Mafia Boss’s Arranged Bride by Bella King

Chapter 11

Annika

The wedding is in three days.

I have been sick to my stomach incessantly for the last month. I have consulted every casual drug dealer I knew back in college to try and find some kind of inner peace, artificial or otherwise, with Xanax or weed.

It’s helped somewhat, but the haze it has cast over me has led me through this month in a sort of dreamlike state where I have been watching the hours crawl past until I have been led to this moment.

Since about two days ago, my parents have been absolutely glowing with anticipation and excitement. I had my final dress fitting a few weeks ago, and while the dress chosen for me is very beautiful, I do not recognize myself in it.

I feel like I belong in a magazine. It doesn’t suit me at all.

I have only heard from Michail once since we last spoke at his parents’ home, and to my embarrassment, this fact has been a huge relief for me.

I suppose a small blessing in all this is that, unlike other women planning their own weddings with the love of their lives, I do not have to pester my fiancé with the superfluous and tedious wedding planning process. The idea that this all came together without my participation has brought me a mixed sense of gratitude and loss.

My involvement with Michail has been so businesslike and foreign to me that the idea of physically giving myself away to him in three days fills me with an unnamed dread. Will I be bad? How much of a base for comparison does he have? Will he be thinking of somebody else?

I know I will. I can’t keep my thoughts off Nikolai. I wonder what became of him. I haven’t heard a single word about him or from him since our conversation outside. I know I should forget about him, but I can’t.

These thoughts race through my head constantly, blinding me until I am sickened enough to throw up.

“Annika, you had better not be getting sick three days before this wedding,” my mother would say as she hears me retching from outside the bathroom door. “If you are, then at least get it all out beforehand. It would be a shame to see you vomit all over that dress. It’s ten thousand dollars, you know. Save the vomiting for your cousin Vivka at the reception, yeah?”

She only cares about herself and the way she appears. I’m a puppet, and she’s the one pulling my strings. I feel as though Nikolai came along and plucked a few of them out, and now I can never dance the same way. I doubt Michail will repair them when my mother hands the controls over to him.

I have been looking at more porn than ever, trying to feel more natural about sex, about the vulnerability of it all. Porn has done nothing for me but nauseate me further. The other people, the obvious actors, it’s just not comfortable for me. It’s all so fake, just like my own sex life will be with Michail.

My own sexuality is something that eludes me. I’ve only been able to make myself orgasm a handful of times, and many of those times were when I was thinking of a complete stranger taking me from behind.

Despite this, I have become more and more aware of that small seed of hunger that has grown in me considerably since the first night I met Michail.

Or was it because of Nikolai?

I brush him out of my head, but his green eyes never leave. They’re always looking at me through my closed eyelids, trying to take pieces of my soul like a thief in the night.

I switch my thoughts to Michail. What will it be like to get close to him? What does he smell like? What are his kisses like?

The idea of not knowing until we’re already married terrifies me, leaving me tangled in my own web of confusion and near-hysteria about my own wedding, about my own fiancé. And again, I am overwhelmed to the point of nausea.

I have only seen the wedding venue once or twice, but it is so grandiose and imposing that I feel intimidated and unworthy of having my wedding there. It is a former art museum on the water, wall-to-wall white marble floors, and pillars overlooking the steely grey of the water under the fickle New York sky. Huge windows climb to a vaulted ceiling where a chandelier of glass origami cranes cascades down in a spiral.

Had I been born a regular girl instead of a bastardized princess, this kind of wedding atmosphere would be completely out of my grasp, and I would likely have to settle for a cathedral or country club. In a way, I have convinced myself to let this experience feel like a party dedicated only to me and not to my obligation toward making my parents happy.

This can still be enjoyable.

My mother has shown me damn near twenty different mother-of-the-bride outfits, hairstyles, nail colors, and pieces of jewelry in the past two weeks. I’m shocked she hasn’t purchased every item on her list to change in and out of throughout the night as her mood shifts from grandeur to sentimentality to envy at Katya Ivanova’s perfectly tailored yet understated ensemble.

I feel so plain in all of this, so out of place. Part of me wonders whether or not anybody would notice that I was gone if I left after the ceremony. They could all just continue to party and kiss each other’s asses and drink themselves into oblivion while I retreated to my hotel room to eat Chinese takeout alone.

I wash the taste of vomit out of my mouth in the sink as my mother tries to get me to leave the bathroom. I wish I could wash her out just as easily.