Alexei was at the back.
He stood apart, hands clasped behind him, face giving nothing. He had flown in that morning from a meeting Anton had not asked about and would not ask about. There were things Alexei was assembling, had been assembling with the patience of a man who had made fifteen years of waiting into precision, and they were nearly done. He had met Anton's eyes when he arrived and said nothing, and the nothing had held everything: acknowledgment, approval, the version of warmth that Alexei expressed through the absence of coldness, which Anton had spent years learning to receive as the gift it was.
The doors at the back of the chapel opened.
Anton turned.
She was wearing ivory. Simple, close-fitted, nothing elaborate, because Daisy Fletcher had never in her life performed for a room and was not about to begin at her own wedding. Her hair was down. Her parents' faces when she passed their pew did the thing parents' faces do at weddings, pride and grief and time, all at once, and she reached out and touched her mother's hand as she passed without breaking stride.
She came toward him. Her eyes found his halfway down the aisle and held.
He had been wrong about her in every possible way. Wrong about her motives, her innocence, the smile in the aftermath that he had filed as performance and which had been, simply, love. The wrongness had a shape now, a dimension he could measure, and what he understood standing at this altar was that he would spend the rest of his life making sure she never had to fight that hard to be believed again.
She reached him. She tipped her face up. Her eyes were bright and her chin was sure and she was the bravest person he had ever known.
"Hi," she said.
The smile came before he could calibrate it. Full. Unguarded. "Hi."
The judge cleared his throat.
The ceremony was brief and exact, the way Daisy had wanted it. No performance, no excess. Just the words and the rings and the moment when the judge said you may kiss your bride and Anton cupped her face in both hands, the same gesture as the worstnight of his life, except this time his hands weren’t shaking for the wrong reasons.
He kissed her.
She made a small sound against his mouth, startled and pleased, and when he pulled back her eyes took a moment to open, and when they did they were warm and dazed and entirely, completely her.
He leaned close. His voice was very solemn.
"Tonight," he said, "we make sure Aria has a younger sibling by next year."
The chapel was small. The acoustics were excellent.
Andrei produced a sound that was not a cough. Artem's mouth pulled sideways. Blythe pressed her face into Jeff's shoulder. Daisy's mother laughed outright. Her father found the ceiling suddenly fascinating. At the back, Alexei's expression moved by a fraction, not a smile but the nearest thing to one that Alexei Almazov produced in public.
Daisy's face went the colour of the roses on the altar.
"Anton—"
"Transparent about my intentions." He offered her his arm. "Shall we?"
She took his arm. Still blushing. He was still smiling. At the end of the third pew, Aria Blythe Almazov slept through all of it.
THE RECEPTION WAS INthe garden.
Long tables beneath the cypress trees, white linen, the Mediterranean a thin blue line beyond the estate wall. The afternoon had gone golden and slow, light that made everything feel like a memory while it was still happening, and the sound of voices and laughter moved through the warm air between the trees.
Alexei stepped away from the tables.
He had always done this. Stood at the perimeter of every occasion the rest of them moved through, his father's dinners, his brothers' celebrations, the hushed family moments and the loud ones, not from coldness but from something older. The habit of a man who had learned, early and at cost, that the things you stood closest to were the things you lost.
He moved to the far end of the garden where the cypress trees thinned and the estate wall gave a view of the water, and he took out his phone.
Two messages. Both unread.
The first was from his head of security.
He read it once, then twice. He stood very still with the sounds of the reception behind him and the sea beyond the wall and he read it a third time, because some information required that.
