Something about the sentence tastes like ash in my mouth, but I don’t give myself the luxury of examining why. I turn back to the mirror, fixing a collar that is already perfect.
“You know, she could bolt,” Dmitri offers pleasantly, admiring his own silhouette. “Right down the aisle. Can you imagine the headlines?Bratva Pakhan Jilted at the Altar.I’d read that article. I’d probably frame it.”
“I have twenty men on her,” I say. “She’s not bolting anywhere.”
Dmitri sighs like this personally disappoints him.
Mike says nothing else. He just looks at me with that expression he has, the steady one that says he has more opinions and is choosing, for now, to keep them behind his teeth.
The ceremony is in the main hall and we’re standing at the altar, the hall is full of Bratva witnesses in dark suits, careful faces and I am about to get married.
It still doesn’t feel real.
The doors at the end of the hall open.
Theo comes first.
He’s in a miniature black suit that someone, presumably a team of very brave tailors, managed to get him into despite his vocal opinions on formal wear. He’s walking with a velvet ring pillow held out in front of him at full arm’s length, moving with the agonizing concentration of a bomb technician defusing a live warhead.
His tongue is between his teeth. He takes each step like a decision.
Then he looks up, sees me at the altar, and his entire face transforms. The grim focus vanishes, replaced by a blinding, gap-toothed radiance.
“Superman!”
He breaks formation, taking three ecstatic lunges toward me before the wedding coordinator catches him by the shoulder and steers him back onto the carpet.
Beside me, I can feel Dmitri shaking. He isn’t making a sound, but his shoulders are hitching in a way that suggests he’s about to have a respiratory event from suppressed laughter.
Don’t laugh,I command myself, keeping my features carved from granite.Do not fucking laugh.
Theo finally makes it to the front. He thrusts the pillow up at me with both hands, his chest puffed out with a level of pride I haven’t seen in men receiving medals of honor.
“I didn’t drop the ring,” he whispers, his voice carrying through the silent, vaulted hall with the clarity of a bugle. “Not even one time!”
“Good work,” I tell him. My voice comes out lower than I intended, rough and snagged on something in my throat.
His smile does something violent to my ribcage. I look down at him, this tiny person in a clip-on tie with wet tongue marks still on his lip from the effort of walking, and the three days I’ve spent deliberately avoiding him come apart all at once.
I haven’t let myself near him. That’s the truth I haven’t admitted to Mike or anyone else. Since the warehouse, since I carried him out of that rot-hole and listened to him talk about Superman at full volume for an hour in the backseat, I have kept a careful, calculated distance.
I don’t know how to do this. I don’t know how to be what he needs, and I am terrified, genuinely, bone-deep terrified in a way that no hitman or federal agent has ever made me, of doing something wrong. I am afraid of breaking something in him that I don’t have the tools to fix.
I’ve bought dozens of books. Parenting. Child development. How to talk to four year olds. How to earn trust. How to be present. They’re in a stack on my nightstand and I read them at two in the morning when I can’t sleep. I feel equally educated and completely, hopelessly unprepared.
I missed five years of his life.
The thought lands with its full weight and I let it. The pregnancy I didn’t know about. The birth I wasn’t there for. First steps, first words, first everything, all of it happened somewhere in Budapest in an apartment with a crack in the kitchen ceiling and I was here, building an empire, searching for a ghost, not knowing that the most important thing I’d ever made was already out in the world learning to walk without me.
I should have been there.
The regret of it is enormous and I swallow it whole because this is not the place and there is nothing I can do with it except make sure that every day from this one forward is different.
Theo is still smiling up at me and I look at him.I will learn. Whatever it takes, I will learn.
Then Lena appears at the doors.
She’s in white that isn’t quite white, something between ivory and silver, and her hair is up in a way that leaves the line of her neck exposed. She’s holding her own hands in front of her because she has no one to walk her down the aisle and she made it clear she didn’t want anyone.
