Page 18 of My Wedding Night Massacre

“After that, she’s Gachev’s wife and the picture shifts.” He crosses his arms. “So what’s the move?”

“I’m working on it.”

“You’ve been working on it for three days,” he says. “What I haven’t seen is any actual work.”

I don’t answer that. I pull the latest intelligence package toward me instead, the one that arrived from Palermo this morning. Names, numbers, and organizational connections that Leoni’s people spent six weeks building. The Italian network has been generous, more generous than I expected, the debt my father accumulated there running deeper than I knew. We have names. We have structure. We have the shape of what Bogdan built and the locations of the load-bearing walls.

What we don’t have yet is the men to act on any of it.

“The Napoli crew lands Thursday,” I say. “Eight men, all vetted, none of them known to Bogdan’s operation.”

“Thursday,” Misha says. “One day before the wedding.”

“I’m aware of the timeline.”

“Are you?” He pulls his chair out and sits down, which means he’s settled in, and this conversation is going to run its course whether I want it to or not. “Because the way I read it, we’re three weeks from being ready to move on Bogdan properly. We have the intelligence, the network is building, and Leoni’s men are coming. The wedding is noise. It doesn’t change our position.”

“It changes hers,” I say.

Misha looks at me. I avert my eyes and look at the intelligence package instead.

“Tell me what you’re thinking,” he says.

“I want to go to the wedding.”

He stares at me for a full three seconds. “No,” he says.

“Hear me out.”

“No.” He’s on his feet now, which is the tell, Misha only stands when something genuinely concerns him. “Slava, we’ve spent three years underground. We have one shot at this, and it only works if Bogdan doesn’t know we’re coming. You walk anywhere near that ballroom and every piece of work we’ve done falls apart.”

“I’m not walking into the ballroom,” I say.

“Then what? What exactly is the plan here?”

I don’t answer immediately, because the honest answer is that I don’t have a fully formed plan, I have an intention. The intention is to be there. To be present in whatever way presents itself. To keep her from walking into that building and becoming Gachev’s wife.

“I want her to know I’m alive,” I say.

Misha sits back down. He puts both hands flat on the table and looks at them for a moment.

“She was gone before the lights went out,” he points out. It’s not out of cruelty as much as bringing up the thing we’ve been circling for years.

“I know what I thought,” I say.

“And now?”

I think about three seconds through a car window on the east side. I think about hollowed out and the face that wasn’t her real face and the way she moved, like moving took everything she had left. I think about the photograph I turned face down and then turned back over, and have been looking at every day since.

“Now I’m not sure,” I say.

Misha is quiet for a long time. When he speaks again, his voice is even, which is more concerning than if he’d raised it. “If you’re wrong about her and you show yourself at that wedding, Bogdan finds out you’re alive before we’re ready, and it’s over. Everything. Three years underground, the Italian connections, the Napoli crew, all of it.”

“I know,” I say.

“And if you’re right about her,” he says, “what changes? What does it change right now, today, with four days on the clock and the operation half-built?”

It’s the right question. The one I’ve been refusing to finish for days.