Page 32 of My Wedding Night Massacre

It doesn’t take hold.

Whatever usually works on her, whatever mechanism her father has been running for three years, it can’t find purchase today. She’s too far past it. The pills, the shock, the dress, the flowers on the floor, me standing six feet away alive when she believed I wasn’t. It’s built a wall between her and every reflex her father installed, and his voice can’t get over it right now.

She steps back from his hand.

Not dramatically. She doesn’t make a big deal about it or look at him when she does it. She just moves her arm so his grip has nothing to hold, a small, clean motion, and then she looks at me.

I cross the distance.

I don’t touch her yet. I simply put myself between her and Bogdan, close enough that he’d have to go through me to get to her arm again, far enough that she has room. She can leave if she wants to. She can step around me and go back to him, and I’ll let her because she has to choose this or it means nothing. That’s the thing I know about her, the thing I’ve always known since before the wedding, and three years of absence haven’t changed. She has to be the one who walks.

She looks up at me.

We’re close enough now that I can see her face clearly, all of it, not the three-second glimpse through a car window on the east side, not the dark room on the third floor where she thought I wasn’t real. Her face in full light, her eyes running over me the way they do when she’s trying to reconcile two things that can’t both be true. She’s looking at my jaw, my eyes, the shape of me without the beard. Looking for the seams, the places where this breaks down and becomes impossible again.

There aren’t any.

“Slava,” she says. Her voice is barely audible.

“I know,” I say.

I say her name back. Just that, just Pavlina, the same name I’ve said in this city and in Palermo and in her bedroom three nights ago when she was holding my face in both hands, and I was trying to memorize the fact of her being real.

Her hand finds my arm.

She grips it with the particular hold of someone testing whether the ground will hold them. Fingers tight around my forearm through my jacket, pressing in until she can feel the muscle and bone of me underneath. Real. Solid. Present. I stay completely still and let her verify it because she needs to, and because if I move right now, I’m going to do something that isn’t containable in this church in front of these witnesses.

“We need to move,” I say.

She nods. Still holding my arm.

Behind her, Bogdan says her name. The same controlled tone he used a moment ago, the tone that has been running her life for three years. I feel her hand tighten on my arm when she hears it, but she doesn’t look at him. She looks at me instead, and I look back at her. After a second, she turns, and we walk.

Not running. Walking. Her hand on my arm, my body between her and the room, the two of us moving down the aisle toward the doors while the congregation parts and stares, the noise building around us. I don’t look at anyone. I look at the doors ahead and keep moving. She stays with me, step for step, her grip on my arm not loosening.

Behind us, Bogdan says her name once more, sharper this time, almost catching an edge he never lets himself catch in public. I hear two of his men start to move and then stop, because they’re doing the same calculation he is, and the calculation keeps arriving at the same answer. Two hundred witnesses. Cameras outside. His own political architecture spread through the front rows. Nothing violent can happen here without burning everything he built, and Bogdan Lyubimtsev did not spend three years building an empire to burn it down over one moment in a church.

He’s going to let us walk out.

It costs him everything, but he has no other move. He knows that I know it, and that’s the only satisfaction I’m allowing myself right now because the rest of it has to wait.

The doors open. The morning hits us, cold and bright. There are cameras, as I knew there would be, and the sight of Pavlina Lyubimtseva walking out of the Krasnov church in her wedding dress on the arm of a man who isn’t David Gachev is going to be in forty places before noon. Good. Let it be everywhere. Let it be somewhere Bogdan can’t reach.

Misha has the car at the curb, engine running. He sees us coming but says nothing. He simply gets out, opens the back door, and gets back in the front. Twelve years and he’s never once needed to be told what a situation requires.

I hand her in. She goes, settling into the back seat, still holding the fabric of her dress, still in the ivory that was meant for someone else’s morning. I get in beside her. Misha pulls out before the door is fully closed.

The church recedes.

I don’t look at her.

If I look at her, I’m going to stop being able to think, and I need to think right now. I need to run the next twenty-four hours in my head, what Bogdan does when the cameras are gone, the witnesses have dispersed, and the public occasion is over. I need to think about Denis, where he’s being held, the Napoli crew that arrived yesterday, and the three weeks I don’t have anymore because Bogdan knows I’m alive and the timeline has just collapsed into something I haven’t fully mapped yet.

I look out the window instead.

The city runs past. I watch it, and I run the calculations, and I don’t look at the woman beside me in the ivory dress.

She doesn’t look at me either.