Aria’s POV
I stood in the hallway with the phone still warm against my ear long after Romeo had hung up, Priya watching me with the careful patience of someone trained not to ask questions until she absolutely had to.
Tell no one. Not Romanov. Not Elena.
The instruction sat heavy in my chest, made heavier by the fact that I’d made Romanov a promise the very first morning of this marriage. And here I was, less than a minute into a phone call, already weighing whether my brother’s paranoia was worth breaking it.
“You should sit,” Priya said quietly. “You’ve gone pale.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re not,” she said, echoing Romanov’s exact words from days earlier, and something about the repetition made me laugh despite everything, a short, humorless sound that didn’t fix anything but loosened the
