Page 106 of The Brutal Arrangement

“It still feels weird that I’d gotten married without Nik here, but I suppose I should be happy about that. He could’ve been the one you married instead of me.”

I shook my head. “I can’t even imagine being with anyone but you.”

“I think that’s why Sloane wanted to wait, because a marriage is such a big thing to us. But I also don’t blame Maxim for the urgency.”

“Was Sloane planning a big wedding?” I asked. She’d talked about it some, but we discussed our pregnancies more than anything else.

“Not really? I don’t know. She doesn’t have any family, so I think a smaller thing is what she wanted. And I’m sure that the house staff will arrange something nice for them. But fast.”

“Like ours?” I asked.

“Notthatfast.” He sighed. “I regret how rushed our wedding was. But I take pride in the fact that we’d found something as we went.” He kissed me softly. “I love you, Lucy.”

“And I love you.” I knew what he meant. We hadn’t enjoyed a smooth start, but we were a stronger couple now.

“The GOH house will be available for a small gathering,” he said, almost as if he were musing out loud.

“The Go house?” I asked, frowning.

“No. GOH.” He spelled it out. “It’s an acronym for the guest of honor house. It’s a smaller building a little way upstate, not a long drive. We used to offer it to diplomats and other guests.”

“GOH?” I asked again, more like questioning myself.

“Yeah. GOH.”

I sat up, more awake now.

“What’s wrong?” He sat up with me.

“I… I don’t know. I’ve heard something like that before.”

“What do you mean?”

“Guest of honor, but a place.”

He shrugged. “We used acronyms for some locations. We own a fair amount of properties in the state and all over the world.”

“But…” The memory was there, yet not. I’d overheard that phrase before, not the exact way he’d said, but similar enough that it clicked.

Or did I read it somewhere?

“What’s going on?” he asked, curious and not demanding.

“I…” Shaking my head, I strained to place that term. That acronym. A property?

GOHS.

I whipped around to face him. “Do you always refer to it as the guest-of-honorhouse?”

He furrowed his brow. “Yes. Why?”

“Never the guest-of-honorsuite?” I crawled up on my knees to better face him in the darkness, starting to wonder if I was onto something here.

“What are you talking about, Lucy?”

I licked my lips, too excited and hopeful to sleep now. “Don’t quote me on anything,” I said, “but I have a hunch that if Katerina was looking for Nik, she might have thought he was at one of the Kozlovs’ properties.”

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