Page 19 of Marrying the Pakhan

The courthouse downtown has fluorescent lighting bright enough to make everyone look slightly ill, and I’m early enough that I get a bench near the window, phone in my lap, watching people shuffle through metal detectors with the particular blankness of anyone doing government paperwork before ten in the morning.

Viktor arrives twelve minutes later, and I see him before he sees me, which gives me exactly enough time to notice he’s wearing an actual suit, dark gray, nothing like the open shirt from the club or the jeans he wore pushing Ginger on a swing two days ago.

He clocks me across the lobby, and the tension in his shoulders drops, just slightly, and for a second neither of us says anything about the fact that the last time we actually talked, really talked, he was telling me the truth about the club while Ginger shrieked with joy on a swing a few feet away.

“You came,” he says instead, like there was ever a real chance I wouldn’t.

“So did you.”

“I did say I would.”

Dimitri’s a step behind him, and beside Dimitri, an older man I don’t immediately recognize, silver-haired, a leather folder tucked under one arm, dressed like someone who bills by the hour.

“Harper,” Dimitri says, nodding at me, then gestures to the older man. “This is my associate handling some of the paperwork today.”

“Actually,” the man says, extending a hand, “I believe we’ve spoken on the phone. Warren Hastings. Your grandparents’ estate attorney.”

It takes me a second to place the name, and then it lands all at once: the calls I made last week, the forms I signed and mailed back, the quiet arrangement I made to have the trust finalized the moment I was legally married, witnessed properly so there’d never be a question about the timing.

“You came in person,” I say, a little stunned. “I wasn’t expecting that.”

“Your grandparents were specific about the marriage clause being witnessed properly, not just filed remotely. I take my instructions from the trust seriously, even years later.” He glances toward the ceremony room. “I understand today qualifies.”

“It does.”

Denise arrives a moment later, brisk and efficient in a blazer I’ve never seen her wear, carrying a folder of her own, the contract tucked inside it.

“Everyone’s here,” she says, glancing around at the small, strange collection of people gathered for what’s supposed to be the least significant version of a wedding imaginable. “Should we go in?”

“Ready?” Viktor asks me.

“Not even a little.”

“Good. Neither am I.”

That, somehow, helps more than if he’d said something reassuring.

The ceremony room is smaller than I expect, beige walls, a flag in the corner, a clerk who’s clearly done this so many times the words barely register as words to her anymore. She calls our names off a clipboard, has us stand in front of her desk instead of an altar, and starts reading before either of us has fully settled into place.

“Do you, Viktor Markov, take Harper Wilcox to be your lawfully wedded wife?”

“I do.” He says it fast, flat, exactly the way I’d expect a man to say it if he meant nothing by it, except I know better now, know the flatness is armor more than indifference.

“Do you, Harper Wilcox, take Viktor Markov to be your lawfully wedded husband?”

“I do.” Mine comes out steadier than I feel, which I count as a small victory given the state of my hands twenty minutes ago.

“By the power vested in me by the state, I now pronounce you married. You may sign here, here, and here.”

We sign, Dimitri signing beneath us with the efficient scrawl of someone who’s filled out a thousand forms in his life, Denise signing as our second witness on the contract itself, everything happening in a small, orderly sequence that somehow still manages to feel enormous underneath its own paperwork.

“Congratulations,” the clerk says, already reaching for the next folder on her desk, already halfway to forgetting our names.

Warren Hastings waits until we’ve stepped back out into the hallway before he opens his own folder.

“Mrs. Markov.” He says it like he’s testing whether I’ll flinch at the new name, and I don’t, not really, not as much as I expected to. “As of this morning’s ceremony, the marriage clause in your grandparents’ trust is satisfied. I have the release documents here, if you’re prepared to sign.”

My throat goes tight in a way I don’t fully expect. “Now?”