They used to take the bride to a bathhouse and bathe her like a corpse. A symbol of dying as an unmarried girl and being reborn as a bride. The funeral rite had always seemed morbid to me when I read about it. Now, sitting in front of this mirror in a dress that weighed as much as a sentence, it seemed like the only honest tradition anyone had ever devised for an occasion like this. They had understood something, those women. They had looked at marriage clearly and called it what it was.
I wished someone had bathed me like a corpse this morning.
Instead Nina had arrived at seven with her case of tools and her reputation and her complete indifference to the inner life of her subjects.
“Nyet. No more tears,” she snapped, tilting my chin up with two fingers and dabbing more powder beneath my eyes with the focused displeasure of an artist whose canvas was misbehaving.“You will not ruin my creation.”
She set the powder down and reached for the ornate flower slide clips, piecing them together one by one with the deft efficiency of someone who had done this hundreds of times and intended to keep doing it for hundreds more. When she finished they sat like a crown at the centre of my curls, precise and elaborate and entirely not mine.
Her reputation was the best in Chernograd. I could see why.
She arranged the veil next, draping it so that it fell perfectly over my hair — light as breath, which was almost insulting given what the rest of me was carrying. The dress was another matter. The weight of all the pearls and beadwork pulled at my shoulders and compressed my ribs and made every breath a small, deliberate act. I had been wearing it for forty minutes and already felt like I was being slowly pressed into the ground.
I stared at the woman in the mirror.
She was immaculate. Vadim Dragunov’s bride, assembled by expert hands—the veil, the crown, the painted face, the careful architecture of a woman being presented. She looked exactly as a bride was supposed to look.
Underneath the powder and the pearls and the precise line of Nina’s work, she was dying. Quietly and without ceremony, which was perhaps more honest than the songs would have been anyway.
“You’re marrying such a handsome man,” Nina said, stepping back to assess her work with her hands on her hips.“Why so glum?”
I shrugged. The dress resisted even that small movement, the beadwork stiff and unyielding.
“Ah.” She nodded sagely.“You will miss your parents,da?”
I didn’t answer.
I looked down at my hand resting in my lap. The pale yellow diamond caught the light from the dresser mirror and threw it back at me, cold and brilliant and enormous.
Property of Vadim.
After today there would be no after. No version of this day that I came out of unchanged. From this morning forward I would be owned—documented, contracted, inscribed—by Vadim Dragunov.
The woman in the mirror looked back at me and said nothing.
She already knew.
??????
People kept touching my dress. Reaching out to finger the beadwork, the pearls, the veil, offering congratulations in bright voices that filled the room and bounced off the walls and meant nothing. I nodded. I smiled when smiling seemed required. Nina was gone, her job complete, her fee no doubt already collected. In her place had come everyone else—neighbours, cousins, women from the parish who had no particular connection to me but had found their way into my bedroom regardless, because a Dragunov bride was worth witnessing.
I had never felt so alone in a full room in my life.
Ruslan pushed through them.
He looked so handsome it almost undid me. His blonde hair smoothed to one side, the black suit making him look older than seventeen had any right to. He had dressed carefully. For me, I realised. He had wanted to do this properly.
“Everyone out of my sister’s room,” he said, and his voice had a quiet authority in it that I hadn’t heard before. Not a boy’s voice.“We leave for the church soon.”
They grumbled, exchanged glances, but they went. The room emptied in stages until it was just the two of us standing in the space that had been mine for twenty-five years and already felt like someone else’s memory.
“You look beautiful,sestra,” he murmured.
I looked at him for a long moment. Took him in. The set of his jaw, the careful hair, the way he was holding himself together for my benefit when I could see clearly that he was barely managing it.
“Ruslan.” My voice came out steadier than I felt.“I won’t be coming back to this house. After today, I won’t step through that door again.”
He went very still.
