EPILOGUE — AURORA
Six months later
Chloe is crying before I've even put the dress on.
"I'm not crying," she says, crying.
"You're absolutely crying," Tiana says, handing her a tissue with the precision of someone who packed extras specifically for this eventuality. Which she did. I watched her count them into her clutch this morning.
I look at myself in the mirror and try to remember how to breathe.
The dress is simple, which was the argument that won after three months of Chloe sending me links to things with trains longer than most airport runways.
Ivory silk, clean lines, nothing that will make it difficult to move, eat, or exist as a human being.
My hair is half up, dark curls escaping everywhere, and Margareta cried when she saw it and then pretended she had something in both eyes simultaneously, which was impressive.
"You look insane," Chloe says, blowing her nose. "Like, actually insane."
"Thank you."
"I mean it as a compliment."
"I know you do."
Tiana straightens my shoulder gently. It’s been six months, and the scar has faded to something I barely think about anymore. She meets my eyes in the mirror and doesn't say anything. She doesn't need to. We've been friends long enough that some things live entirely in the look.
You good?
I'm good.
A knock at the door draws our attention back, and my father’s voice comes through.
"Aurora?"
Chloe and Tiana slip past my father as he comes in.
Papa closes the door.
He looks at me for a long moment. His jaw does its usual thing when he's feeling something he hasn't named yet, tightening slightly, with his mouth going straight.
Then he exhales through his nose, the tension eases, and he looks just like my father—exactly like the man who taught me to ride a bike and let me win at cards for years before I figured it out.
"Your mother would have—" He stops. Clears his throat. "She would have cried more than Chloe."
A laugh comes out of me that is dangerously close to a sob. "That's not possible."
"You didn't know your mother at weddings."
He offers his arm, and I take it, and we stand there for a moment in the quiet of the room before everything begins.
"Papa."
"Don't," he says. "If you say something sentimental, I will embarrass myself, and I refuse to embarrass myself before I've even walked through the door."
I press my lips together. "I was going to ask if you had the rings."
He pats his breast pocket. "Obviously."
"Obviously," I agree.
He covers my hand on his arm with his, just briefly, just for a second, and squeezes.
We walk through the door.
The garden is full of people who should probably not all be in the same place at once, legally speaking, but today that seems beside the point.
Luca's men are on the left. Axel's are on the right.
Viktor is in the front row, looking extremely uncomfortable in a suit that fits him perfectly, which seems to be the cause of his discomfort.
Sergei is next to him, his gold tooth catching the afternoon light every time he smiles, which happens often.
Alexei is in the third row, already emotional, already losing the fight with it in the way only Alexei can, visibly trying to channel Sergei's stoicism and failing completely.
Chloe and Tiana are at the altar, bouquets in hand, Chloe's mascara already a lost cause.
My father's grip on my arm tightens slightly as the music begins and the guests rise, I look down the aisle and find Axel.
He's watching me.
He has been since the doors opened, probably before, and the look on his face is one I have never seen on it before. Not Something entirely new, unguarded, and enormous, and it is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen on a human face.
That look is mine, I think, walking toward it. That is completely mine.
My father places my hand in Axel's, and for a moment, the three of us exist in a small triangle of complicated history and hard-won peace. Axel looks at my father. My father looks at Axel. Something passes between them, wordless and sufficient.
My father steps back.
Axel looks at me.
"Hi," he says quietly, meant only for me.
"Hi," I say back.
He squeezes my hand once, then we face forward, the ceremony begins, and I spend most of it trying not to cry, failing moderately, and not minding at all.
Later, when the dancing has been going for two hours, and Chloe has somehow convinced Sergei onto the floor, which is something I will be processing for years, Axel finds me at the edge of the garden.
He comes up behind me, arms around my waist, chin at my temple. My stomach is genuinely enormous now, round and insistent, and his hands settle over it automatically, the way they always do.
The baby kicks.
Axel makes the small satisfied sound he always makes when that happens, like he's won something.
"What are you doing out here?" he murmurs.
I pull the folded paper from the small hidden pocket Tiana insisted the seamstress add, because Tiana knows me better than I know myself. I unfold it.
The bucket list. Soft at the creases now, the ink faded in places. I read through it in the evening light.
Willingly lose virginity. Done, to put it mildly.
See the Northern Lights. Done, on a hillside with private security and a thermos and a man who remembered I wanted it.
Swim naked in the ocean. Done, in a cove at midnight.
I look at the ones that aren't crossed off. Japan. Skydiving. The tattoo.
Axel reads over my shoulder. "We're going to Japan," he says. "After she's born."
"You don't know it's a she."
"I know."
"Its a boy."
He ignores this completely. "I'll take you skydiving if you stop arguing with me about the baby's gender."
"That's not a compromise, that's a threat."
"Same thing in my world."
I laugh, and pull the pen from the same pocket, and at the bottom of the list, below everything else, I write one final item.
Build a life worth living.
Axel reads it. His arms tighten around me.
I fold the paper one last time, slowly, deliberately, and tuck it into the pocket.
I'm not going to need it anymore because my life is completely fulfilled.
The End.