The Don Shielded Her. So I Became Bratva Queen. novel · Chapter 14 of 24

Chapter 14: A Seat, Not a Dowry

Every man on the square had his cap in his hands.

Old men I'd known my whole life, with arthritis in their knuckles and grandchildren at Saint Monica's.

Young ones who'd started on the piers the summer my father died.

Behind me, inside the house, nobody came to the door.

"Benno," I said. "Put your hat on, you'll catch cold."

He put it on.

His eyes were wet and he was furious about it.

"Your father would've..."

"Don't tell me what my father would've done. Tell me where you want to work tomorrow."

"Where you tell us."

Kirill came down the steps behind me and stood at my shoulder.

Benno looked at him for a long moment.

Then he held out his hand.

Kirill shook it.

"You called me at minute ten," Benno said. "Not minute twenty-four. I noticed."

"I didn't want you to miss it."

"Good." Benno let go. "Take care of her, or I'll come up to the Northeast with a pipe wrench."

"I'd expect nothing less."

The next night Kirill took me up to the roof.

The terrace was cold and bare, a few iron chairs and a view of Bustleton Avenue's lights running north.

He'd put a blanket on one of the chairs and a bottle of something in a bucket of ice.

That was the only sign he'd planned anything.

"Sit," he said.

"You're nervous."

"I'm never nervous."

"You checked the bucket twice."

He didn't answer that.

He got down on one knee on the tar paper instead, which no one had ever done for me.

Vin had proposed through my father, in my father's study, with the ring already in his mother's pocket.

Kirill took a small box out of his shirt.

"My grandmother's," he said. "My mother sewed it into the lining of her coat to get it out of Moscow. It's been in a drawer for twenty-three years, waiting for somebody worth the trouble."

The ring was old gold with a dark red stone, not big.

It was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen.

"You already said yes," he said. "At the breakfast table, in front of my sister. I'm asking again because I want you to have said it on purpose."

"I said it on purpose the first time."

"Then say it again. I like hearing it."

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