Page 41 of My Wedding Night Massacre

I keep my eyes on his face, and I listen.

27

Slava

“I had two bullets in me and no use of my legs. Misha dragged me three blocks before he found a car.” I pause, looking at the coffee in front of me, not at her. “I owe him a debt I’m never going to be able to clear. We both know it.”

Pavlina is very still across the table, her hands wrapped around her mug, her eyes on my face.

“Staying in New York was impossible,” I continue. “Every contact I had was either dead or potentially compromised. The men who survived folded into your father’s operation within weeks. I had no way to know which of those left standing had chosen that path and which had been given no other option, and I couldn’t afford to guess wrong.” I look up at her. “Moscow was Misha’s first suggestion. My father had cousins there, old ties, people who might have taken us in.” I shake my head. “Your father had spent years building his reach there. Relationships I hadn’t fully formed because I hadn’t needed to yet. Anywhere in Russia was a risk we couldn’t take.”

“Italy was Misha’s idea,” I say. “Which is the only reason I’m willing to admit it was a good one.” The corner of her mouth moves, a fraction, the first lightness I’ve seen in her since yesterday. “My father had done a favor for a man named Leoni years before the wedding. I knew the debt existed. I didn’t know how deep it ran until I called from a hospital bed in Palermo and he said take the house for as long as you need without asking a single question.” I turn the mug in my hands. “That’s the thing about Italian relationships. The debt is real, or it isn’t. Leoni’s was real.”

I recovered slowly. That’s the sanitized version of what happened, and I know it while I’m saying it, the version that strips out the particular texture of those first two months, the reality of a man who’d spent his entire life operating at full capacity, suddenly unable to cross a room without his hand on a wall. The humiliation of it. Misha doing things I won’t enumerate. I don’t say any of that. I give her the shape without the interior because I’m not ready to hand her that, and she doesn’t need it right now anyway.

“By the time I could move properly, I had about a third of what I needed,” I say. “Information, mostly. What Bogdan had taken, how he’d organized it, which men had moved where. Leoni’s network was useful. He had eyes in places I didn’t, and he was willing to share them because sharing them served him.” I look at her directly. “It wasn’t charity. I want to be clear about that. I had information he wanted, connections in New York that still had value even with me dead, and a very specific enemy whose removal would benefit certain people in Palermo whose names don’t need to be in this conversation. Mutual interest dressed up as alliance. It held because it needed to hold for both sides.”

She’s listening without moving, without interrupting, her eyes tracking every word.

“Three years of building,” I say. “No Russians except Misha. No trust extended past what was absolutely necessary. Every piece of the network assembled from scratch, tested, and tested again before I’d let weight sit on it.” I stop and look at the table. “The Napoli crew that arrived on Thursday is the last piece. Eight men, none of them known to your father’s operation, all of them vetted through channels Bogdan doesn’t have access to. We’re three weeks from being ready to move properly.” A pause. “Or we were. Before yesterday.”

“Before you walked into a church,” she says. Her voice is even, not an accusation, just stating the sequence.

“Before I walked into a church,” I agree.

The kitchen is quiet around us. Morning light moving across the stone floor, the maps still spread on the table in the next room, all the evidence of three years compressed into this villa, into these documents, into eight men whose names I trust and one timeline that no longer exists.

I don’t tell her about the nights. The vodka, the rage, and the long months when I’d built enough of a case against her to function only for some piece of intelligence to surface, a photograph, a report from Misha about access schedules and compliant smiles, and the case would develop a crack I’d spend days sealing again. I don’t tell her that her face was the thing that kept me moving through the worst of it, the memories of times we’ve shared together, especially the private moment in the dark room on the third floor of the wedding venue, thirty minutes before everything ended. I don’t tell her that I hated that memory for keeping me functional because needing it felt like a weakness I couldn’t afford. I’m not ready to hand her that. She doesn’t need to carry it yet.

“That’s more or less the gist of it,” I say.

She’s quiet for a moment. The mug in her hands has gone cold, she hasn’t drunk from it in twenty minutes, and her attention has been entirely on me. I’ve been aware of it the whole time: the weight of being listened to by someone who needed to know and now knows.

“I thought you were dead,” she says. Her voice has changed, dropped to the register she uses when she’s not pretending to be anything or anyone else except who she is now. It’s the tone she uses when she’s stating another fact. “I was certain. I saw you on that concrete. He took me home by force. Eventually, I stopped waiting because waiting was killing me faster than grief was.” She looks at the table. “I stopped letting myself listen for you. Under things. I had to stop, or I wasn’t going to make it.”

“I know,” I say.

She looks up. “Do you?”

“Misha found everything,” I remind her. “He’s the best at what he does, and he doesn’t like doing things halfway.” I hold her gaze. “I know what stopping looked like.”

She looks at me for a long moment, reading something in my face, then she nods once, slowly, and looks back at the table.

Misha appears in the doorway.

He has his phone in his hand, his jaw set the way it gets when the news is bad and actionable. He looks at me, then at Pavlina, then back at me.

“Her father’s been making calls since yesterday evening,” he says. “Not his usual people. Different channels. The city is starting to move.”

I look at him across the kitchen. Pavlina looks at me.

The three weeks we don’t have are running out faster than I thought.

28

Pavlina

“Denis has been moved,” Misha says, his phone face down on the table, his eyes on Slava. “Not to the main property. Somewhere smaller, off the usual rotation. We don’t have the address yet, but we have the area. Somewhere east side and definitely residential.” He pauses. “Your father’s been making calls since before you left the church. The city’s Russian networks are quietly activating. Slava’s name is being attached to words like unstable and dangerous.”