Page 7 of My Wedding Night Massacre

I press my hand flat against the car window, cold glass against my palm. I hold onto the cold because it’s the only real thing I can find right now. Outside the city keeps moving, keeps going, completely unaware that the person I built my entire future around is bleeding out while his father-in-law sits in a car and explains himself.

“...no loose ends...” My breath fogs the glass. “...Bratva is ours now...” A red light. “...exactly as planned...” Green. “...exactly as planned.”

I watch the city move. My father’s voice keeps going. None of it reaches me because I’m still at that window, still seeing it, still stuck in those two seconds. Dark blond hair. Eyes that weren’t open. I didn’t say I loved him one more time tonight. I thought we had time. I thought we were going to have so much of it.

The loop doesn’t stop.

5

Pavlina

The house smells exactly the same.

That’s the first thing that hits me when the door opens. Wood polish, Nadia’s candles burning in the east corridor, a warmth underneath both that my body still reads as safety even though my brain knows better now. It isn’t home anymore. It stopped being home tonight, in a car, watching a city that didn’t notice anything had ended.

I walk through the door because there’s nowhere else to go. My father’s hand is at my back, steering me forward. The corridor is the same it always has been. The same console table with the same mirror above it and the same small painting my mother chose before she died. All of it exactly as I left it this morning when I walked out in a white dress thinking I was walking toward something.

My father’s already talking. He moves through the house briskly, already somewhere else in his head, already onto the next thing. “...transition of assets by end of week...” He checks his phone. “...Yeleshev properties will need new management...” He straightens a painting on the wall, a painting that has always been slightly crooked. I watch him do it like I’m watching a stranger. “...your role going forward will be largely ceremonial...” A door opens somewhere upstairs. “...the lawyers are already...”

He’s still talking when he reaches the sitting room doorway, then pauses and looks at me. I always thought he had warm eyes, but now I understand it was all a performance. It’s always been one.

“You’ll feel better after you rest,” he says.

I don’t answer. He leaves.

Nadia’s in the kitchen doorway.

Seeing her breaks me. Her face has known me since I was four, knows every version I’ve ever been, and right now it’s full of a grief she’d clearly been hoping wouldn’t be necessary.

She doesn’t say anything. Instead, she just opens her arms.

I cross the kitchen in three steps, and she folds me in. I put my face against her shoulder, and what comes out of me has been building since I saw Slava’s lifeless body through the window. It isn’t crying. It’s rawer than crying, older than it, coming up from a place that tears don’t reach. Nadia holds me through all of it without speaking because she knows me well enough to know that words would ruin it.

We stay like that for a long time.

My father’s footsteps move through the upper floor, back and forth, back and forth, the sound of a man with calls to make and plans to set in motion. Somewhere in the city, people are figuring out what happened tonight. Somewhere in the city, Misha is digging a grave for Slava.

Nadia puts the kettle on without asking. She sets a cup in front of me and wraps her hands around her own. We sit like that in the kitchen that hasn’t changed since I was a child.

After a while, she asks, “Are you hurt?” There’s something in her voice when she asks it, a gentleness that tells me she’s been sitting with the question for a while.

“No,” I tell her.

She looks at me over the rim of her cup. “Pavlina.”

“I’m not hurt,” I say again. We both know what I mean and what I don’t mean. I hold the cup because it’s warm, and warm is something to hold onto right now. I don’t drink, and she doesn’t comment on it.

She nods once, slow, the nod of someone filing the rest of the answer away for later. She puts her hand over mine on the table and leaves it there. That’s all either of us has for now.

At some point, she takes me upstairs, her hand at my back. I let her because my legs are moving without me again. The bedroom is as good a place as any to not sleep in.

The loop runs. Slava on the concrete. Misha’s face, tight and moving fast. The blood on his shirt, dark and spreading. The window moving past. His head back, eyes closed, the complete absence of resistance in his body. I’ve replayed it enough times now that the edges have started to blur, which should make it easier, but it doesn’t.

I keep returning to the same small thought, the one that doesn’t have anywhere useful to go. I didn’t tell him I love him one more time. There were moments, a hundred of them, small ones, the kind that don’t announce themselves as last chances because they aren’t supposed to be. I didn’t say it when he fixed my hair. Didn’t say it when I handed his tie back. Didn’t say it when I caught his eye across the ballroom and saw the corner of his mouth pull. I looked away first because I thought we had time.

We were going to have so much time.

The grey light starts at the window somewhere around five. Not sunrise yet, just the city beginning to remember itself, the flatness of early morning before the color comes back. Nadia is still beside me. She hasn’t left, which I didn’t ask her not to do, but she understood it anyway, because that’s what twenty-three years of knowing someone looks like.