Page 4 of My Wedding Night Massacre

The ballroom pulls me back in, noise and light, and almost two hundred people who all want something from the Yeleshev heir. I move through it on autopilot, muscle memory doing the work, and find Misha at the edge of the room looking like a man enduring a party he’d rather be anywhere but at.

“Your father looks like a man who lost an argument,” Misha says, without looking at me.

“He did.”

“He usually does with you,” Misha muses.

I don’t answer that. I find Pavlina instead, across the room, standing with two women I don’t know. She catches my eye over their shoulders and smiles. A private acknowledgment that has nothing to do with the public version of her and everything to do with the dark room, twenty stolen minutes, and the fact that she’s still filled with my cum.

The corner of my mouth pulls. She looks away first, returning to her conversation. I think, not for the first time tonight, that my father doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He can’t. Because if he’d ever felt anything close to this, he’d understand that there’s no argument capable of moving me. There’s no security rotation or staffing anomaly or unnamed feeling that outweighs what I have with her.

I take a sip of my drink and scan the room again out of old habit. Exits, faces, threats, out of order. The east entrance. Two men I don’t recognize near the door who could be Bogdan’s. They could also be catering. They could be anything. My father’s voice sits at the back of my mind, but I push it away, determined to examine it tomorrow to know why these changes were made without my father’s or my authorization.

Just then, the lights go out.

It’s not a flicker or a fault. Every light, everywhere, gone at once. As if someone knew exactly where the panel was and when to cut it.

The screaming starts four seconds later.

3

Slava

The gun is in my hand before the first scream finishes.

I’ve been armed at my own wedding since the moment I decided to have one, because I’m my father’s son in every way that counts. The one lesson he drilled into me before any other was that a man without a weapon is just a man waiting to become a casualty. The holster sits at my ribs under the jacket. I’d checked it twice before the ceremony. It’s an old but good habit.

My first instinct is Pavlina. It’s always Pavlina. But she was near the south end, which put her close to the emergency exit, the street, and a way out. My father was at the north wall, alone, with nothing but an untouched glass and a body that’s been slowing down for years, even if he’d never admit it. In a coordinated attack, you go for the most exposed first. That’s not sentiment. It’s logic. I’ll get to her too. I just need thirty seconds.

Getting to the north wall isn’t a straight line. The ballroom’s a battlefield now, tables overturned, chairs scattered, people moving in every direction at once, uncoordinated and loud. I go around a fallen table, step over a woman on the floor who’s alive but covering her head, duck under a swinging arm, and ram my shoulder into him as I pass, just to move him out of my way and keep going.

Two men block the north corridor entrance. Not guests, not staff, not anyone I’ve seen before tonight. They’re positioned, not panicked, which tells me everything. I don’t slow down. I put the first one down with a shot the ballroom noise swallows whole, then use the half-second the second man spends processing it to close the distance between us, get inside his reach before he can raise his weapon, and drive my elbow up into his jaw hard enough to feel the crack through my arm. He drops. I step over him.

My father was standing right here, but I don’t find him anymore. What I find instead is one of our men face down near the baseboard, a man I’ve known for six years, and two I don’t recognize standing over him. Without hesitation, I shoot, putting both of them down before they’ve finished turning around. I step over the bodies and keep moving, eyes cutting through the dark, looking for my father’s silhouette, for the upright way he carries himself, for anything familiar in the chaos.

Nothing.

The attack is coordinated. The power cut was timed. The men are positioned, not scattered. They’d been placed before the lights went out, which means this had been running underneath the whole evening like a second conversation nobody invited me to.

Fuck! My father was right.

There are bodies near the east entrance that I don’t stop to examine. The north wall gives me nothing but overturned chairs and a woman I don’t recognize pressed against the paneling with her hands over her mouth. I check the antechamber off the main hall, the corridor that runs behind the bar, and the emergency exit, which should have two of our men on it, but has none. The absence is its own information. Someone pulled them or put them down. Either answer is bad.

My father isn’t anywhere I look.

I’m halfway through the corridor behind the bar when the blow comes out of nowhere, a doorway to my left that opened while I was looking right. The impact hits my ribs like a sledgehammer. No warning, no sound, just sudden blinding pain and the wall rushing up to meet me. I let the momentum carry me into it, use it to push back off, and put my elbow into his throat before he can reset. He goes down. My ribs register the damage, bruised but not broken. I force myself to keep moving because Pavlina and my father need me on my feet, and a man who goes down in the first ten minutes is no good to anyone.

Misha finds me in the west corridor.

“My father?” I ask.

“Not found.” There’s blood on his knuckles that isn’t his. “East side’s gone. This was planned, Slava.”

“I know.” I’ve known for the last four minutes. “Where’s Pavlina?”

“She was near the south end last I saw her.”

I’m already moving before he finishes the sentence.