Page 64 of My Wedding Night Massacre

He nods, apparently satisfied that this information has been properly distributed, and goes back to the watch. Slava’s hand is still on his back. Denis has made no acknowledgment of this and no move to change it.

I press my lips together and look out the window. Not happiness, exactly, though it’s close. Fuller than that, heavier. Something broken being put back together and holding.

Three years ago, I sat in my father’s car, watched Slava bleed out on the hard concrete, and accepted that the future I’d believed in was gone. I built a different one, smaller and harder, held together by Denis and hatred for my father in roughly equal parts. I got through it all.

And now Slava is sitting in a kitchen in a villa on the outskirts of New York with our son in his lap, letting him hold his wrist, answering questions about watches, his hand on Denis’s back with that extraordinary careful weight.

Nadia turns from the counter and sets a plate of crackers in front of Denis. Denis releases Slava’s wrist immediately and gives the crackers his full attention. He picks one up, inspects it, and takes a bite. Correct crackers. Good.

He doesn’t climb down. He eats the cracker in Slava’s lap, already somewhere else in his head, the introduction and the watch and the climb filed away and forgotten.

Slava looks at me over the top of Denis’s head.

I look back at him and smile.

There’s nothing to say that the room hasn’t already said. He knows that, and I know that, so neither of us tries. He just holds my gaze for a moment, his hand still on Denis’s back, this man who ran operations out of a Palermo hospital bed and built a network from nothing and walked into a church to stop a wedding, sitting in a kitchen at eight forty-two in the morning, being used as furniture by two-year-old eating crackers.

Denis holds up a cracker. Not to Slava, not to me. Just up, examining it, turning it in his fingers. Then he takes another bite.

Slava looks back down at him.

I pick up my coffee and drink it while it’s still warm, because some moments don’t need anything added to them and this is one of those moments, the three of us in a kitchen, Denis eating crackers, the plan running quietly in the next room where the maps are spread on the table and my father’s silence already starting to crack at the edges.

All of that is still there. None of it has gone anywhere.

But right now, there’s this.

39

Pavlina

Denis goes down without a fight, which I choose to take as a good sign.

He’d been running on fumes since mid-afternoon, the new place, the new faces, and the extraordinary event of a watch all keeping him going past the point his body had the sense to stop. By seven, he was lying sideways on the couch with his eyes still technically open. By seven-fifteen, I had him in the back room, door cracked, nightlight on, and his thumb finding his mouth before she’d finished pulling the blanket up.

I stand in the corridor for a moment after he falls asleep, listening to the house settle around me. Misha’s people are at every entrance. Two more of Leoni’s men arrived this afternoon, taking up their positions without needing to be told twice. The villa feels different with the weight of them in it, more sealed and contained. Safe in a way I haven’t felt in three years, the kind of safe that has people behind it rather than just locks.

I go to the bedroom.

Slava is already there, sitting on the edge of the bed in just his underwear, his phone face down on the nightstand, his elbows on his knees. He looks up when I come in. His cock is hard, straining against the fabric, and he’s not making any effort to pretend otherwise.

I look at him. All of him, the broad shoulders, the scarred ribs, and the grey eyes watching me cross the room.

“I could get used to this,” I say.

“You should,” he says.

I stop in front of him, close enough that he has to tip his chin up slightly to hold my gaze. His hands find my hips before I’ve reached for him, the full curves of them filling his palms, his thumbs pressing in at the soft flesh above the waistband. I feel the heat of his hands through the fabric, and my breath catches.

He pulls me closer and puts his mouth to my stomach through my shirt, lips pressing flat, and I get my hands in his hair and hold on.

He takes his time getting my clothes off. My shirt first, over my head, his eyes moving over me in the low light. Not scanning, not checking. Just looking, the full attention of a man who has been thinking about this. My jeans next, his hands working the button, the zipper, pushing them down over my hips and letting them fall. He hooks his fingers into my underwear and draws it down slowly, his knuckles brushing the outside of my thighs on the way. When it’s gone, he sits back and looks at me standing in front of him.

I feel the self-consciousness arrive, the old reflex, the awareness of my belly, my hips, and all the softness that the world I grew up in spent years telling me was too much. I feel it, and then I feel his hands, spreading wide across my hips, his thumbs pressing into the soft flesh at my sides, gripping the full curves of me.

“Stop,” he says, reading it on my face.

“I’m not doing anything,” I say.