I walk the aisle and check every latch. The doors to the side chapel. The sacristy lock. The balcony rail shows no scrape where no scrape should be. When I lift my head, I find the choir loft empty and the trumpets on their hooks catching dust. I refuse to give snow the last word. Snow doesn't own this city. We carry it into our coats, stamp it from our boots, and make it serve the bread with cold that wakes a face.Resurrection,my father would say. That is the word they mocked when they preferred restructuring. The Mother of God carries three stars on her veil and watches with a mouth that doesn't judge the living. This is a house. It is not a brand.
I hold my hands open, palms tingling from wick and match. I remember the first time Dmitri sang under his breath to show me where to place a vowel in a prayer that doesn't belong to architecture. A council calls him a liability when it wishes to shave its conscience thinner. He calls himselfmine without asking for thanks, and I have hurt him. I will not let hurt be the last word between us.
The chapel waits. The candles stand. The panes hold. I take my place on the step and look at the crowns. I don't rehearse a speech. Words arrive when I need them. They always have in this room, even when my mouth was dry and my hands were too cold to trust.
Footsteps in the corridor approach, firm and softened by the runner. No man under this roof makes that pattern except one. The door opens. He steps in with his coat on and his collar marked by the faint line of a harness. His shirt is black under the coat. Along his ribs, a darker gloss spreads, slicking the weave. The air tastes faintly of iron. His face carries the stillness that comes after an exchange of blows where both men thought they were right and at least one of them was wrong. His eyes go to my hands, then to the candles. He doesn't look around the room to count exits.
"Let us finish the vows," I say, and the words take their place and stand there.
His mouth finds the shape I have only seen when he touches the Gospel with two fingers. In one motion, he takes his place beside me. We stand in front of the table where the red thread waits. The sacristan ties it around our wrists. The elders rise in the back pew. They have won enough wars to know they must stand for the right things.
We face the icons. There is no priest yet. There is no music. There is the low tick of wax running. There is the faint ring of metal as a censer cools on its chain. There is the heat along our hands where the thread lies. There is the taste of myrrh that always moves into my mouth when the bookopens. We speak. We don't mark the cadence like students. We let the line carry us as if it were a bridge cut from iron by men who expected to be shot at and crossed it anyway.
"To bind our fate to each other, before God and man," I say. My voice finds the stone and stands on it.
He answers with the same sentence, his mouth shaping each vowel as if it were an oath hammered on an anvil. His hand holds mine. The red thread lies across our pulse.
We speak the next line and the next, Old Church words that feel like river stones in the mouth. To honor, to guard, to keep, to forgive, to bring truth with no delay. When I speak the line that names secrets, I don't flinch. When he speaks the line that names ambition, his voice drops, and the room receives it as law.
Our hands don't shake. The candles don't gutter. The saints don't look away. We are not alone, and we are not many. We are exactly the number needed to make a vow binding. We reach the last clause. The crowns gleam as if they know their turn is coming. The colored glass over Saint George throws a red bar across the altar rail like a warning and a benediction at once. I hear my grandmother's hymn run under my words like a river under ice. I see my father's ring pressed into wax and my own fingerprint inside it.
We open our mouths together for the final word. A single mote of glass rests on the red thread on my wrist.
The stained glass over Saint Nicholas explodes. A single bullet pierces the blue and turns the window into a rain of knives. The shard that carried the saint's halo falls between us and the altar and shatters against the stone.
27
DMITRI
The pane in our estate chapel is boarded, the saint's face mended with timber and prayer. The bullet that shattered it is logged and sealed. Katya runs the trail that hurt us there, tracing entry, angle, and hand. Sergei wanted that message to haunt our rehearsal and push us from the altar. It fails. The Vigil moves to St. Nicholas and goes forward as written.
The cathedral holds a winter of its own, ancient stone warmed by a thousand tapers. Candles rise in tiers like a regiment that learned to sing. Lamps anoint gold onto icons worn thin by kisses and winters. The families have come. Brigadiers with rings that carry wars. Elders whose eyes have read every ledger and still prefer faces. Ivan Kostin, who did not believe women had the permission to stand. The keeper of theobshchaksits with the book shut on his knees, thumb on the corner, present for order, not profit. Colored glass hums above the nave, saints kindled in carmine and cobalt. Outside, the snow thickens on graniteand iron. Inside, backs straighten because God is watching, and so is the house.
I stand at the left of the solea, bandage under linen. My shoulder protests when I lift my arm, and I deny it. I have denied worse. Across the aisle, Valentina comes toward me with the unhurried certainty of a procession. Garnet pins hold her veil. Iron pins hold the city. Her red silk shimmers like a banner in a house that remembers saints and knives, and the room learns where to look. Her hands are steady, the kind a man could build seasons on, and when the priest sets the red thread between us, it settles over our wrists like a living line.
Father Gavril lifts the crowns and blesses them. His voice carries along stone, clear as a bell with its ornament stripped away. He sets the red cord across our wrists, not tight, never cruel, just firm enough to tell the room and heaven whose hands belong together. Coats whisper in the pews, a lamp kisses its chain, a cough loses its battle with a sleeve. Men square their shoulders the way soldiers do when the standard comes forward. This is not pageantry. In our house, a crowning makes two bodies a single rampart, turns bloodlines into a treaty that outlives signatures and lays law on the tongue stronger than ledgers or guns.
I look once at Anatoly. He sits three pews back, suit the color of gunmetal, face paler than it was last month, jaw square anyway. Both palms rest flat on the pew in front of him, shoulders set as if the verdict has already been signed. Glass broke in our chapel, and he answers by sitting taller, a commander who refuses the lesson of fear. He inclines his head to me. He has never loved anyone like he loves his roof.Tonight, he hands it to me and to her with the smallest nod he has ever given a man. I answer it with my own.
The choir begins the Vigil hymn. The words lift the nave. Incense walks the center line like a herald. The rite opens. We say the first lines as we were taught—in the Church tongue, consonants like river stones, vowels opening like doors, then in ours, so every ear can hear. Elders rise to witness. Two councilmen who don't believe in God stand anyway, which is proof they still fear a covenant more than a contract.
Father Gavril lifts the crowns, and the gleam calls the room to order. Colored glass throws a piece of saint across Valentina's cheekbone, and it looks like war paint and a blessing at once. We circle the table three times, slow, measured, the old way. Each step says the same thing. This is not theater. This is a fence the house will hold.
Then the door on the side aisle opens.
Mourners appear in long black, faces arranged to pass any usher. They carry nothing and yet hold themselves as if they have just set a coffin down. Aleksandr, jaws shaven clean, wears a dark suit tailored for confession but meant for a mirror. Behind them, eight men in coats, collars turned up, hands hidden under cloth in a posture that has nothing to do with prayer.
Sergei Vetrov enters last, bald scalp catching candlelight, face mapped by old cuts, neck thick, shoulders built for breaking doors. A small crown sits on his finger with no saint on it. He carries the pistol like habit, a mean economy in every movement.
Gasps break along the pews like gulls rising off a winter harbor. No one stands. The choir falters, then falls hushed.
I take one step and put myself between Valentina and their line. My left arm has stitches and bleeds again under the shirt. I lift my pistol low. I keep my hand open at my side, where her fingers can find it if the red thread fails. She doesn't need to. She may.
Sergei stops at the transept rail as if he has paid for the front row of a play. His eyes walk my shirt to the dark at the shoulder. His mouth curves. He enjoys a man who bleeds and keeps standing because he mistakes endurance for sentiment.
"Volkov," he says, voice soft under the chant, as if he respects a church enough to keep his tone inside it. "Look around. The city has gathered to see a crown placed. Here is my offer. Lay the girl down and walk away from this farce, and I will put Boston in your hand with ceremony. Take the chair. Call it an upgrade."
Men who love power don't whisper because of reverence. They whisper because it travels better in a church.
