Today, standing here in the sun, I’ve settled on both.
Seven months ago, I proposed to her in the garden under the willow tree, on one knee. Sophia had helped me choose the ring, sworn herself to secrecy, and somehow managed to keep it, which I appreciated more than I told her. What nobody tells you, going in, is that proposing to the woman you love is genuinely one of the more destabilizing experiences available to a man. My knee was unsteady. My voice was not entirely reliable. I had survived Aslanov’s and his men, two gunshot wounds, and more years of the Bratva than I can account for cleanly—and I knelt in the grass under a willow tree and could not find a single word that felt sufficient.
She said yes before I finished asking.
Like it was obvious. Like she’d been waiting for me to catch up.
I don’t know why it surprised me as much as it did.
Sophia arrives at the altar, one hand resting on her stomach. Her second pregnancy is starting to show, and Timur’s composure, which is considerable under most circumstances, falters slightly every time he looks at her. I understand that now in a way I wouldn’t have, a year ago.
The scars from Pullman Yard have faded some—the ones on the surface, at least. The ones inside take longer. I still check the locks at night. Triple lock Hannah’s door without deciding to. Still employ men to walk the perimeter of the grounds, still scan rooms I’ve entered a hundred times before. The habit of vigilance doesn’t dissolve just because the threat is gone. It recedes slowly, month by month. There are now mornings whenI wake up and the first thought isn’t a threat assessment. The number of those mornings are increasing.
The thoughts haven’t gone entirely. I don’t expect them to. But they’re quieter than they were, and the life underneath them—the one I’m living, in this garden, on this day—is louder.
I’m aware, distantly, that I’ve turned to check the entrance.
Old habit.
And then I see her.
Lauren, at the far end of the aisle, the light catching the white of her dress, her eyes already on mine across the distance between us.
The noise stops.
Every door I keep locked. Every room I’ve already swept. Every scenario my mind has been rehearsing since I woke up this morning. All of it goes quiet, and what’s left is just her—walking toward me, unhurried, with the particular expression she gets when she’s trying not to cry and has already lost the battle.
The music changes.
I exhale.
I think I’ve been holding that breath for four years. She takes my breath away on an ordinary Tuesday morning. Seeing her in white, walking toward me in the sun, is something else entirely.
I reach into my breast pocket and press the folded square of linen to the corner of my eye before I can think too carefully about what I’m doing. Timur, to his credit, says nothing.
The dress is simple and magnificent—white silk, strapless, skimming the curve of her pregnancy in a way that makes the whole picture something I don’t have adequate language for. She’s chosen gold jewelry, small drop earrings, a thin bangle at her wrist. Her hair falls loose over her shoulders in dark waves.The light catches the green of her eyes from twenty feet away and I feel it in my chest like a physical event.
Then Hannah appears.
She comes down the aisle ahead of her mother in a pink dress, scattering petals with the focused seriousness of a child who has been given an important job and intends to do it properly. She’s five now—taller, more certain of herself, with my eyes and her mother’s way of walking into a room like she’s already decided to own it. When she reaches the altar she looks up at me with a grin that costs me the last of whatever composure I had left, and I tip my chin toward the sky and breathe through it.
Lauren reaches me.
I take her hand and she turns to face me. For a moment, neither of us speaks—we just look at each other in the particular way we’ve looked at each other since the beginning, when she walked into my estate in a lemon silk dress and some part of me understood, with the quiet certainty of something irreversible, that this was going to change everything.
I was right about that.
This event is nothing like Timur and Sophia’s wedding was—no grand arrangements, no lavish displays, no army of catering staff moving between tables. We didn’t want any of that. After years of operating in the dark—hiding, watching, moving through the world like people who couldn’t afford to be seen—getting married under an open sky feels like the right way to mark the end of it.
No more hiding.
No more pretending.
The priest begins, and I hear very little of what he says. Not because I’m not present—I am, more present than I’ve been anywhere in years—but because Lauren is looking at me the wayshe looks at me sometimes when she thinks I won’t notice, and I can’t find a reason to look anywhere else.
I used to resent it. The way she got under every defense I’d spent decades building. The way she made careful, calculated men like me do incautious things—fake deaths, long vigils, and alliances with men I didn’t trust, all in service of keeping her and our daughter safe. I told myself for years that it was a liability. That caring this much about someone was the kind of weakness that got you killed in the world I came from.
I was wrong about that.
