Page 34 of My Wedding Night Massacre

“I came through your window three nights ago,” he says.

I stare at him. “That was you.”

“Yes.”

“I thought I was.” I press my fingers against my mouth for a second. “I thought I was losing my mind. I’ve been having hallucinations of you for three years, and I thought it was one more, I thought the pills and the stress and the wedding had finally.” I stop. “That was you.”

“That was me,” he says.

“And you didn’t say anything. You were in my bedroom, and I was talking to you, and you didn’t say I’m real, Pavlina, I’m actually here.”

“You told me not to talk.”

“Don’t,” I say. “Don’t you dare.”

“I’m not making an excuse. I’m telling you what happened.”

“What happened,” I repeat. “What happened is that you were alive and you didn’t tell me. What happened is that I buried you, Slava. Not literally, there was no body to bury, but I buried you in every way that counted. I spent three years.” My voice cracks, and I hate it, hate the crack in it. I’ve spent three years building a voice that doesn’t crack, and he’s been back in my life for an hour, and it’s already gone. “I spent three years putting myself back together around the hole you left and you were God knows where.”

“I was shot,” he says. “Twice. I nearly died in a stairwell.”

“I know what nearly dying looks like,” I say. “I watched you through a window.”

His jaw releases. He was holding himself very still, and that stillness breaks, grief moving through his eyes before he gets it back under control.

“My father put me in the car,” I say, because he needs to understand this, because if he spent three years thinking I knew, he needs to understand what actually happened. “His men held my arms, and I screamed your name until my voice broke, and he drove me away from a building where you were bleeding on concrete. That’s what I knew. That’s what I saw. I didn’t know about any plan, I didn’t know about the attack, I didn’t know anything except that my father had just killed my husband and I was going to have to keep living anyway.”

Slava is very quiet.

“I tried not to,” I say. It comes out smaller than I mean it to. “Keep living. For a while.”

The silence that follows is a different quality from all the silences before it. He crosses the room, and I don’t move away. He stops close enough that I could reach out and touch him, and for a moment, we just look at each other, the full weight of three years sitting between us, taking up space.

“I know,” he says. His voice has changed. “I know about the bathroom.”

I look at him. “Misha.”

“He did the research. He found everything. Nadia told him. You know she always had a soft spot for him.”

Something about that, about him knowing, about him having found that information and carried it, makes the last of the distance in my chest collapse. I reach for him before I’ve finished deciding to, and he’s already there, his arms coming around me, both of us holding on in the middle of a stranger’s living room with maps on the table and my wedding dress in a heap by the door.

I cry. Properly, completely, the ugly kind with no dignity, the kind that’s been sealed under three years of surviving and has finally found its exit. It comes up from somewhere without a name, all of it at once, the grief and the fury and the relief, all three tangled so thoroughly I can’t tell where one ends and another starts. He holds me through all of it, his arms tight, his face against my hair, and doesn’t say anything that would make it smaller.

When it starts to quiet, I pull back enough to look at him. My face is a ruin, and I don’t care. He looks at me like he doesn’t care either, which is the only thing that could have made any of this bearable.

His thumb moves across my cheekbone, clearing what’s left of the tears, and I let him look at my ruined face because there’s no version of me left to perform for him. He’s seen the rest of it tonight. He can see this, too.

I kiss him first.

Not slow, not careful, nothing like the measured thing I’d imagined in the dark months when I let myself imagine anything at all. I grab his face with both hands and kiss him like I’m trying to close a three-year gap in thirty seconds, my fingers curling into his jaw, my mouth hard against his. He makes a sound low in his chest and kisses me back just as hard, his hands finding my waist through the ivory fabric, gripping the fullness of me, pulling me flush against him.

His cock is already hard against my hip. I feel it, and something short-circuits entirely in my brain, three years of absence collapsing into a single urgent point. I reach between us and get my hand on him through his pants, feeling the thick length of him, and he exhales sharply against my mouth.

“Fuck me, Slava,” I say against his lips. It’s far from a request.

He gets a hand under the skirt of the dress, shoves the fabric up around my waist, bunching the ivory into his fist. No finesse, no patience, just the dress rolled up, his hand finding my hip and pulling my underwear aside. I reach for his belt at the same time, get it open, and get his pants down just enough to free his cock. I wrap my hand around him, thick and hard and already leaking at the tip, and stroke once, feeling him twitch in my grip.

He walks me backward until my thighs hit the arm of the couch, and then he lifts me, hands under my ass. I wrap my legs around his hips. The dress fans out around us, still on, still ivory, completely wrong for this, and neither of us cares. He gets the head of his cock against my entrance. I’m wet, so wet it’s embarrassing, soaking through my underwear since the church, if I’m honest with myself, since the moment I understood he was real.