Page 11 of Marrying the Pakhan

I close the folder properly this time, slide it into the desk drawer instead of leaving it out where anyone could see it, and sit there for a minute doing absolutely nothing, which isn’t something I do often.

Fuck.

5

HARPER

My phone buzzes on the nightstand before my alarm does.

Morning, future wife. Sleep okay?

I stare at it longer than the message deserves, coffee not even started yet, and I still can’t decide if I want to laugh or throw the phone across the room.

We’re not married yet. You don’t have to keep this up in text messages nobody else can see.

His response comes back within a few minutes.

Force of habit already. Also, I liked how it sounded.

I read that one twice. My face goes warm in a way I blame entirely on not having had coffee yet, and I set the phone face down on the counter like that’ll stop it from happening again.

It buzzes again anyway.

Court’s going to want this believable. Might as well start early.

He’s not wrong. That’s the annoying part.

I’m still typing out a reply that isn’t quite as flustered as I actually feel when my phone rings for real, Denise’s name on the screen, and I answer before I’ve finished deciding what my face is doing.

“You’re engaged,” Denise says, no hello, which is how I know she’s already read the text I sent her sometime after midnight, when I couldn’t sleep and needed to tell someone before I lost my nerve.

“I’m engaged.”

“To a man you met two days ago.”

“Yesterday, technically. Well, the day before yesterday I met him. Yesterday he said yes.”

“Harper.” She says my name the way she says it when she’s about to be right about something I don’t want her to be right about. “I need you to walk me through this slowly, because on paper this looks either brilliant or like the worst decision of your life, and I genuinely can’t tell which yet.”

I walk her through it. The club, the offer, his name, the fact that I still don’t know his last name until she asks, and I have to admit I don’t, and there’s a pause on the line that tells me exactly how that sounds out loud.

“You’re marrying a man, and you don’t know his last name.”

“Markov. Viktor Markov. I know it now.”

“Okay.” She exhales, and I hear paper shuffling on her end, the sound of her already building a strategy instead of a lecture, which is one of the reasons I hired her in the first place. “Here’s what matters. The hearing’s in three weeks. Whenever you do this, it needs to happen soon enough that the marriage has time to look established, not thrown together the week of court. I need you two doing normal things a couple does before then. Seen together. Photos, if you can manage it naturally. A joint bank account wouldn’t hurt, even a small one, once you’re actually married.”

“He’s not going to want to merge finances with a stranger.”

“Then talk him into dinner somewhere public, at minimum, before the wedding. Judges don’t examine bank accounts as often as they examine whether two people act like they know each other.” A pause. “Do you actually know anything about him?”

“Not really.”

“Then learn something before Thursday, because if his own lawyer asks you his birthday and you go blank, that’s worse for us than never having met him at all. And you two need an actual date set. What’s his address, for the record? Where’s he going to be living, and where’s Ginger going to be sleeping when the caseworker asks.”

“We haven’t gotten that far.”

“Get that far pronto. Today, ideally.” Denise’s voice softens, just slightly, the version she allows herself when she remembers I’m not just a case file. “I’m not trying to scare you. I think this could genuinely help, once it’s actually done. I just need it to hold up under questions, not just under a first glance.”