Page 25 of My Wedding Night Massacre

He leans back in his chair, arms crossed, and waits like the good soldier he is.

“Find everything,” I say. “Everything that happened while we were gone. Pavlina, the Lyubimtsev household, how it’s been running since the night of the wedding. Every person who’s come in and out of that house. Every movement, every date, everyone who has access to who.” I pause. “Any child connected to either family.”

Misha goes still.

Not dramatically. Just the stillness he gets when a piece of information lands and he needs to process it and its meaning. He’s looking at me with an expression I can’t fully read, which is unusual because after twelve years, I can usually read him completely.

“How long do I have?” he says.

“Yesterday,” I say.

He nods slowly, but doesn’t move yet. “The child in the photograph. The new one on your desk.”

It’s not a question. I look at him across the table, he looks back at me, and we both know what we’re talking about, but neither of us says it out loud. Not yet, at least, because saying it out loud makes it the kind of thing that changes everything. I need the information before I let it change everything.

“Pull what we have on Denis Lyubimtsev,” I say. “Two years old. I want to know where he is in that house, if he even is there. I want to know what floor he’s on, what part of the building. I want to know who has access to him and when. I want to know everything.”

Misha is quiet for a long moment, then he picks up his coffee, finds it cold, and sets it back down.

“Last night,” he says. “When you went to see her.” A pause. “What did you find?”

I think about how to answer that. I think about her face when she looked at me across the dark room, the way she reached for me without hesitation, the way she said don’t talk, just stay, the way she was asleep before I’d finished understanding what had just happened.

“She thought I was a hallucination,” I say.

Misha doesn’t move.

“She’s had versions of it before,” I say. “She said as much. She’s been dreaming me up for three years.” I look at the window. “She didn’t know she was touching someone real.”

The room is quiet. Misha processes it as best as he can.

“If she’s been grieving you for three years,” he says, “then she didn’t know.”

“That’s one reading,” I say.

“What’s the other one?”

“That I went through a window at one in the morning while she was on sleeping pills and I’m not thinking clearly,” I say. “That I saw what I wanted to see.”

“Are those mutually exclusive?” he asks.

I don’t answer that. When I still don’t say anything, he picks up his laptop and phone and starts working. That’s what he does when the conversation has reached the edge of what words can handle, and I’m grateful for it.

I try to hold the mission in place.

Bogdan. The territory. The names on the list of men who helped him take everything. The Napoli crew is landing tomorrow, eight men, and the network is still being built piece by piece. The two days between now and Friday and the question of what happens at the Krasnov ballroom that I still haven’t answered.

The grey eyes in the photograph pull focus.

“Misha,” I say.

He looks up.

“The photograph. It was on her desk,” I say. “She had it face down.”

He waits.

“She turns it over when she needs it and puts it away when she can’t bear it,” I continue, trying to read this new version of her as I talk. “That’s not the behavior of a woman who made a choice and lived with it. That’s the behavior of a woman who lost something she loved and still can’t look at it straight on.”