Page 35 of My Wedding Night Massacre

Without preamble, he pushes in.

I make a sound that has nothing dignified about it, my head dropping back, the thick drag of him stretching me open, filling me inch by inch until he’s buried completely. I clench around him hard and hear him curse low against my temple.

“Don’t move,” I say, my hands gripping his shoulders. “Just. One second.”

He stays buried inside me, his breath ragged, his forehead against mine. I can feel his heartbeat through his cock, feel him fighting to hold still while my pussy flutters around him. One second. Two. Then I roll my hips, giving him the green light. He groans and pulls back, then drives in hard, and that’s it, that’s the end of anything slow.

He fucks me fast and urgently, no buildup, no preamble, just his cock driving into me again and again while I hold onto his shoulders and take it. The arm of the couch digs into the backs of my thighs, but I don’t care. The dress is bunched between us, fabric everywhere, but I don’t care about that either. I care about the drag of him, the depth, the wet sounds of my cunt taking him that fill the quiet room, the low sounds he’s making against my ear that I’ve been starving for without letting myself name it.

“You feel exactly the same,” he says, his voice completely wrecked. His hands grip my hips harder, pulling me down onto his cock with every thrust.

“Don’t talk,” I say, and then immediately contradict myself. “Don’t stop.”

He doesn’t stop. He drives into me deeper, angling his hips, and hits that spot inside me that makes my vision go white at the edges. I gasp and he does it again, and again, relentless, his cock splitting me open on every stroke. I dig my nails into his back through his shirt, the fabric bunching in my grip. He’s still mostly dressed, shirt on, pants shoved down just enough, and there’s something about that, about the fact that we couldn’t even wait, that undoes me completely.

“Slava.” His name in my mouth sounds different than it has for three years. Not grief, not a loop, not the sound of something lost. Just him, just his name, just the fact of him buried inside me and real and here.

He fucks me harder at the sound of it, his hips snapping forward, the arm of the couch shuddering with the force of it. I stop trying to be quiet. The sounds coming out of me belong to a person I forgot I was, someone who exists only in rooms with him, someone who got buried under three years of performing and surviving and holding things together. She comes out now, loud and unguarded, her nails in his back and her pussy clenching greedily around his cock.

I come with my face pressed to his shoulder, clenching so hard around him that he curses again, his rhythm stuttering. The orgasm tears through me from the inside out, my whole body shaking, my cunt milking his cock in waves. He fucks me through every second of it, relentless, and then drives in one last time and stays, shuddering, emptying inside me in long hot pulses that I feel everywhere. His hands grip my hips and hold me down on him, grinding the last of it deep, his breath ragged against my neck.

We stay like that for a long moment.

The dress is a disaster around us, ivory fabric twisted and creased beyond saving. His pants are halfway down his thighs. Neither of us has fully undressed, and neither of us moved to. We just needed, and now we’ve had, and the room is very quiet except for our breathing slowing down together in the afternoon light.

His cock is still inside me when I lift my head and look at his face.

He looks back at me. Undone, present, and real.

I feel his cum warm inside me and think about three years, and all the mornings I woke up, reached for him, and found nothing. My eyes sting all over again.

He pushes the hair off my face with one hand, his palm against my cheek, and I turn my face into it, fully giving myself to him.

23

Slava

“You were gone before the lights went out.”

I say it the way I’ve been saying it in my head for three years, flat and without apology, because it’s a fact and I’ve never been able to make it into anything else. She’s sitting on the edge of the couch with the ruined dress still on her, the fabric twisted at her hips. She looks at me across the room with her honey-brown eyes, steady, and her jaw set.

“I know,” she says.

“That’s not an admission.”

“It’s not a denial either. Keep going.”

I pull the jacket off the chair and take the photograph out of the pocket before I set it face down on the table. Not yet. I turn back to her and lay it out the way I’ve been laying it out in my head since I woke up in a Palermo hospital with two bullets in me and Misha’s face above mine.

“The security rotation changed that afternoon. Men I didn’t recognize near the east entrance. Catering staff who turned over without briefing. My father flagged it, and I dismissed him.” I’ve never said that part out loud before. The words sit wrong in my mouth. “The attack was coordinated. The power cut was timed. The men were positioned before the lights went out, which means the order was given hours before the ceremony. Your father’s men were already in place.” I look at her directly. “You weren’t where you were supposed to be when it started. You were already gone.”

She holds my gaze without flinching. “Are you done?”

“No. My father’s second is dead. Three of our best men are dead. And who knows how many more were killed away from the public eye. Everything my family built for thirty years was absorbed into your father’s operation in six months. And the one person who had access to both sides of that table was already out of the reception hall when the shooting started.”

The grief drains out of her face. What replaces it is harder and colder, the version of her I’ve been watching assemble across three years of surveillance photographs without understanding what I was seeing.

She lets me finish. Then she straightens her spine and looks at me, her eyes narrowing.