All Chapters of Venom & Vows : Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

55 Chapters

Chapter 20 (Dorian)

Enzo speaks first, which means he drew the short straw."Is the reworked plan acceptable?" He shifts forward on the couch, elbows on his knees, trying to look composed and failing. "And can Dante and I come to New York?"Dante adds quickly, "We need to be there by Saturday. The next gala. Orlov and the Sorano daughter are both expected. We have to execute the final phase in person or the whole thing falls apart."I say nothing immediately. I am already going to New York that week. Marco knows it. The practical case against bringing them is thin, and I know it, which is irritating.I think it through. They are loose cannons, both of them, impulsive and undisciplined and constitutionally incapable of reading a room without disturbing it. But disrupting alliances, specifically, is the one arena where their talent for causing chaos stops being a liability and starts being a tool. They created this plan. They know its moving parts better than anyone. Sending them alone into a room full of

Chapter 21 (Sera)

Caspian walks in carrying another box and I already know before he sets it down."Another one," he announces, dropping it onto my lap with the resigned tone of a man who has made this same trip too many times in three weeks. "For you."Leander looks up from his desk. The concern on his face has been a permanent fixture lately, deepening incrementally with every delivery, and I have stopped pretending not to notice it.I have not heard directly from Maksim once in three weeks. Not a call. Not a message. My father confirmed he was travelling across Europe on business and that a second meeting was scheduled for the upcoming gala on Saturday. That is the full extent of my personal contact with the man currently being positioned as my future husband.What I have received instead is this. A steady, uninterrupted stream of deliveries, arriving with the consistency of someone making a very deliberate point.The first ones were genuinely sweet. Chocolates in a handpainted tin. Long-stemmed flow

Chapter 22 (Sera)

Leander opens the car door and his eyes drop to my dress before I have both feet on the pavement.The glare is instantaneous. Full voltage. The kind that would make a lesser woman get back into the vehicle."Before you say anything," I tell him, stepping out and smoothing my skirt with one hand, "I look stunning in black, you are going to have a coronary regardless of what I wear, and your funeral will be extremely well-attended and lit. So.""Get back in the car." He says it with complete seriousness, one hand still on the door. "Harris can drop you home to change and leave you in the middle of nowhere on the return trip.""Katya is right there," I say, nodding toward the car ahead in the convoy. "She has been sitting in a vehicle for forty minutes. If you spend any more time policing my hemline she is going to wander inside and find someone more interesting to talk to. That is genuinely your problem, not mine."Leander turns his head. Katya is visible through the window of the car ah

Chapter 23 (Sera)

"I need a drink," I mutter, mostly to myself, as I move down the heavily guarded hallway toward the ballroom.No one responds. Caspian is three steps ahead, already scanning the room beyond the entrance with the practiced sweep of someone cataloguing threats before pleasantries. Leander has his hand at Katya's back, speaking quietly into her ear. I fall slightly behind the group and let myself breathe for exactly three seconds before the doors open and the full noise of the evening closes around me.The ballroom is the kind of room that costs money just to look at. Chandeliers dripping with crystal. Tables set in ivory and gold. A string quartet stationed near the far wall, doing their best against the volume of four hundred conversations happening simultaneously. I move through the entrance and take it all in with one slow sweep, the way my father taught me before I understood why he was teaching it.The crowd tonight is an unusual composition, even by these standards. Upper class soc

Chapter 24 (Sera)

"Do you remember," I say quietly to Katya, watching Leander across the room with his hand at the small of her back, "how they actually got together?"She follows my gaze. "He told me he defended her at a bar.""He did. Some man would not leave her alone and Leander stepped in." I take a sip of champagne. "And then spent the next several months running background checks on her family, requesting a formal conversation with her father, and arguing with our mother about whether the whole thing was appropriate. Back and forth for months, until our mother finally lost patience and told both of them to stop being dramatic and let the woman into the family."Katya laughs softly. "That sounds exactly like him.""And when he finally told her the truth about his life, she avoided him for an entire week." I watch them together now, the easy way they stand, his head tilting toward hers when she speaks. "Then she came back. And they have been together ever since."Katya is quiet for a moment. "You a

Chapter 25 (Sera)

"So." Erik Lund clasps his hands together with the cheerful energy of a man who has already decided this is going well. "You live in New York, yes?""Yes," I say."Good, good." He nods, accent rolling warmly over every syllable in a way that sits completely at odds with the ink covering every visible inch of his skin. "You will love Sweden more, once we are married."I look at him.He looks back at me with open, pleasant confidence, as though he has said something entirely reasonable.This, I think, is going to be a very long evening.I try. I genuinely try. I ask about his family's operations, which produces a fifteen-minute answer I absorb approximately forty percent of. I ask about Stockholm, which he takes as an opening to describe in considerable detail the wedding venue he has apparently already identified. I stand with my champagne glass and I nod and I think about the collar on Leander's office floor with its engraved lettering and I think about the spider in Athens and I think

Chapter 26 (Sera)

"Answer the question," I say. "Were the gifts a joke, or are you simply a dick."His mouth opens. Then it closes. He looks at me the way people look when they are searching for the right response and have not found it yet, except the thing about Maksim Orlov is that his expression does not do what trained men's expressions usually do. It does not settle into something smooth and manageable. It stays open. Confused. His eyes move across my face the way someone reads a page they are certain they have misunderstood."I genuinely," he says quietly, "have no idea what you are referring to."I study him. I look for the seam where performance meets calculation, the slight adjustment behind the eyes that the men in my own family make when they are saying something they do not mean. My father makes it. Leander makes it. Every mob boss I have watched operate in rooms like this one has made it at some point during some evening. I know what it looks like.I cannot find it on Maksim's face.I remin

Chapter 27 (Sera)

"I have not agreed to a marriage," I say. He smiles and opens his mouth to respond and then someone walks directly into my back. I turn. A young man with olive skin and dark hair looks at me with a sheepish smile, green eyes moving across my face with an expression I cannot immediately name. Something in it sits slightly off, slightly too attentive for a stranger on a dance floor, but his voice when it comes is easy and warm. "I am so sorry," he says. "Completely my fault." "It is fine," I tell him, and it is, because he means it. He is younger than most people here tonight, lean and tall, and there is something faintly familiar about the line of his eyes that I cannot place before a hand closes around his arm from behind. His twin. Or close enough to it. Similar features, similar age, same dark colouring, but where the first one looked at me with warmth this one looks at me with something considerably more guarded. He pulls his brother back without speaking and the two of them mo

Chapter 28 (Dorian)

"Dorian."I do not answer. I am fitting my second cuff link and I have heard my name four times in the last twenty minutes and I am choosing, deliberately and consciously, not to reward the fifth attempt with a response."Dorian.""Cosa c'è adesso." I say it to the mirror. What is it now.They appear in the doorway of my bedroom and I look at them and I want to throw them both out the window. Not figuratively. The penthouse is on the fourteenth floor and the window behind me opens outward and I think about it seriously for two full seconds.Dante is holding his bow tie in one hand, dangling it in front of him like a man presenting evidence at a trial. Enzo has already attempted his own, which is now knotted around his neck in a shape I cannot immediately classify. It is either a small French scarf or something a sailor would produce in an emergency. It is not a bow tie."Why," I say, with enormous restraint, "did you choose bow ties.""We wanted to look like James Bond," Dante says, w

Chapter 29 (Dorian)

"I get front," Dante announces, and shoves his brother sideways hard enough to win it.Enzo does not go to the back seat. He wedges himself into the gap between the front seats instead, both elbows finding surfaces they were not designed to occupy, his shoulder pressing against my arm before I have even started the engine. The interior of the car now smells like the ground floor of a department store. The cologne saturation is complete and total and there is nothing to be done about it."Music," Dante says, already reaching for his phone."The deal was silence," I say."The journey has not started yet," Enzo says immediately from approximately four inches away from my ear. "Technically.""Technically," Dante agrees, and they begin arguing in whispers about the playlist with the focused urgency of two people who have decided the most important thing happening right now is this.My security forms around us as I pull out behind the lead vehicle onto the main road, the convoy settling into

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