“After that,” I said, voice rough, “we decide what kind of men we become without him.”
Archie looked away, swallowing hard.
Outside, the Russian sky pressed grey and heavy against the windows.Inside, the office remained exactly as it had been.But something had shifted.
The room no longer belonged to Viktor.Nor to the blood he had spilled and expected us to drown in.
Archie stood beside me now, wounded and furious and alive.And I understood then that survival was not the same as victory.Sometimes survival was uglier.Sometimes it came limping, resentful, scarred beyond recognition.And sometimes it stood in a dead man’s office with your brother’s grief in its hands and no idea how to give back the years it had stolen.But it was still something.
It was breath.It was blood still moving.It was a hand at the back of a neck.A fist in a coat.A brother returned from the grave, and another who had every right not to forgive him yet.
For now, that had to be enough.
Because four years ago, Viktor Popovich had stood in this office and believed he had ended us.But he had made ghosts of the wrong men.And ghosts, when they finally came home, did not knock gently.
44
Epilogue - Tone
Marigold hated shoes.
This was the problem.
It wasn’t the weather.Nor the catering.It wasn’t the fact that half the men attending my wedding had collectively committed enough crimes to destabilize several governments.
No.
The problem was that my daughter had decided shoes were oppression.
“I don’t want them,” Marigold declared, sitting cross-legged in the middle of my dressing room floor, tiny arms folded over her chest, glaring at the white satin flower-girl shoes like they’d personally offended her.
“You need to wear them,” I told her.
“No.”
“Yes.”
“No.”
She had Archie’s stare.Which was unfortunate.
At two years, Marigold Popovich already possessed the unwavering conviction of a dictator and the negotiation tactics of an organized criminal.She also had my hair.
God help us all.
I crouched in front of her, wedding dress pooled around my feet.
The dress itself was simple.Not because I lacked options.But because this wedding wasn’t even my idea.I hated spectacle.
Today I was committing.It had taken him forever, but Archie had finally convinced me to commit to him and our new family.This, as he pointed out, was the only thing remaining to legally seal what Archie and I had built long before rings.
Long before the vows we would take today.
Wife.
Husband.
Mother.
