Caroline
Lukas takes care of the rest.
I don't watch. Afon keeps me turned into his chest, my face against the bloody, beaten front of him, as he walks me out of that room and onto the porch before anything else happens.
I'm glad for it. I don't want to see what Lukas does to Viktor Reznik. I only want to know that it's done.
Outside, the snow is churned to mud and Lukas's men are roaming everywhere. The bodies are being dealt with. I don't ask how. There are some things you don't ask about.
"Are you hurt?" Afon asks me, holding me out at arm's length, his swollen eyes scanning me head to foot. "Did anyone touch you? Did you get hit?"
"I'm fine. I'm fine." I grab his face in both my hands, careful of the bruise. "Look at you. Look at what they did to you."
"It's nothing."
"It is not nothing, Afon!"
He almost laughs. Then he winces because laughing hurts. "It's nothing I haven't had before."
A truck pulls up the drive then, and Cass spills out of it before it's even stopped. She runs across the mud and snow, toward where Matvei is climbing down out of another vehicle behind her, beaten but walking, and the two of them crash together in the middle of all that wreckage.
She's crying. He's holding her like he'll never let go.
Afon watches them, his hard eyes glistening.
"He's okay," I remind him. "You did it. You got him out."
"I did," Afon agrees. "That was the whole point."
Matvei looks over Cass's shoulder and finds his uncle. Then Matvei untangles himself and limps over, and he and Afon stand there looking at each other, two stubborn men who don't know how to say the thing.
"You're a goddamn idiot," Matvei finally declares.
"Runs in the family."
Matvei grabs him then in a bear hug and Afon grabs him back. They hold on. I look away, because some things aren't mine to watch.
We don't go back to Lukas's house that night.
We go to a hospital, where Lukas has people who don't ask questions.
Afon has two cracked ribs, a hairline fracture in his cheekbone, a kidney that's bruised but not bleeding, and the graze on his hip that's reopened for the third or maybe thirtieth time.
They tape him, stitch him, and order him to rest, which is a command he's never once obeyed.
I don't leave his side. They try to make me sit in a waiting room, so I snap at them that I'm his wife. It isn't true yet, but it's about to be, and nobody argues with a crazy woman in a bloody wedding dress.
In the morning, the first thing Afon asks about is Wolf. "He's good," I tell him. "I called. He ate a whole bowl of food and tried to chew off his bandage. The vet says he's a menace. Takes after his dad, I guess."
Afon closes his eyes. A long breath leaves him. "Good," he says. "Good dog."
"The best dog," I agree.
Three days later, we go back to Lukas's house.
Wolf is waiting for us in the front hall, shoulder shaved and bandaged, walking with a limp that matches Afon's, and when he sees Afon, he loses his entire mind.
He can't run yet, but he tries anyway, his back end skidding on the marble, his whole body wagging.
Afon gets down on the floor with him, ignoring all my protests that he's going to re-injure himself.
Wolf climbs into his lap, licks his face, and makes a sound I've never heard a dog make, a high, broken whine of pure relief.
"I know," Afon murmurs into his fur. "I know, boy. I know. I'm here. I'm not going anywhere."
I have to leave the room. I'm crying again. I cry a lot these days.
The Bratva Wives, as I've come to think of them, descend on me that afternoon.
Cass and Rae and Jillian, plus Matvei trailing behind Cass like a man who's decided he's never going to be more than four feet from his wife ever again. They look so much better than the last time I saw them, when we were all in half-armor in a war room.
Now, they're just people again. Tired people. People who got everyone home.
"Wolf's a hero," Jillian announces, settling onto the couch beside me. "I've decided. He's getting a medal."
"He's getting a steak," Rae says. "Lukas already ordered it. A real one. Japanese A1 Wagyu, bone-in."
"He took a bullet for Afon," I say. "He earned a hundred steaks."
"They're idiots, both of them," Cass says with all the fondness in the world. "The man and the dog. Stupid, brave idiots."
I laugh. "I keep saying that."
"Because it's true." She reaches over and touches my hand. "How's he doing?"
"He's stitched up like Frankenstein, but he'll heal.
" I look toward the window, where I can see Afon out on the snowy lawn, throwing nothing for Wolf to not chase because Wolf can't run yet and Afon can't throw yet, just the two of them standing in the cold being alive together.
"Lukas has him in the study most mornings.
Wrapping things up. Whatever there is to wrap up. "
"There's always something to wrap up," Cass says. "But it's the good kind now. The kind that ends."
I find Alexei Ivanov in the kitchen the day before the wedding.
I've never met him in person, only heard his name. The fixer who told Afon where Lukas was, who got us the lodge address, who somehow knows everything. He's a strong, lithe man with a sharp face and clever eyes, eating a sandwich at the counter.
"You're the bride," he says right away when I come in. "Bill Oglethorpe's girl, right?" He studies me. "You've got his chin. He never could hide what he was thinking. It was all right there on his face. Bad quality in a lawyer. Good quality in a man."
"You knew my father?"
"He did me a good turn once. A long time ago." Alexei takes a bite of his sandwich, chews, and swallows. "I won't bore you with it. But I never forgot it." He sets the sandwich down. "Satyrin's one of the last good bastards left. You know that?"
"I'm starting to."
"There aren't many of us," he continues.
"We're a dying breed. Men who'll burn it all down for the right person and never once mention it after.
Hold onto him. I'm sure you've noticed, but he's kind of an idiot sometimes.
" He slides off the stool, brushing crumbs from his coat.
"Sorry for such a quick meet-and-greet, but I've got some business of my own to get back to. "
"What kind of business?" I ask out of curiosity.
He smiles tiredly. "The kind you don't ask about." He pulls on his gloves. "Tell Satyrin I said congratulations. And tell him—" He pauses at the door. "Tell him to stay out of oil drums. He'll know what it means."
Then he's gone, melting back into wherever men like him come from, carrying his own ghosts off toward whatever's been waiting for him.
We get married the next day. At noon. The same hour Reznik gave Afon to come die.
Afon picks it on purpose. Reclaiming the time. Taking the hour that was supposed to be his ending and making it a beginning instead. Mostly, it's a big ol' fuck you to the universe.
It's a small affair. We do it at Lukas's house, in the big room with the windows looking out over the snow.
Cass and Rae and Jillian stand on my side, Matvei and Lukas and Kir on Afon's.
Wolf sits at the front, bandaged and dignified, in the place where a ring bearer would go, because Afon insisted and nobody had the heart to argue. He's even got a bowtie on his collar.
I wear the ivory dress. The same one. The bulletproof vest is gone this time, and I can breathe.
Afon waits for me at the front in a dark suit, the beard grown back enough to be his again, not the clean-cut stranger from the apartment. When I come down the aisle, he watches me the whole way with an expression I've never seen on him.
Open. Completely open.
Like every wall he ever built has finally come down and there's nothing left but the man underneath.
"Hi," I whisper when I reach him.
"Hi," he says back, rough.
"You came."
"I'm here," he agrees. "I'm not going anywhere."
We don't have a real officiant. Lukas does it, which I'm told he can, somehow, in some legal-enough way, and I've decided not to ask too many questions about anything Lukas does anymore.
The words are short. I don't remember most of them.
I remember Afon's hands holding mine, scarred, warm, and steady.
And I remember the ring.
It's not the bronze band. That one is on my right thumb, where it's been since I found it on my pillow, smoothed warm by my fingertips tracing over and over for days.
The new ring is plain gold, simple. The kind of ring a man who wants no attention would choose.
But before he puts it on me, he takes my hand and he slides the bronze band off and holds it.
"This was Yelena's vow to me," he explains in a soft murmur for my ears alone.
"I'm not leaving her behind. But I'm done living in the past." He folds the bronze ring into Lukas's hand for safekeeping.
Then he takes the new gold ring and slides it onto my finger.
"This is for now. For you. For everything that's left. "
I'm crying. I mean, duh. Who wouldn't be?
Then it's my turn. His left hand. The hand that wore the same ring for twenty years, that's been bare since the morning of the day he tried to die. There's a pale band of skin where the bronze used to be. I press my thumb over it, then slide the new gold ring home.
"Eyes open," I say. "On purpose. I choose you."
"Eyes open" he echoes. "I love you, Caroline Satyrin."
Lukas says something that means we're married. Wolf barks. Cass is sobbing. Jillian whoops. And then Afon kisses me. I'm trying to be careful with his split lip and his cracked ribs and the bruise on his cheek, but it doesn't matter. None of it matters.
We made it. We're here. We're both here.
That night, we have a room to ourselves. A real bed. A locked door. Wolf has been banished to the hall with a steak and his wounded dignity, but he'll have to get over it. My husband and I have a marriage to consummate.
But for a long time, we just lie there. He's still healing and so am I, in the ways you can't see. There's no rush. There's nowhere we have to be and nobody coming and nothing hunting us.
For the first time since I walked out of those trees, there is only this. Only us.
"I can't believe you came up that mountain," he says into the dark. His hand moves slow over my back. "I can't believe any of it."
"I told you I'm bad at boundaries."
He laughs and winces. "You're going to be the death of me."
"Not after all this. I went to too much trouble."
He turns onto his side and looks at me in the dim, flickering firelight. He's so beautiful to me. His bruised face. His damp eyes. "I'm sorry I left you that night, you know. It was the hardest thing I've ever done."
"You can be sorry," I graciously allow. "But you came back, so I'll forgive you. But you have to promise: No more leaving. No more deciding things for me in the dark. That's the deal."
"That's the deal," he agrees.
He kisses me then, more open than ever. There's no longer any story standing between us, no secret left to break my heart, no ghost in the corner of the room. He told me everything and I'm still here.
We both know it now, finally, in our bones: Some vows last forever.
He undresses me slow, taking his time with every article of clothing. He kisses every part of me he uncovers, my shoulder, the soft inside of my elbow, the new gold ring on my finger.
"I love you," he says. "I can't believe how easy it is to say. I should have said it the moment I saw you."
"Say it now," I whisper. "Say it as many times as you want. To make up for all the missed chances."
So he does. He says it into my throat, my collarbone, the swell of my breast. He says it with his hands and his ruined, gentle mouth.
We're slow because we have to be, because we're both held together with tape and stitches, but it doesn't matter, because slow is what I want. Slow is what we never got to have.
Every other time it was stolen, snatched out of the path of bullets and blizzards, hurried because we didn't know how much time we had.
Now, we have all the time in the world.
"Look at me," he says, when he finally moves over me, when there's nothing between us at all. "I want to see your face when I make love to my wife."
I look at him. The bruise and the split lip and the silver in his beard and the eyes that aren't concrete anymore, that haven't been concrete in a long time, that are open and bright and full of everything he spent twenty years refusing to feel.
"I'm yours," I tell him. "Whatever you need."
"I need you," he says. "Just you. That's all. That's everything."
And then there are no more words. Just the two of us moving together, careful and certain, the gold rings catching the dim light, the both of us crying a little and not ashamed of it.
When the magic finally takes me, I moan his name.
He buries his face in my neck and holds me like he's holding on through a storm.
I feel him let go of every last thing he was carrying.
When it's all over, we're intertwined in a way that teams of wild horses couldn't even begin to separate. I press my lips to his chest, over the scar, over the swallow with the key in its beak that brought me up the whole mountain.
"Stupid, brave idiots," I murmur. "Both of us."
"All three of us," he corrects. Down the hall, Wolf is snoring loud enough to hear through the door. "All three of us."
He laughs, and so do I, and that giggle in the dark is the most perfect thing I've ever been a part of. I get to love this wild mountain man, this protector, this lost soul who swore he'd used up his one good year and believed in his heart of hearts that no one gets happily ever after twice.
But he loves me now. And he finally, finally believes we'll make it.