Page 101 of Gilded Cage (Kovalyov Bratva 1)

We turn to face the minister, who gives me a smile that’s almost kind.

Then he starts talking and I block him out.

I can only hear my own thoughts—panicked, scared, and uncertain. But for some reason, a part of me has resigned myself to my fate just as Alice advised me to do.

I stand there like a statue as the minister says all the typical things you would hear at a real wedding.

When he asks me if I take Artem as my lawfully wedded husband, I don’t even know if I answer out loud.

Maybe I do.

Maybe I don’t.

This is all such a fucked-up nightmare that I’m not sure what’s real and what’s fake anymore. What’s inside my head and what’s actually happening.

Besides—no one in the cathedral gives a fuck either way.

This is happening whether I like it or not.

At some point, Artem takes my hand and slips a ring onto it. I stare at the gorgeous Princess cut diamond that reflects the sunlight streaming in through the stained glass windows above.

And then the minister speaks with finality.

“I now pronounce you man and wife,” he says, in a low rumble. “You may kiss your bride.”

The veil that’s given me some small degree of protection through the entire ceremony is whisked over my head and then, all at once, he’s kissing me.

I gasp as his lips thunder down on mine with furious possession.

I’m vaguely aware of clapping and whistling from the crowd, but all I can really absorb is this kiss.

I try desperately to pull up some kind of resistance to him, but it melts into dust when his lips coax open my mouth and his tongue slips inside.

My head spins for a moment, but he’s holding me close and I know there’s no chance that I’ll fall.

Artem Kovalyov will never let me go.

He’s the one who started this kiss and he’s the one who ends it. He pulls back, leaving my lips raw and stinging as he looks down at me.

Then he leans in and whispers in my ear. Something in Russian.

“Teper' ty moya navsegda.”

“I don’t know what you just said,” I manage to stammer. It still sends a chill down my back all the same.

One corner of his mouth goes up in a dark tilted smile.

“You will soon enough,” he rasps.

Then he hooks my hand around his arm and we move down the aisle to thunderous applause.

As we walk towards the cathedral’s entrance, I’m able to take in more faces, people I wasn’t capable of noticing before.

Like an older gentleman in a sharp black tux, insulated by a ring of the largest men I’ve ever seen.

It takes me only a second to figure out why he looks familiar.

He must be Artem’s father.

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