Page 71 of My Wedding Night Massacre

He grabs the edge of the desk, trying to find purchase, trying to get upright, and I pull him off it by the collar, drag him out of the chair entirely, and put him on the floor. He lands hard on his hands and knees, head dropping, blood from his lip hitting the floor in a steady drip. I grab him by the back of his jacket, haul him half upright, and drive my knee into his ribs.

The sound he makes isn’t a word. It’s just air, forced out of a body that has run out of ways to manage the situation.

“That’s for the safe house,” I say, and do it again, the same rib, feeling something give under the second impact. “For putting my son in a room with guards while you signed documents with his name on them.”

He collapses onto his side, one arm wrapped around his midsection, his mouth working. His face is changing shape, the composed mask coming apart feature by feature. The lip is swelling already, the cheekbone rising, both eyes beginning to close from the impact, swelling spreading across the orbital bones. He looks like a man and less like an institution with every passing second, and I feel nothing about that except a cold, thorough satisfaction.

“Slava.” His voice is wet, clogged with blood from his lip. “Please.”

“We’re too far gone for that,” I say, and hit him again.

This one snaps his head back against the floor, a hollow sound that the stone walls throw back at me. My knuckles are properly open now, three of them, blood running down the back of my hand and dripping off my fingers. I don’t feel it. I pull him up by the collar one more time, his weight dead against my grip, his legs not cooperating, and look at his face.

He’s still there. Still conscious, still present behind the ruin of what his face has become, one eye already swollen nearly shut, the other fixed on me with the last thing he has left, which is the refusal to show me fear.

“That’s for Pavlina,” I say, low, right into his ruined face. “For every document she signed and every dinner she sat through and every morning she woke up in your house and built herself back from nothing. For the bathroom.” My grip tightens on his collar. “You knew what you were doing to her, and you kept doing it, and you called it family.”

I hit him one last time.

His head drops. His body follows it, all the way to the floor, the last of the tension going out of him at once. He’s breathing, the shallow rise and fall of a man whose body is still running on instinct while everything else has gone offline. His face against the floor is barely recognizable, swollen and bloody, the composed architecture of it completely dismantled.

I stand over him, my chest heaving, both hands dripping. The floor around him is spotted with blood, some his, some mine, the desk chair on its side against the wall where it rolled.

“That’s for my father,” I say.

He doesn’t respond. He’s past responding.

I straighten up. My breathing is ragged, my knuckles split across three fingers, blood on my hands and on his shirt and on the floor of his office. I look at him for one more second, at what’s left of the man who manipulated a ballroom and smiled across it while I walked to my own slaughter. Then I turn, walk to the door, and open it.

Misha is in the corridor, his back against the wall, his eyes moving to my hands and then to my face.

“Clean it up,” I say.

He nods.

I walk back down the corridor, past the frayed runner, past the doors standing open, down the stairs, through the entrance hall, and out through the front door into the morning. The city is fully awake, traffic on the street, the ordinary sounds of a day that doesn’t know what just ended inside a house on its grid.

Romeo has the car at the gate. I get in. Nobody speaks. The city moves past the windows, and I look at my hands in my lap, the split knuckles already stiffening, and I feel the thing I’ve been carrying for three years finally go still.

Not gone. Not resolved into something clean. Just still. The weight without the momentum I’ve carried for years.

The villa comes into view, and the car rolls past the gate.

Pavlina is on the front step.

She sees me coming and comes down to meet me, her eyes moving over me the way they do when she’s taking inventory. She reaches me, takes my face in both hands first, turns it, checks. Then her eyes drop to my hands.

She takes my right hand, turning it over, looking at the split knuckles, the dried blood across my fingers. She holds it in both of hers without speaking.

“Are you alright?” she asks.

I look at her. At her honey-brown eyes and her dark hair and her face that I’ve been carrying in my chest since the night I woke up in a Palermo hospital and understood what I’d lost. The face that kept me moving when the rage ran out, that I hated for doing it, that I needed to do it, that I don’t need to carry as a wound anymore because she’s standing in front of me on the steps of a villa in the morning light, holding my damaged hand in both of hers.

“Better than I’ve ever been,” I say.

She looks at me for a long moment, reading it, finding what she’s looking for. Then she closes her fingers around my hand and leads me inside.

Epilogue