Page 58 of My Wedding Night Massacre

She’s already turning for the door.

The corridor is dark except for the kitchen light at its end. Misha is at the far end, one hand pressed hard to his left shoulder, blood dark through his fingers and down his forearm. His face is composed in the specific way of a man managing significant pain by deciding it doesn’t exist, yet. Francesco is on the floor. I look at him once and understand. I don’t stop because stopping is thirty seconds I don’t have, and it won’t change what I already know.

“Misha,” I say.

“Moving,” he says, and he is, already heading for the front, his good arm swinging, his pace only slightly off.

Giorgio and Luigi fall in behind us, covering the rear. The front door. The street. Romeo already has the engine running. I can hear it from the doorway. He had it going the moment the shots were fired because Romeo understands operations and doesn’t need to be told twice.

We come out fast, Nadia with Denis tight against her chest, Misha ahead, the crew forming up. The street is still empty. I count the seconds without thinking about it. The rotation guard is due on the south pass in under fifteen minutes, and we need to be north of this block before that.

Into the car. Nadia and Denis are in the back, Misha folding himself into the front passenger seat, his jaw set, his hand still pressed to his shoulder. I take the seat behind Romeo, my hand going back between the seats without thinking about it, finding Denis’s back, feeling the small solid warmth of him through Nadia’s grip.

He goes still under my palm.

He looks at my hand, then up at my face. He doesn’t pull away.

I keep my hand there, and he keeps looking at me.

Misha says something low to Nadia. She looks at him the way she hasn’t had the chance to look at him directly until this moment. Her expression shifts, a small movement, but I catch it.

“You’re bleeding,” she says.

“I’ve noticed,” Misha says.

“That needs attention.”

“After the reunion.”

She looks at him for another beat, then back at Denis, her hand moving in slow circles on his back.

Denis is still watching me. His fingers have found the edge of my sleeve, small fingers curling around the fabric without fully gripping, testing the texture of it, testing whether I’m solid. I let him. Romeo takes us north and I watch the street through the windshield, keeping my hand on my son’s back and don’t move either one.

The second car is where it’s supposed to be, three minutes north, pulled to the curb on the east side of the block. Three figures beside it. I see her before the car stops, her dark hair, the way she’s standing with her whole body angled toward the sound of the approaching engine, already moving before Romeo has the car fully stopped.

She reaches the door as it opens.

Denis sees her face, and his whole body changes. Not gradually. All at once. The sound he makes is Mama, twice. His arms are already out before Nadia has finished turning toward her.

Pavlina takes him.

She pulls him against her chest, and he locks his arms around her neck. They both go still, completely still, in the middle of the street in the outer boroughs at four in the morning with the city going grey at the edges. She has her face in his hair. He has his face in her neck. Neither of them is moving.

I get out of the car and stand on the pavement ten feet away, looking at them. The two of them in the pre-dawn dark, my wife and my son, both of them here, both of them out, both of them together for the first time in the two years he’s been alive. Something in my chest that’s been held at arm’s length since I woke up in a Palermo hospital takes one step closer to wherever it’s been trying to get to.

But not yet. There’s still Bogdan. There’s everything that remains unsettled and the justice my father deserves.

But this part is done.

Denis lifts his head from Pavlina’s shoulder. He looks at me over her arm, those grey eyes, my eyes, steady and assessing even now, even at four in the morning on a street he’s never been on.

He looks at me for a long moment.

Then he puts his head back down on his mother’s shoulder and holds on.

36

Pavlina