Page 55 of My Wedding Night Massacre

Pavlina

Tomorrow sits on the house like weather.

I feel it in the way the rooms are too quiet, in the stillness Misha carries when he moves through the kitchen, in the set of Slava’s shoulders when he thinks I’m not looking. The plan exists, the crew is positioned, and the rotation gap is mapped down to the minute. There’s nothing left to do tonight except live through it.

We end up in the bedroom without deciding to. That’s been happening more, the two of us finding each other in the same space without a reason beyond wanting to be in it. I sit on the edge of the bed, and he pulls the chair from the corner, turns it around, and sits with his forearms on the back of it, facing me. It’s practical at first, the way things always start between us.

“Nadia will have him ready,” I say. “She’ll know from the sound of the crew coming in. She’s been waiting for this, even if she didn’t know she was waiting.”

“I know,” he says. “We’ve accounted for it.”

“Denis won’t make a sound if she’s the one holding him,” I repeat more for my sake than his. “He trusts her completely.” I look at my hands in my lap. “He trusts her the way he used to trust me before the visits got shorter.”

Slava doesn’t fill that with reassurance. He just listens, which is the right thing.

“After tomorrow,” I say, “the visits won’t be shorter anymore.”

“No,” he says. “They won’t.”

The room settles around us. Outside the city does its night thing, the low hum of it, the distant sounds that never fully stop. I look at his hands on the back of the chair, at his face, the face I spent three years reconstructing from memory and now have in front of me every day, and still sometimes catch myself looking at it for too long.

“I need to tell you something,” I say.

He waits.

“I need to tell you what happened,” I start, then stop, then start again. “When I thought you were dead. What it did to me.” I look at him directly. “It broke me, but I rebuilt. Denis rebuilt me, your supposed death broke things that are still fragile. Things that will probably always be fragile.” I pause. “I need you to know that. Not as an accusation. Just as a fact about who I am now.”

He’s very still.

“I’m not the person you married,” I say. “I’m someone who came through the other side of losing you, and I’m still putting myself back together, and I don’t know how long that takes.” I look at my hands. “I needed you to know that before tomorrow, because tomorrow changes everything, and I wanted this said first.”

Silence, then, “I know.”

I look up.

“I know what it did to you,” he says. His voice is low, stripped of the controlled tone he usually maintains. “I read everything Misha found. I’ve suspected since before I walked into that church.” He holds my gaze. “I’m sorry I ever thought you’d betray me. I’m sorry it took me as long as it did to get here.” A pause. “I’m sorry for all of it.”

It’s not an elaborate apology. But it’s real and honest. It lands in exactly where it needed to land, the place that’s been waiting for it since the ballroom three years ago.

Something releases in my chest. Not everything, because some things take longer than one conversation. Some fractures don’t close in a week. But enough. Enough to breathe differently than I have been breathing.

I reach out and take his hand where it rests on the back of the chair. He turns his palm up and closes his fingers around mine.

We stay like that for a moment, just that, his hand around mine in the quiet room with tomorrow sitting on everything.

Then he stands, and I stand. It’s not a decision so much as a direction we both move in at the same time.

He kisses me first, his hands coming to my face, both of them, thumbs at my jaw, holding me with the same certainty he’s always had, nothing hesitant about any of it. I kiss him back, my hands on his chest, feeling his heartbeat under my palms.

We undress without urgency. He gets my shirt over my head, and I get his off. We take our time with the rest, no desperation, no proving anything, just the unhurried business of two people who know each other’s bodies and aren’t in a hurry to rush past any of it.

He lays me down and follows, settling his weight over me, warm, real, and solid. I reach up and touch his face, his jaw, the lines around his eyes that weren’t there four years ago. He turns his face into my hand for a second, eyes closing, the same gesture from the night I thought he was a hallucination. My chest tightens around the memory of it.

He kisses my throat, my collarbone, moving down with his mouth, taking his time. His lips find my breast, my nipple, his tongue circling slowly, and I tip my head back and let the sound out. His hand spreads flat across my stomach, the warmth of his palm on my skin, then moves lower, finding the heat between my thighs, stroking through my underwear, feeling how wet I already am.

He pulls the fabric aside and touches me directly, two fingers stroking through my pussy, slow, reading every response, his mouth still at my breast. I grip his hair and hold on.

“Slava,” I say.