Page 53 of My Wedding Night Massacre

The first thing that moves through me is relief, fast and involuntary. She went and came back. She’s here. She’s whole. The second thing is fury. It arrives right behind the first and burns considerably hotter.

“You went to your father’s safe house,” I say, “alone, while I was at a meeting you knew I was at, without telling me, without backup, without—”

“I left a note on the counter.”

“There’s no note on this counter.”

She blinks. Stands, crosses to the far end of the counter, and opens the bin. The note is on the top. She takes it out and sets it in front of me without a word.

I look at it. Then back at her.

“You went to your father’s safe house,” I say. “Alone. Without telling me, without backup, without anyone knowing where you were going or how long you’d be gone.”

“You know now,” she says.

“I know now because you’re sitting here.” My voice is coming out harder than I want it to, and I can’t pull it back. “If it had gone wrong, I would have come back to an empty kitchen and a note on the fucking kitchen counter. Do you understand that? I wouldn’t have known which house, which car, which men. I’d have had nothing.”

“But it didn’t go wrong.”

“That’s not the point.” I put my hands flat on the table. “The point is that you made that call without me, and if it had gone sideways, I’d have been standing here with no way to find you. That’s the whole fucking point.”

She looks at me from across the table, not flinching, not softening, her face, built over three years of having nothing to push back against, directed at me with complete composure.

“I know,” she says.

“Then why did you do it?”

“Because it’s been ten days since I held my son. Ten days. I called my father and begged him to let me see my son. He agreed. You weren’t here. The decision was in front of me, and I made it.”

“You should have waited.”

“I needed to see Denis. I needed my father to think he is still holding all the cards.”

“That’s not good enough.” The words come out too hard. I know it, but still can’t stop. “You went around everything we’ve been building. The crew, the address, the plan, all of it, and you walked into his territory alone because you couldn’t wait two more hours—”

“Don’t.” Her chin comes up. “Don’t talk to me like I broke your protocol. I’m not one of your men. I’m Denis’s mother, and I made a decision about my son.”

“Your decision could have gotten you killed.”

“My decision got me into that house.” She steps up to the table, both hands on the edge of it, her honey-brown eyes not dropping from mine. “I saw the layout. The rotation, the fixed guard, the rooms. I walked through it. I know it now in a way no map can give you.” She takes a deep breath, then adds. “You’re welcome.”

The silence after that lands hard.

Misha has taken himself to the far end of the room and is studying the wall, doing his best not to be present.

My hands are flat on the table, jaw tight, the fury still running hot underneath the fact that she’s right, underneath the accuracy of it, underneath the confirmation I’ve been waiting for since I sat across from Gachev this morning. The anger has nowhere clean to go. She isn’t wrong, and I know it, but I’m still furious, which is the worst version of furious there is.

“You should have told me,” I say. It comes out lower than the rest.

“You weren’t here,” she says. “And I won’t apologize for seeing my son.”

The quiet that follows is longer. I sit down because I need to stop standing over the table.

“Tell me what you saw,” I say.

She tells me. All of it, the safe house, Nadia, Denis, and her father’s comments.

She pulls something from her jacket pocket and sets it on the table between us. A piece of paper, folded once. A crayon drawing, a dark-haired figure with a wide smile. Mama was written at the bottom in the careful letters of a child who’s been practicing.