Page 42 of My Wedding Night Massacre

Slava doesn’t move.

“He’s trying to control the narrative,” I say. Both of them look at me. “He’s getting ahead of the story before anyone else can tell it. If they think Slava is unstable and dangerous, then everything yesterday looks like an incident rather than an exposure. He’s protecting the consolidation.” I look at Misha. “He’ll be moving assets too, not just Denis. Anything that could anchor a counter-narrative. He’ll be on the phone with every alliance he has, offering reassurance, and asking for quiet support.”

Misha looks at Slava, then at me.

“You grew up watching him work,” Slava says.

“I grew up inside his thinking,” I say. “There’s a difference.”

I know how my father operates because he raised me to understand it, not as a lesson, not with words, but through proximity. Through years of sitting in rooms while he took charge of situations, absorbing the logic of it the way children absorb language before they know they’re learning. I know what he does when a situation shifts. I know how he sequences his moves, what he protects first, and what he sacrifices to protect it.

I also know that as long as he believes he still has leverage over me, Denis is safe. My father doesn’t damage assets. Denis is only useful to him alive, accessible, and presentable. A two-year-old boy with the right bloodlines who can be produced when needed. The moment my father decides he’s lost me entirely is the moment Denis stops being a chess piece and starts being a liability. My father has never had patience for liabilities.

“I need to call him,” I say.

The silence that follows stretches too long to be comfortable.

“No,” Slava says, narrowing his eyes.

“I’m not asking.” I hold his gaze across the table. “I need him to believe he still has me. That I panicked, that I’m frightened, that I need time, but I’m still reachable. As long as he believes that, he keeps Denis stable. He won’t move him again, won’t change the access, won’t do anything that might complicate getting him back.” I pause. “The moment he thinks I’m gone entirely, he starts treating Denis as a contingency instead of a guarantee.”

“You’re not calling him,” Slava insists. His voice has changed, dropped into the register he uses when he’s made a decision and considers it closed.

“Slava—”

“I said no.” He stands from the table, moving away from it, putting distance between himself and the conversation as if that will settle it. “We find Denis another way. We don’t put you on the phone with that man.”

I look at his back. “Why not?”

“Because it’s dangerous,” he says, turning. “Because he’s been reading you your entire life. Don’t you see it? One wrong word and the whole thing collapses. One wrong word and Denis is gone before we have any move to make.”

“That’s not why,” I say.

He goes still.

“That’s a reason,” I say, “but it’s not the reason. So, tell me the actual one.”

The kitchen is very quiet. Misha has gone somewhere else entirely, not physically, just retreated behind his own eyes, his coffee mug held in both hands, his gaze on the table.

“Tell me,” I say. “If it’s not about trust, tell me what it is. Because from where I’m sitting, it looks like you’re making a decision about what I’m allowed to do, and I’ve spent three years with someone doing that. I won’t do it again, Slava. So, you either start treating me as an equal and your fucking wife, or I’m out of here. I mean it.”

The restraint in his face cracks open, not breaking, the way stone cracks when the pressure underneath it has been building for longer than the stone can hold.

“It’s not about trust,” he says.

“Then what?”

He crosses the room in four steps, stops in front of me, close enough that I have to tip my head back to hold his gaze. His jaw is tight, his eyes hard, all the controlled fury of a man who has been holding something at arm’s length for too long.

“I can’t,” he says, and then stops. He looks at me, looks away, then looks back again. “I can’t put you on the phone with him. I can’t sit in this room and listen to you perform for the man who took you from me and kept you and used you and.” He stops again. His hands are at his sides, but they’re not entirely still. “I spent three years getting here. Three years going from a hospital bed in Palermo to Leoni’s villa, then building everything from nothing because there was nothing left.” He looks at me, and the control in his voice finally gives way to the thing underneath it. “I cannot lose you again. I cannot sit here and watch you call him and listen to you make yourself smaller for him one more time and know that if it goes wrong, I lose you all over again. I can’t do it.”

The room is completely silent.

I look at him. At his face, the grey eyes, the jaw, the man who walked into a church yesterday and stopped everything, who came through a window three nights ago and let me believe he was a ghost because I told him not to speak, and he listened. Who spent three years in Italy building something to come back to me with, even when he wasn’t sure I deserved it.

My chest hurts. Not the old hurt, not the grief or the rage, something newer and more frightening, the vulnerability of being seen by someone who knows exactly what they’re looking at.

“Slava,” I say.