Page 12 of My Wedding Night Massacre

He leaves, and the door locks behind him. I listen to his footsteps move away and realize that this was the most honest thing he has ever said to me. He wasn’t pretending he’s proud of me, wasn’t faking he cares about me, wasn’t playing a role he created twenty-seven years ago. All I am, all I ever was for him is a valuable asset. I was never a daughter. I was always an inventory, a pawn to control.

I hate him. I hold onto the hatred because it’s the only thing in the room that’s entirely mine, that he didn’t build, plant, or manage. It’s small, cold, and completely my own. I grip it in the dark the way you grip something you’re afraid of losing, because it’s the only thing keeping the grey flatness from coming back.

Nadia comes back when the door is unlocked for her in the evening. She brings and offers nothing. She doesn’t try to talk me through anything or reach for words that would fall short anyway. She simply sits on the floor beside the bed, her back against the mattress, and takes my wrapped hands in hers and stays.

We don’t speak for what feels like eternity.

“You’re still here,” she says eventually, into the dark. I don’t know whether she’s talking to herself or me, but it’s a reminder for both of us.

I’m still here.

Yes, I’m still here, but not by choice. It’s because I failed. I failed at the one thing I tried to do over the past five days. I failed at joining Slava. I failed because that is what I am best at.

I don’t have any hope for things to get better. I’m too tired for that. But Nadia isn’t. She keeps the spark alive for both of us. She watches over me, content that I still exist even if only as a shell. As long as there’s breath in me, Nadia won’t give up.

There’s only one thing that hasn’t dimmed one bit. Hatred. It’s there, deep inside me. Cold, steady, persistent, and patient.

Tonight is just one more night. One of many. Despite my attempt, nothing changes. The ceiling is the same. Nadia is still on the floor beside me, present without asking anything from the presence, just there, warm and constant in a world that has stopped being any of those things.

That’s all it is tonight. Just the fact of another night, survived.

9

Pavlina

I know days have passed because the light changes. Beyond that, the weeks have folded into each other without distinction, one grey morning bleeding into the next, the city outside doing its relentless thing while I do mine, which is mostly nothing.

I eat when Nadia puts food in front of me. Not because I want to, not because hunger has returned in any real sense, but because Nadia’s face when I don’t eat is one pain too many, and I’ve run out of the cruelty it takes to add to it. So I eat. Small amounts, bit by bit, just enough to satisfy her watchful eyes. Every time I’m done, Nadia takes the plates without comment. She never pushes for more.

My clothes hang wrong. I notice this the way I notice most things now, from a distance, with the mild detachment of someone observing a situation that doesn’t belong to them. A sleeve that used to sit at my wrist falls past it. A waistband that used to hold sits loose, gaping at my hip when I move. I put on a jumper one morning that I’ve worn a hundred times, and it sits differently on my shoulders, too wide, the fabric pooling where it used to lie flat. My body has been quietly giving things back, returning them to wherever they came from, as if it decided at some point that there wasn’t enough reason to hold on to all of it.

My own hands look unfamiliar when I look at them. The knuckles are more pronounced, the tendons are visible in a way they weren’t before, and the skin sits differently over the bones. I hold them in my lap, look at them, and wonder whose hands are these.

I catch myself in the mirror once, walking past the bathroom. I stop even though I don’t mean to, but something makes me, some reflex I haven’t managed to train out of myself yet. The person in the mirror is wearing my face, but it’s been taken in at the edges, slightly hollowed under the cheekbones, the collarbones more pronounced above the neckline of my shirt. I look at her for three seconds, maybe four. Then I look away, because the person there doesn’t require much attention, and because looking at her makes me think about the last person who looked at me like I was worth looking at. That’s a door I can’t open this morning. Maybe never.

The restraints came off at some point. I don’t remember exactly when I was set free without Nadia watching over me. I haven’t tried to harm myself again, not because the impulse has gone but because the energy it takes has. Somewhere in the long, empty stretch of these weeks, I’ve arrived at a different place. It’s not better and definitely not healed. It’s just a place further along the same empty road, where the urgency has burned away and left something quieter behind. A waiting. Not active, not chosen, just the body continuing to function while the rest of me stands beside it and observes.

Despite seeing his lifeless body with my own eyes and even though my father confirmed it, I still expected Slava to come. A silly, hopeful part of me kept thinking he’d walk through the door and take me with him. For weeks, I dreamt about it, about him.

But lately, I’ve been circling in a different way around the truth. I didn’t allow myself to fully land on it, preferring to leave it sitting in the corner, but for the last few days, it’s been forcing its way to the center of everything, making the rest of it make sense. I kept thinking Slava would come. Not as a plan, not as something I was building toward, just as a background frequency I couldn’t locate or turn off, running underneath everything else. He would come because Slava Yeleshev doesn’t stay down. Because I know what kind of man he is, knew it from the first time I set my eyes on him. I recognized it in the way he held a position, the way he moved through opposition without flinching, and the way he looked at every room like a problem he’d already solved before walking into it. Men like that don’t end on concrete outside a wedding venue. They find a way back.

So I waited. Without knowing I was waiting, without naming it as waiting, just listening for him under everything, under my father’s calls through the wall, Nadia’s quiet movements, and the shift changes outside my door.

But he hasn’t come.

I let that sink in one morning while Nadia makes tea and the light moves slowly across the floor. I let it land the way you let something land when you’ve been keeping it at arm’s length for weeks, not because it’s new information but because you’ve finally run out of the strength to keep it from touching you. He hasn’t come. He isn’t coming. The blood on his shirt was the kind that leaves no room for a different interpretation. Slava is dead. He’s dead, and I have to stop listening for him under things because there’s nothing there to hear.

He’s gone. That’s the reality of my life now.

Nadia sits beside me that afternoon. Not on the floor this time, but on the bed next to me, which is new. She has something in her hands. It’s small and white. She doesn’t waste words on building up to it or allowing it more weight than it already carries on its own. She just sits beside me and holds it out to me. It’s clear she’s been thinking about it for a while, probably building the courage to tackle the matter.

I look at what’s in her hand without fully taking it in. But some subconscious part of my mind recognizes the small object because my heart skips a beat.

“I notice you have not seen your period for a while now. When did you last bleed?” Nadia asks gently. She’s treating it like information, which is the only way to treat it right now, because if either of us lets it become anything else, we won’t be able to have this conversation.

I think about it. The wedding was weeks ago, more than that, the weeks have blurred, but I count back the way you count back when you’re afraid of what the counting will confirm. The last time I was certain is further back than it should be. Much further. I think about the weight, the shock, the body redirecting its resources to the places that matter most when everything else is falling apart. That happens. Bodies do that under extreme stress, it’s a documented, clinical, explainable thing, and it doesn’t have to mean what Nadia’s face is quietly suggesting it might mean.

Except that Slava and I were not careful on our wedding night, or any night before it, because we were in love and we had our whole lives ahead of us. Careful was never a word either of us reached for when we were together.