Page 14 of My Wedding Night Massacre

“I’m sure he is,” I say.

My father looks at me. He’s learned, in three years, not to read my neutrality as opposition, because it almost never is anymore. I’ve stopped opposing things out loud. There’s no point to it. “He’s a good match. You’ll be comfortable.”

I look at him. Not with hatred, which surprises me sometimes, the absence of it in moments like this one. The hatred was real for a long time, cold, patient, and mine, the one thing that kept me tethered when nothing else did. But three years is a long time to maintain any one emotion, and what’s replaced the hatred is quieter and, in some ways, more complete. It’s just blankness. A clean absence where a person used to be. I look at my father and I feel nothing about him at all, not love, not hatred, just the neutral recognition of a fact I’ve absorbed so thoroughly it’s stopped generating a reaction.

“Is that all?” I ask.

He pauses, looks at me for a moment with the eyes of a man trying to determine whether the machinery is running correctly. Once he decides it is, he nods and leaves.

I go to the window.

The garden is empty, the afternoon light sitting on the grass. Somewhere in the city David Gachev is looking forward to Thursday’s dinner. Somewhere in this house my father is on the phone again, talking to his lawyers or his men or whoever comes next on the agenda. Somewhere in a room I don’t think about very often, a box of things from before, a silk wrap, a tie pin, a photograph taken at the engagement dinner where two people are looking at each other instead of the camera, things Nadia kept because I couldn’t keep them but I also couldn’t throw away.

Ten days.

I look at the garden, thinking about nothing and everything at the same time. It’s a skill I’ve developed over three years to a degree that should probably concern me but it doesn’t. I think just enough to notice and acknowledge, but not too much so it doesn’t affect me. The light keeps on moving. It always does. The time never stops. There’s a seating chart on the table in the next room that needs to be finished before morning.

I stand at the window and breathe. I let the ten days fill the part of my mind where I store the information with no weight attached, as a date on a calendar, as something happening to someone who used to be me but is now just the person standing at this window in a house that was never home, looking at a garden that’s empty, waiting for nothing in particular and finding just that.

11

Slava

New York looks exactly the same.

That’s the first thing I register coming out of arrivals, the city doing its relentless thing, taxis and noise, and the smell of a place that doesn’t stop for anyone or anything for that matter. It doesn’t stop for grief, or three years, or the return of a dead man in glasses and a beard that’s been on his face long enough that he now only notices it when it itches. The city doesn’t know I left. And now, the city doesn’t know I’m back, which is exactly what I need.

Misha is beside me, carrying his own bag, wearing his own version of a beard and long hair. He looks different in other ways, too, heavier in the shoulders, with a scar on his jaw that wasn’t there before. We’ve both been somewhere, and we both came back from it.

“Home,” he says, not like it’s a welcome. More like a notation.

“Almost,” I say.

The car takes us north.

The villa sits on the outskirts of the city, far enough to be private, close enough to be operational, belonging to a man named Leoni who owed my father a favor that became mine by inheritance when my father could no longer collect it. Leoni asked no questions when I called from Palermo. He said the house was mine for as long as I needed it. That’s the thing about Italian connections, they understand the long game in a way that doesn’t require explanation. I trust him because the debt is real and because he has no stake in New York’s current power structure. He’s not Russian, which right now is the most important qualification anyone can have.

I trust no Russians except the one currently setting up the operations table in the room off the main corridor.

The maps go up first. Misha’s work built from three years of intelligence gathering conducted from a safe distance and then from progressively less safe distances as we got closer. Territory boundaries, property holdings, security rotations, and known associates. The Yeleshev organization as it exists now, which is to say as it was absorbed, reorganized, and renamed in the paperwork while remaining the same in everything that matters. More or less the same men and routes. Mostly, at least. Same properties, too, except that now with Lyubimtsev signatures on the documentation.

I stand in front of the maps and approach it the way I’d approach a problem with variables. I look at it as a structure with weak points, as something that can be taken apart if you understand how it was assembled. This is how I’ve survived three years. It wasn’t by grieving or raging, though there was plenty of both in the early months, but by turning everything into a problem and then solving the problem. It’s the only mode I have that requires nothing of me except intelligence and patience. I have both in quantities that would concern anyone who knew how long I’ve been sitting on them.

The intelligence picture is thorough. What Bogdan has built is impressive, I’ll give him that, the work of a man who’d been planning for years and executed cleanly. My father’s men either folded or disappeared. The ones who disappeared are either dead or still loyal to me, and I know which is which. I’ve been watching the ones who folded. Some of them I’ll use. Some of them I’ll deal with differently.

Pavlina is just another name on a list.

I don’t allow myself to think of her any differently. She’s alive, I confirmed that before I left Palermo, a single piece of intelligence that took three months to verify through channels I trusted. Alive, living in her father’s house. She has a little boy now. A son. Two years old, dark hair, the reports said. I made a note of it and set it aside. I don’t have the luxury to dwell on certain parts of the past.

She helped her father build what he built, stood in the right places, signed the right documents, and performed the role Bogdan needed her to. She was gone before the lights went out. She was always going to be gone before the lights went out. I know this the way I know the other things I know now.

It was all planned. And she was a part of the plan.

The surveillance establishes its rhythm over the first two days. Misha runs the logistics, I run the analysis, we eat at the table with the maps, sleep in shifts, and communicate in the shorthand we’ve developed over three years of being the only two people either of us can afford to rely on. It’s efficient but also impersonal. The personal things got stripped away until the only thing left was work.

On the third day after my arrival, I’m in a car on the east side, doing a route assessment, when I see her coming out of a building.

It isn’t planned. Surveillance hadn’t flagged this location. I was there for different reasons entirely, and then she walks out of a door I wasn’t watching. I see her before I can look away, redirect, or do any of the things I would have done if I’d had warning. She’s maybe twenty feet away. She’s wearing dark clothes, something simple. Nadia’s behind her, carrying a garment bag. Pavlina’s walking toward a car at the curb with her head slightly down, not looking at anything in particular.