Page 19 of My Wedding Night Massacre

“I don’t know yet,” I say.

“That’s not good enough.”

“I know that too.”

He leans forward. “She’s been surviving without you for three years. Whatever she is now, she’s been managing it. Four more days won’t break her.”

“Four more days and she’s Gachev’s wife,” I say.

“Yes,” he says. “And maybe that matters to you, and maybe it matters more than you’re admitting, but it is not a reason to destroy everything we’ve built before we’re ready to use it.” He pauses. “I’m not saying this to be difficult. I’m saying it because I’m the only person who will.”

“I’m not going to do anything reckless,” I say.

“I’ve heard that before,” Misha says.

“I mean it.”

“You always mean it,” he says, dry and accurate, “and then something happens, and the meaning shifts.”

I look at him. He looks back at me with the expression he’s had since Palermo, since I told him we were coming back and he said it was too soon, but we came anyway. The expression of a man who thinks I’m wrong and has already decided he’s coming with me wherever wrong leads.

“I’ll follow you,” he says, “whatever you decide. You know that. I’ve always known that and so have you. But I need you to actually think about this. Not the version of thinking where you’ve already decided, and you’re building the case. The real version.”

I nod.

“Promise me,” he says. “Properly.”

I hold his gaze. He holds mine. He’s not asking for a guarantee. He knows better than to ask for a guarantee. He’s asking for the genuine attempt, the consideration that goes all the way down rather than stopping at the conclusion I’m already leaning toward.

“I’ll think about it,” I say. “Properly.”

He nods once. Goes back to the intelligence package without another word, because that’s what twelve years of loyalty looks like. Not silence that means he’s given up. Silence that means he trusts me to do what I said, and is giving me the time and space to do it.

I turn back to the window.

Four days. The Napoli crew on Thursday. The network still building, piece by piece, the way you build something meant to last.

And somewhere in this city, my wife is four days from a wedding I hope she didn’t choose. I’m aware that there’s a big chance she betrayed me. I’ve spent a long time blaming and hating her. But right now, I’m standing at a window telling myself I’m going to think about it properly.

The photograph is still on the table behind me, face up now, the public event smile, the hair up, and the face that isn’t her real face. I don’t turn around to look at it. I don’t need to. I’ve had it memorized since the moment I turned it over. The thing I keep finding beneath its composed surface is the same thing I found in three seconds through a car window on the east side.

Wrong. She looks wrong. She looks like someone surviving something.

Or maybe that’s just something I’m desperately wanting to see.

I think about that for a long time, standing at the window, while Misha works quietly at the table behind me. The four-day countdown weighs on me. I think about what I’m going to do, but I don’t have a clear answer. I’m not sure one exists at all.

14

Pavlina

The pill was Nadia’s idea, or close enough to it. She’d found them in the medicine cabinet three weeks ago and set them on the nightstand. She must’ve noticed I wasn’t sleeping and had decided to do something about it without making it a conversation. I took the first one a couple of months after my suicide attempt and slept for seven hours without the loop running once, the longest uninterrupted stretch I’d had since the nightmare happened.

I’ve been taking them every night since.

Tonight I took it later than usual, after the final dress fitting ran long and my father wanted to go over the ceremony order at ten in the evening, sitting across from me with his notes and his quiet voice, while I sat there pretending I was paying attention, while actually thinking about nothing at all. By the time Nadia walked me upstairs, I could already feel the edges of things going soft, the looseness that comes just before sleep, the world pulling back to a comfortable distance.

I’m in that space now. Not asleep, but not entirely awake either. The room is dark except for the city light coming through the gap in the curtains. I’m lying on top of the covers because getting under them felt like too many steps. In three days, I’m going to stand in the Krasnov ballroom and become David Gachev’s wife.