Page 28 of My Wedding Night Massacre

I told myself I shaved because today requires a recognizable face. That’s true. It’s also the only true thing in a list of reasons I’ve been building since four this morning, sitting at the operations table while Misha slept and the city got light outside the villa windows.

The reasons are all correct. They hold up. Bogdan cannot be allowed to consolidate power through a Gachev alliance. A second marriage seals the Yeleshev assets under a new name, gives Bogdan legitimate political cover through Gachev’s connections, and closes off some of the legal avenues I need to move on what he took. The wedding has to be stopped. Those are the facts. They are solid, they are strategic, and they are not why I’m standing in front of a mirror at six in the morning, shaving off a three-year beard before dressing in a suit I’ve kept folded at the bottom of a bag since Palermo.

I know why I’m doing this.

I just don’t say it out loud.

Misha is at the bottom of the stairs when I come down. He takes in the shaved face, the suit, and the absence of the glasses. He doesn’t say anything. Instead, he simply hands me a coffee and turns back to the table, checking his phone.

“Car in twenty,” he says.

“Ten,” I say.

He puts the phone in his pocket.

The drive to the Krasnov church takes forty minutes through Friday morning traffic. Misha drives. I sit in the passenger seat and go over the intelligence picture Misha finished building yesterday evening as if he knew what I was going to do. Or maybe he simply planned ahead for every possible scenario, which is another reason why he’s so invaluable to me. I study the layout of the church, exits, sightlines, and the public nature of the venue. Two hundred guests, outside press, a politician in the front row whose name I know, and whose interest in keeping things clean is stronger than his interest in any one family’s business. No place for anything messy. This doesn’t involve weapons or violence. That’s not the move today, and it’s not the point.

The point is the room full of witnesses.

The point is saying something that cannot be unsaid in front of everyone Bogdan wants watching.

It’s the perfect opportunity to reveal myself without risking my life while subtly threatening them.

“You understand what happens after this,” Misha says. It’s not a question. He’s done questioning. He got through that last night, his final case made carefully, heard completely, and then set aside.

“Yes,” I say.

“Bogdan knows we’re alive. Everything moves faster.”

“I know.”

“The Napoli crew isn’t in position yet.”

“I know that too.”

He drives. I look out the window at the city doing its Friday morning thing, indifferent, relentless. Three years I’ve been gone from it, and it hasn’t registered my absence at all, which would bother me on another day. Today it’s useful. The city doesn’t know I’m back, which means Bogdan hasn’t had time to find out either.

That’s about to change.

The church comes into view, and I feel something settle in my chest. Not calm exactly. More like the way a decision stops being a decision once it’s been made, the way everything that was unresolved simply becomes a line moving forward. The church is everything the intelligence said it would be. Old stone, high entrance, a crowd outside the doors in their best clothes. Cameras at the edges. A car belonging to a city council member parked on the corner. Public. Witnessed. Bogdan’s monument to what he built, full of everyone he wanted watching.

Good. I want them watching too.

Misha pulls into a side street. I’m already reaching for the door.

“Slava,” he says.

I stop.

He doesn’t say anything else for a moment. I look at him, and he looks back, twelve years of knowing each other running underneath the silence. He nods once. I get out of the car.

The crowd outside the entrance doesn’t notice me immediately. I’m in a suit, I’m composed, and no one in this city has seen my face in three years. I move through them without stopping, up the steps, and push the door open.

The ceremony is already running. The priest’s voice carries through the stone interior, filling the high ceiling, rolling toward me as I step onto the aisle. The doors behind me take their time closing. The sound of them, heavy old wood on old hinges, carries into the silence like a struck bell.

I don’t hurry. There’s no reason to.

I see Bogdan first.