She was small under my hand, but she did not falter once. I could smell the soft powdery perfume she had worn since I was a child, the one in the little glass bottle on her dresser, and I couldfeel the way she kept her eyes fixed forward, chin up, like she had been waiting forty years to walk a girl of hers down an aisle and was finally getting to do it.
I looked up.
Daniil was at the altar.
His suit was very dark and very plain, the way he liked things, and the white of his shirt and the white of the flowers behind him made his gray-green eyes look like something the cold light had picked out on purpose. The small scar at his temple. The set of his mouth, trying very hard to be the set of his mouth. Failing a little, around the eyes.
He saw me, and for one beat his eyes went wet, then he blinked once, hard, and put it away the way he put everything away, and I loved him so much in that second I could not breathe correctly.
Alek stood beside him, calm, hands folded. Mikhail and Ivan on his other side. Mikhail already had a hand pressed to his own mouth like he was telling himself not to make a sound. Ivan looked like a man at a tax meeting, which from Ivan was the highest possible compliment.
Halmoni reached the front and let go of my arm. She kissed me once on the cheek, quick, dry, and stepped aside to her seat in the first row.
Daniil reached for my hand.
The small white scar on his left index knuckle caught the candlelight as his fingers closed around mine. I had kissed that scar in a hundred dark rooms. I kissed it now with my eyes, just for a second, because I could not do it with my mouth in front of everyone.
"Hi," I whispered.
"Hello, my love," he said.
Alek cleared his throat once, kindly, and began.
He kept the opening short. He spoke about family the way Alek spoke about family, plain and serious, no flourish. He said the two of us had chosen each other in front of all the people who mattered, and now those people were going to witness it. He nodded at Daniil.
Daniil took a small breath and looked at me.
"Chloe," he said.
His voice was quiet but it carried, the way his voice always carried, and his hand around mine did not shake, though his thumb moved across my knuckle once, slow, like he needed to anchor himself there.
"I saw you in a coffee shop three months before I let myself walk close enough to speak to you. I had my men gather what they could about you because that was the thing I was good at, and I told myself it was only that. It was not only that. I was already a man who had decided. I did not know yet what I had decided, or that the woman across that room would become the only piece of my life I would not be able to lose without losing all of it. I only knew that the shape of your face made something in my chest go quiet for the first time in a long time."
A small sound from somewhere in the chairs. Possibly Mikhail. Probably Mikhail.
"There was a night a stranger put something in your glass, and I carried you out of that room, and I slept on a couch a few feet from you, and in the morning you were not afraid of me. That night something settled in me I could no longer pretend was about my work. You cooked for me in your kitchen not long after, and I asked you if I could kiss you, and you said no, and I did not push. That was the first time in my life I understood that wanting a thing was not the same as taking it. You taught me that without trying. You have taught me most of what I know about being a man worth standing in this room."
I bit the inside of my lip. Hard. Sienna was going to kill me.
"I have hurt you. I will not pretend otherwise on this day. I started a fight in a restaurant I should not have started, and I grabbed your arm too tight on a wet sidewalk after, and you looked at me and you said the words you are scaring me. I have carried those words in my chest every day since. Three days later I was driving to you to ask for a chance to be a better man, and a man cut my brake line, and for three months my body was somewhere in the woods being kept alive by people I will never be able to name and never be able to thank, because they were killed for the keeping of me. I owe a life I do not deserve to people I will never meet. I will try to be worth it for the rest of mine."
His thumb moved on my knuckle again.
"You walked into my brother's house as a nanny to a child I was calling my sister, and you did not say one word about who you had been to me. You let me find my own way back. You found me crying by her bed one night and you put your hand on my face and you told me I did not have to force anything to remember, and a few nights after that the memory came back to me in a kitchen, because you had trusted me enough to stop pushing. I make you a promise here, in front of these people. I will not be the man who is always right. I have tried it, and it is not a good way to be a husband. I will be the man who keeps coming home. I will not let you down again. I will be worthy of being the man you said yes to even when I was no one."
"You are my home, Chloe Kim. You have been since the second I saw you, even before I knew it was you I was looking at. Take my name. Let me carry yours."
Somebody in the second row was openly crying. I was not going to look to see who. If I looked, I would lose it.
Alek nodded at me.
I took a breath. It came in shakier than I wanted. I let it out. I started.
"Daniil."
I said his name the way I had said it the first time I ever said it out loud, careful, because it was a name that mattered.
"I've spent most of my life walking out of rooms before anybody could ask me to stay. It was a thing I was good at. I told myself it was politeness. I told myself it was independence. It was neither. It was me being scared. The first room I didn't walk out of was a room in a house I didn't know, the morning after a stranger put something in my drink at a club, and there was a man asleep on the couch a few feet from the bed, and I wasn't afraid. I didn't understand yet what that meant. My body did. It knew before I did."
