indecent ease. She sat right here in my chair and sent it under my name.

I type again.

Bring the proposal to my office. Now.

I already know whose hands really wrote that email. I know it the way I know my own name. And still, when the knock comes, it is not Yelena I want to see standing in my doorway, and that alone should tell me everything, however unknowable I pretend it is.

The memory of her sweeping out of here an hour ago rises up, chin high, spine straight, wounded and proud. That willfulness was always in her, old habits she never had to break. Yelena is Igor Lebedev’s only daughter, and Igor never once told her no in her whole life. As a child she made her father sell a horse he had paid an abhorrent amount for, simply because she had decided she disliked it, and buy a new one to replace it. As a grown woman she walks out of rooms and out of relationships whenever the mood takes her, too clever to get stuck in a corner, and everyone left behind scrambles to reupholster their lives around the space she leaves.

She came back. She told me she loved me. And before I gave a single word of consent, she planned the entire wedding and mailed it out under my name, as though my agreement were a formality that would sort itself out later. The fire climbs another degree, and I smother the urge to put my fist through the screen.

The girl who once knelt in a basement and blew on my bleeding hand before either of us climbed out of that hell-hole, still the closest thing to family I have, and the woman who forged that email overlap in my mind—and then they pull apart, and I don’t know whether she changed while she was gone or whether I only ever remembered the version of her that I wanted.

A knock lands on the door. I force the anger back down my throat, tamping it flat.

“Come in,” I say, with the flat voice of a man giving orders.

Delaney steps inside with the file in her hands, her eyes combing the room once, and she looks as though she’s not slept in days. There are cavernous shadows carved under her eyes and her lips have gone pale, but her back is straight, as if she knows she’s walking into the lion’s den, some stubborn spring of steel still holding her upright.

“Here’s the completed proposal for your review,” she says, flat and professional, eyes flitting to mine and then away, and holds the file out to me.

I sit stock still and don’t take it. The corners of the folder are soft, worn, and crumpled from being carried through however many all-nighters she gave it. I know exactly what I should say, and that this is the make-or-break moment. I should tell her I never sent that email, that none of this came from me. But Yelena’s proud face and Delaney’s voice, cold and distant like a knife wrapped in frost, are both feeding the fire, and the wrong words climb out of me instead.

“Who authorized you to leave your position as my assistant?” I ask, and my voice is low, coming out as ice, past the point where I can take any of it back.

She blinks at me, thrown. “What are you talking about?” she asks with a quiet gasp.

I know I’m aiming this at the wrong person, that this is a bad decision. I cannot stop it. The fire burns straight through my reason, mindless and hungry.

“You planned my wedding without once asking me,” I say, squaring up to her. “You saw two names on an order, and you just followed them, like a machine. It never occurred to you to ask whether I wanted any of this. You followed my name off a fucking screen and never stopped to think for one second.”