She looks furious.
Not obviously. Someone who didn’t know her face wouldn’t see it. But I know the way her shoulders are braced as ifshe’s walking toward a firing squad rather than an altar. She is fighting an emotion with teeth, and I find myself respecting the sheer, icy steel of her resolve. She doesn’t cry. She doesn’t stumble.
She reaches the altar and stands across from me. Her gaze lifts, clashing with mine like whetted blades.
“You look beautiful,” I say, my voice barely a murmur.
Her chin lifts, a defiant tilt that tells me exactly where I can shove my compliments. “My beauty is not for you, Razvan.”
The priest begins the liturgy.
I listen to approximately forty percent of what he says. The other sixty percent of my attention is on her face, the way she refuses to look at me for longer than two seconds at a stretch, the way she glances down at Theo between responses, and the thing that happens in her expression when she does. Soft. Involuntary. Gone again the second she looks back up.
And then, sliding in underneath all of it, the thought I’ve been keeping at the edges for three days.
Who took my son?
The men at the warehouse were professionals, but they weren’t anyone I recognized. No markings. No tattoos I could place. The ones we took alive said nothing useful before they stopped being useful, and the trail from the warehouse went cold inside six hours. Whoever orchestrated it knew how to clean up after themselves. Knew Theo’s school. Knew Lena’s name and location in Budapest.
That level of intelligence doesn’t come cheap. It comes from somewhere organized. Somewhere with resources and reach and a specific reason to want leverage over me.
A Bratva family. Has to be. But which one and why now and what do they actually want?
The priest says something that requires my response and I give it without breaking stride.
I’ll find them.I turn the ring in my fingers before I slide it onto her hand.And when I do?—
Lena’s hand is cold.
I hold it a beat longer than necessary. She doesn’t pull away, which costs her something, I can see it costing her, and I let go.
The reception moves through the Volkov estate’s main hall with the efficiency of an event staffed by people who know that Bratva occasions require both excellence and discretion. The senior families come through in rotation. Handshakes and congratulations and eyes that assess my new wife with varying degrees of subtlety.
Lena stands beside me and smiles at exactly no one.
Except Theo.
Every time Theo appears at her elbow, which is frequently because he has appointed himself her personal escort for the evening, her face does the thing. The involuntary softening. She crouches to his level and listens to whatever he’s telling her, which based on his gestures involves something large and possibly a helicopter, and she laughs, actually laughs, and the sound of it hits me somewhere behind my sternum like a finger pressed on a bruise.
I look away.
Is it that terrible?The thought arrives before I can stop it.Being here. Being mine.
I don’t follow it further.
Dmitri materializes at my shoulder with two glasses and the expression of a man who is having an excellent evening. “Congratulations,” he says, handing me one. “She hasn’t stabbed you yet. Promising start.”
Lyosha appears on my other side, already on his third drink, looking genuinely cheerful in the way he only does when the evening has involved either violence or celebration and tonight qualifies as both. “The boy told me he wants to learn to fight,” he announces. “I said I’d teach him.”
“He’s four.”
Lyosha shrugs. “Start them early.”
Mike comes last. He stands beside me and we watch the room for a moment without speaking. Then he raises his glass slightly. “For what it’s worth,” he says quietly, “she’s doing well. Considering.”
I don’t answer.
Viktor appears from the crowd, silver-haired and impeccable, warmth arranged on his face. He takes my hand in both of his and squeezes with the practiced sincerity of a man who has been performing family feeling for decades. “Your father would have been proud. A wedding. A grandson.” His eyes move to Theo across the room, and something in them does a thing I file away without examining. “Family is everything, Razvan. Remember that.”
