DRAWN TO THE ALTER

TERMS AND FIRST DANCE

Chapter Three

Reina pov

Nobody told me there would be a first dance.

I found out approximately four minutes before it happened when a woman I did not know appeared at my elbow during the reception and told me with a professional smile that the first dance would begin shortly and could I make my way to the centre of the floor. I smiled back at her with the same pleasantness I had been deploying all evening — the smile that said everything is completely fine and I am exactly where I am supposed to be — and the moment she turned away I looked around the room for the nearest exit that was not an actual exit.

What I found instead was Rafael Leone.

He appeared at my side with the particular energy of a man who had been waiting for the right moment and had decided this was it — warm, dark eyed, a glass of something expensive extended toward me like a peace offering.

"You look like you need this," he said.

"I look perfectly fine," I said.

"You look perfectly fine," he agreed pleasantly, "and also like you are calculating the distance to the nearest door."

I took the glass.

He smiled like he had won something and perhaps he had. Within four minutes I understood why Caelan kept this man close — Rafael Leone could make anyone feel like the most interesting person in any room and the dangerous thing about it was that it did not feel performed. He was genuinely curious about me in the way of someone who found people endlessly fascinating and had never seen a reason to pretend otherwise.

Dorian appeared next — lean, green eyed, the kind of bone structure that belonged in an old portrait somewhere — and within thirty seconds had said something so precisely funny about the flower arrangements that I laughed before I could stop myself. He looked quietly satisfied about this in the way of a man who considered making someone laugh a small personal victory.

Xavier came last. He stood beside the other two, tall and completely still, and looked at me for a moment and nodded once.

Somehow this felt like more than anything the other two had said.

Then Rafael leaned toward me slightly and said "Ask us whatever you want to know. This is the only time we will be more honest than he is."

I looked across the room to where Caelan stood with a minister or a dignitary or someone important — perfectly composed, perfectly controlled, the kind of man who looked like he had been built specifically for rooms like this one.

I leaned toward the three of them.

"Does he smile?" I asked. "Actually smile. Because I have been watching and I genuinely cannot tell if his face does that."

All three of them turned and looked at Caelan at the exact same moment.

It was so immediate and so simultaneous that I pressed my lips together to keep from laughing.

Dorian turned back first. "He smiles," he said. "We have documented evidence. Rafael has a photograph from 2019."

"It was a good year," Rafael said solemnly.

"Once," Xavier said. Just that. Once. In a tone that suggested this was the complete and accurate answer and no further elaboration was necessary.

I did laugh then. I could not help it — something about Xavier's delivery, so perfectly timed and so completely straight faced, broke through everything I had been holding together all afternoon.

And that was the moment I felt eyes on me from across the room.

I looked up.

Caelan was watching us from where he stood with his minister or his dignitary or whoever the important man was — and something had shifted in his expression. Not quite readable. Not quite the sealed composure of the altar. Something in between that I did not have a name for yet.

Then he said something brief to the man beside him and began crossing the room toward us and I had approximately five seconds to compose my face before he arrived.

He stopped in front of the four of us and looked at his three friends with the particular expression of a man who knows exactly what has been happening and has chosen not to ask.

"Can I have my wife," he said. It was not entirely a question. "It is our first dance."

"We were just getting acquainted," Rafael said innocently.

"I noticed." Caelan's eyes moved to me briefly — that unreadable look — and then back to the three of them. "Stay away from my wife. You are all insufferable and I mean that with complete sincerity."

The sound that came from all three of them simultaneously was somewhere between a cheer and a laugh and it was loud enough that several nearby guests turned to look.

Caelan ignored this with the practiced ease of a man who had been ignoring these three his entire adult life.

He turned to me and something shifted in his face — not a smile exactly, not the full version, but the shadow of one at the corner of his mouth that came and went so quickly I almost missed it.

"Can I have this dance, Mrs Voss."

The wooooh from behind him intensified considerably.

He continued to ignore it completely.

I looked at him for a moment — this man I had married four hours ago, this cold controlled stranger who had just called his closest friends insufferable with the particular warmth of someone who meant the complete opposite and felt something I was absolutely not prepared for.

I took his hand.

"You can," I said.

The woooooh followed us all the way to the dance floor.

He was a good dancer.

I do not know why this surprised me. Perhaps because everything about him suggested control and precision and I had not considered that those qualities translated to this. He moved like someone who had learned to dance properly and then forgotten to stop being good at it. His hand at my waist was correct and nothing more — the right pressure, the right distance, completely professional — and I told myself this was fine and appropriate and exactly what the situation called for.

"Your friends are not what I expected," I said.

"What did you expect?"

"Versions of you."

Something moved at the corner of his mouth again. "That would be unbearable."

"You said it," I said pleasantly. "Not me."

Then the song shifted and the moment passed and we finished the dance in the particular silence of two people who have said something real by accident and are not ready to say anything else.

The flight to London is quiet in the way that has nothing to do with peace.

We sit beside each other in the first class cabin — him with his laptop open almost immediately, me with my face turned toward the window watching Greece disappear into the dark below — and the silence between us is the first honest thing that has happened all day. No guests. No priest. No Helena managing surfaces. Just two people who are now legally bound to each other sitting in the dark thirty thousand feet above everything and having absolutely nothing to say.

I think about my grandmother's kitchen. The smell of thyme honey in the early morning. The sea outside the window doing its slow shift from black to grey to the colour with no name. I hold all of it carefully in my chest like something I am afraid of losing if I am not paying attention.

I think about the ring on my finger.

One year.

I can do one year.

I do not look at him once the entire flight.

He does not look at me either.

---

London is grey and vast and completely indifferent to the fact that I have just arrived in it as someone's wife.

The penthouse is on the thirty second floor and the lift opens directly into it and when I step out and see it for the first time I understand something about Caelan Voss that no file or briefing or conversation could have told me. Enormous. Immaculate. Beautiful in the way of a space that has been designed rather than lived in. Everything in its exact right place. Nothing unnecessary. Nothing warm. No photographs anywhere on the walls or the shelves — just art and architecture and the city below and the particular silence of a place that has never had noise in it that was not chosen.

I stand in the middle of it and feel for the first time since my father's car appeared at my gate the full weight of where I am and what I have agreed to.

I breathe through it.

I have stood in spaces that were not built for me my whole life.

This is just another one.

He introduces me briefly to the staff — Mrs Bennett his composed and quietly warm housekeeper, Thomas his driver, Henri his chef who shakes my hand and says something about making whatever I need whenever I need it,Caelan stands slightly behind me while I meet each of them and says very little and I feel him watching the interaction with the attention of a man cataloguing something he had not expected. I am warm with them — I cannot help it, it is just who I am.

Then he says — "I will show you your room."

Your room.

Not our room. Not the room. Your room.

I follow him down the corridor and make a quiet mental note of those two words and say absolutely nothing about them.

It is large and beautiful and has never been used. Walls too clean. Surfaces too empty. A bed so large it makes everything I have ever slept in feel like a different world entirely. He gestures at the space — this is yours — and I nod and he leaves and I sit on the edge of that enormous bed and look at the city outside the window and let myself feel everything I have been holding back all day.

I unpack my small bag. I shower. I change into something comfortable — soft, loose, mine, nothing chosen for someone else. I sit back on the bed and call my grandmother.

She picks up before the second ring.

"Yiayia," I say.

"Reina." Just my name. In the voice that has steadied me my whole life.

"I am okay," I say. "I just wanted you to know."

"I know you are," she says. "How is London."

"Grey," I say. "And very tall."

She makes the sound that lives just beside a laugh. "Get some sleep when you can."

"I will."

Three hours pass.

Then the knock comes.

Henri stands in the doorway. "Mr Voss requests your presence in his study, Mrs Voss."

Mrs Voss.

I stand. I smooth my dress. I follow Henri back down the corridor thinking — Mrs Voss. Well. That is going to take some getting used to.

The study feels like him immediately — darker than the rest of the penthouse, books arranged with intention, a desk that commands the room the way he commands every room he enters.

He gestures to the chair across from his desk. I sit. He sits.

"I am sure you know this is not a romantic marriage. This is a transaction and nothing more."

"I was not expecting romance, Mr Voss.”

He pushes a file across the desk. "These are the terms we will operate by for the next year. Read them carefully."

I read them.

He is thorough. Every term laid out in clean precise language that leaves no room for anything. Separate bedrooms — non negotiable. Public appearances as required with adequate notice provided. His business remains entirely his own — no questions, no involvement. His schedule is his own and he does not explain his movements to anyone. Outside of public appearances our private lives remain entirely separate. At the end of one year the arrangement concludes cleanly with no complications and no extensions.

I read it twice.

Then I turn to the last page and find the black card.

A supplementary annex — thicker paper, dark bordered, separating itself from everything else with the confidence of something that expects to be obeyed.

I closed it.

I push it back across the desk toward him without a word.

He looks at the black card. He looks at me.

"The main file is fine," I say pleasantly. "That one is not."

He looks at it for a moment and says — "Those terms are standard for anyone living in this space."

I look right back at him. "Then find someone standard to live in it."

The silence between us stretches.

Then he picks up the black card and sets it aside and moves on without another word.

He does not concede loudly.

He simply moves on.

I file that away carefully.

"The stylist," I say.

He waits.

"I dress myself. I have been doing it for twenty seven years without assistance and I am not stopping now.”

Something moves at the corner of his mouth. There and gone before I can be certain of it.

He nods once.

The silence settles and I think we are finished when he says —

"I assume there is no one. A boyfriend. Anyone of that nature. That will not be possible for the duration of the arrangement."

Clinical. Unhurried. The way you close a clause in a contract.

I look at him across the desk for a long moment.

"My personal life," I say, "is not one of your rules, Mr Voss."

The formality lands between us and sits there like something solid.

He does not respond.

He does not correct me either.

I pick up the pen. I sign the main file. I slide it back toward him and I stand and I walk out of his study without looking back.

Behind me — silence. The complete silence of a man sitting very still with a signed file in front of him and a rejected black card beside it and a year ahead of him that I suspect is going to go considerably less according to plan than he intended.

I walk back to my room.

I close the door.

It is going to be a very interesting year.