Page 46 of My Wedding Night Massacre

After two hours of restlessness, I finally give up on sleep and get out of bed.

The corridor is quiet, the floor cold under my feet, the villa holding its breath around me. Light spills from the kitchen. I already know what I’ll find there, Slava bent over the table, maps and reports, his brain still running while the rest of the world sleeps. I didn’t expect otherwise. I wouldn’t expect otherwise.

He looks up when I come through the doorway. He takes me in, bare feet on cold floor, wearing one of his shirts, the dark circles under my eyes that I’m not trying to hide from him, and he doesn’t ask questions.

I sit on the edge of the table beside his maps, close enough that my knee almost touches his arm. He leans back in the chair and waits, which is what he does when he’s decided I’ll get there in my own time.

“I’m scared,” I say.

He doesn’t fill the silence with reassurance or logic. He just looks at me.

“Not of my father,” I continue. “I know what my father is. I know how he moves. I’ve been afraid of him for three years, and that fear has a shape I understand.” I look at the maps on the table, the circled properties, the contingency columns. “I’m scared of tomorrow. Of what comes after. Of the version where we get Denis out and we destroy everything my father built, and then we have to figure out what we are to each other in the middle of all that wreckage.” I pause. “I’ve been surviving so long, I don’t know what the other thing feels like. The thing that isn’t survival.”

He looks at me for a long moment. Then pushes his chair back and opens his arms.

I slide off the table and go to him, settling into his lap. His arms come around me, and my face rests against his neck. He holds me without a word, his chin resting against the top of my head, one hand flat between my shoulder blades. I breathe him in, the specific warmth of him, the realness of his chest under my hands, and I feel the loop in my head slow, not stop, but slow, the way a spinning thing gradually loses momentum when something solid holds it.

His hand moves in a slow circle on my back.

I lift my head. He’s already looking at me, his grey eyes in the low light, his face open in a way I’ve only ever seen when we’re alone, the guard down, the distance gone, nothing left between us and what’s underneath. I close the distance myself, my mouth finding his, and he meets me without hesitation, his hands shifting to my hips, gripping their fullness, pulling me closer.

The fear doesn’t go away. It just gets converted into something we can act on.

I get his shirt off him, my hands moving down his chest as I push the fabric off his shoulders, feeling the muscle under my palms, the warmth of his skin. He’s broader than I remember, three years of whatever he did in Palermo and after carved into him, his shoulders wider, his chest harder, the definition of his abdomen more pronounced under my fingertips as I trace slowly downward. I spread my hands flat across his stomach, feeling each ridge of muscle contract slightly under my touch. The realness of it and the solid living warmth of him make my eyes sting.

Then I find the scars.

Two of them, one high on his left side just below the ribs, one lower, both healed into pale raised lines against his skin. I stop. I press my fingertips to the first one, feeling the slight difference in texture, the evidence of Misha saving his life. I trace its edge slowly, not saying anything, just touching. He goes very still under my hands.

I move to the second one. Smaller but deeper, the scar tissue is denser. I press my palm flat over it and look up at his face.

He’s watching me with his jaw tight, letting me do this, letting me have it.

I lean forward and press my lips to the first scar. Then the second. I feel his breath change against the top of my head, his chest expanding on a slow inhale, his hands coming up to rest at my waist without gripping, just staying.

I pull back and look at him. He looks back at me, grey eyes dark, his hands still light at my waist, waiting.

Then he gets his shirt off me.

He doesn’t rush it. He pulls it over my head and sets it aside, and then just looks at me for a moment, his eyes moving slowly, taking inventory. He’s been thinking about this and isn’t willing to abbreviate it now that he has it. I feel the familiar flicker of self-consciousness, the old reflex, the awareness of my belly and my hips and all the softness that the world I grew up in spent years telling me was too much.

His hands find my waist first. Both of them, spreading wide, his thumbs meeting at my navel, his fingers spanning out across my sides, feeling the full curve of me. He pulls me slightly closer and looks down at where his hands are on me.

“Here,” he says, his thumbs moving in slow circles at my waist, pressing in slightly, feeling the give of me. “I thought about this. In Palermo, when I was trying not to think about you, I still thought about this.”

I don’t say anything. Instead, I watch his face.

His hands move to my hips, spreading wider, gripping the fullness of them, his fingers curving around the curves that I’ve spent years being ashamed of. He squeezes once, possessively, his eyes still down on where his hands are on my body.

“These,” he says.

I feel heat move through me that has nothing to do with embarrassment.

He slides one hand up slowly, tracing the curve of my waist, the flare of my ribs, the softness of my belly, all of it mapped under his palm like he’s reminding himself of the geography of me. His other hand stays at my hip, gripping, holding me in place while he takes his time.

“You’re beautiful,” he says. “You’ve always been beautiful. I need you to understand that I’m not being generous when I say it.”

I look at him.