Page 79 of Savage Bratva King

“You will.”

“It’s so beautiful, Leo. It’s… I never imagined…”

“That you would one day be wearing a Romanov ring?”

Her smile lights up her face. “That I would one day be marrying you.”

25

GIANNA

I still can’t believeit.

My emotions soar and dip between happiness that makes my heart so full I fear I’m going to explode, and disappointment that I can’t share my experience with Mel. She would love Leo … once she got over the fact that he’s at war with Xander. And that he’s a Russian bratva boss. And that he kidnapped me en route from Montenegro to Chicago.

So much has happened in the short space of time since I met Leo that I’m going to need a month alone with my sister to fill her in on all the gossip. At least a month.

But as soon as she meets Lucky and Marvel, and I tell her about the refuge, she’ll understand that Leonid Ivanov is the man of my dreams.

We are going to be married at the house.

Next week.

Because the sooner we’re husband and wife, the sooner I can tell my family. This is when my mood plummets, each time I try to predict my father’s reaction.

I’m currently torn between him hugging me tightly and whispering into my ear that all he ever wanted was for me to be happy, closely followed by him agreeing to forge an alliance with the Ivanov mob. Or—and this is the image that brings me out in a cold sweat and anxiety hives around my neck—he’ll draw a revolver from his pocket and shoot Leo straight through the heart.

This is why I need Mel. She would convince me that our father wouldn’t shoot my husband first and then ask me if I’m happy after.

He wouldn’t.

I time my meals for when I’m in full-on soaring-like-a-bird mode. In those moments, my appetite is so great I could out-eat Leo. This morning, I almost polished off an entire loaf of homemade bread spread thickly with butter and marmalade. But when I picture Leo lying in a pool of blood with my father’s bullet lodged in his chest, I feel so nauseous, the only thing I can stomach is a can of soda.

Victoria arranged for me to meet with a wedding planner the day after Leonid gave me their grandmama’s ring. The woman was tall, elegant, graceful, dark hair swept into an Audrey-Hepburn-worthy chignon. She casually dropped exorbitant sums of money that her previous clients had spent on weddings into the conversation and promised that she would do her utmost to find me a designer wedding gown at short notice.

I smiled and nodded in all the right places.

Then the instant the door closed behind her, I gathered up all the samples and brochures that she’d left behind for me to read and tossed them into the trash can.

Flashy weddings are for flashy people.

They’re not for me.

A wedding is a celebration of two people falling in love and vowing to spend the rest of their lives together. For better, for worse. For richer, for poorer.To love and to cherish. Leo cherishes me; I’d be an idiot not to see it in his eyes every time he looks at me.

But he hasn’t said it yet. He hasn’t told me that he loves me, and these missing words feel like a crushing weight pressing down on my chest.

I don’t know why they’re so important. Actions speak louder than words, right? The puppy. The refuge. His grandmother’s ring. But Leo putting the refuge in my name is niggling away at me. I heard Victoria when she said that Leo wants me to be happy, but I didn’t pay enough attention to what shewasn’tsaying.

People like Leo and Victoria and my father never do anything unless it benefits them in some way. I only wish I knew what Leo stands to gain from opening a women’s refuge in the city.

I try to shove this thought to the back of my mind and smother it beneath a mountain of wedding preparations. It feels surreal to be planning my own wedding, when I spent the last month in Montenegro dreading my imminent nuptials, but Leo has warned me that he’ll marry me in an oversized T-shirt in the piano room if I don’t get things sorted.

And I believe him.

I find the perfect setting in the Japanese garden behind the house. It will look so romantic strewn with rose petals, and I liaise with the gardener about laying out a rose-petal path from the house to the pagoda.

Back in the house, I swallow my embarrassment and ask Olga if she knows a caterer who will prepare a small banquet for us and our minimal number of guests. Her mouth pinches into a button-hole shape. She doesn’t look me in the eye—perhaps because she saw her boss going down on me on top of the piano—when she says, “I prepare the food in this house. You think I don’t know how to make a banquet?”

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