Mafia Heiress Stalling a Forced Wedding

I have run my father's empire since he died — three docks, forty soldiers, a ledger no bank would touch — and yet I am twenty-four and sitting on a pink couch in a bridal boutique while a tired attendant holds up lace I will never wear. I've been crying, and I keep asking her for another dress, anything to buy nine more minutes. Outside the window, Viktor Sarno waits with two guards: twenty-nine, a scar through one dark eyebrow, calm as a blade. He is the heir my father promised me to in a contract signed before I could read, and he is the one man I have hated for as long as I have known him. He wants the alliance sealed and me standing beside him at the altar; I want a white coat in a hospital and a life with my own name on it. One of us has to move first, and I am still stalling.