“Yes, brother.”
He was quiet for a moment.
“She agreed,” he said. Not a question.
“She didn’t refuse.”
He looked at me sideways. “Those are not the same thing, Viktor.”
“No,” I said. “They’re not.”
There was another short silence. Outside, I heard cars arriving, which was a sign of the family beginning to arrive. Mikhail turned slightly, looked at the door, then back at the altar.
“I’ll tell you something,” he said, in a tone I recognized as the one he used when he had been holding something for a while. “When Elena came into my operation, I told myself it was containment. That proximity was a strategy. That keeping her close was the rational management of a variable.” He paused. “Elena told me later that she had known, within the first week, that I was lying to myself. She found it charming, which I did not expect.”
He said nothing further. He walked to the front row of chairs and sat, which was the end of that particular conversation.
I looked at the altar and said nothing.
I had nothing to say because he was not wrong.
*****
They came in intervals after that.
Alexei, at thirty minutes before, dressed with his characteristic precision, taking the measure of the room with those pale calculating eyes and finding it, apparently, satisfactory. He came to stand beside me for a moment and said nothing, which with Alexei meant he was thinking, and thinking with Alexei was always more pointed than speech with other men.
“Clean,” he said finally, which was his assessment of the operational structure, not the flowers.
“It will hold,” I said.
“Cruz will hear within the hour.” He adjusted his cuff. “He’ll probe. One attempt, probably, to test whether the declaration is genuine or not. After that, he’ll recalculate.”
“I know.”
“She’ll need to understand what the marriage means publicly. What she can and cannot do. Who she speaks to and in what context.” He glanced at me. “She’s not a woman who responds well to restriction.”
“No.”
“That will be interesting. Congratulations, brother.”
He moved away to find Elena, who had arrived with my two sisters and was speaking quietly near the entrance.
I watched Elena.
She was looking toward the door. Waiting. She had been told what she needed to be told: that Sofia was safe, that the marriage was protection, that the threat that had entered Sofia’s apartment two nights ago had been the precipitating factor. She had received this information with a stillness that reminded me, disconcertingly, of Sofia.
Then she had looked at me with brown eyes that were Mikhail’s in their directness and said, “If she’s unhappy, Viktor, I will make that your problem in every way available to me.”
I had told her that it was reasonable.
She had nodded, once, as if we had reached an agreement, and had gone to speak to Mikhail.
Then she arrived.
Sofia.
I heard her arrive before I saw her. Heels on the stone path, two sets—she had brought Isla, which I had agreed to, and which was correct. My sisters moved to the doorway like a tide, and I heard voices, brief and female, and then they were inside. They were speaking in the low, reassuring tones that women use when they are claiming someone into a circle, and I kept my eyes on the altar because looking over my shoulder was not something I was going to do.
