Chapter 6
Siobhan
The Wedding
* * *
The back of St. Demetrios smells like incense and old wood and the particular brand of tension that comes from putting fifty armed people in a house of God and asking them to behave.
I stand at the entrance in ivory silk, the dress Nico chose, and I catalog the room the way Cormac taught me: exits first, threats second, allies third.
Two doors — the main entrance behind me and a side door near the altar that leads to the sacristy.
Security in dark suits lining the walls, earpieces catching candlelight every time someone shifts.
Greek side, left. Irish side, right. The Romanos scattered through both like hedged bets.
The candles are real but the men guarding them are carrying Glocks under their suit jackets, and there's something deeply absurd about getting married in a building where the flower arrangements were checked for explosives this morning.
I should be terrified. I am terrified. But terror and I are old friends, and we've reached an understanding: it gets to live in my stomach, and I get to ignore it.
Cormac sits in the front row, green eyes locked on the altar like he's calculating the distance between his fist and the groom.
He wore Da's tie — I recognize the pattern, navy with thin gold stripes, and the sight of it punches me in a place I thought I'd armored.
He wore it for me. Cormac, who hasn't mentioned our father in three months, put on his tie to walk into a Greek church and watch his sister marry a man he doesn't trust. That's love, in the O'Brien language.
Wordless. Stubborn. Dressed in someone else's clothes.
Declan beside him, hand resting on his thigh, which is casual if you don't know what lives under his jacket, terrifying if you do.
Finn is calm, legs crossed, looking like he's at a business meeting rather than a wedding.
Ronan has a hymnal open on his lap and he's drawing in the margins because that's what Ronan does when he can't leave a room he doesn't want to be in.
My father is not here.
I notice the way I notice weather — a fact of the landscape, expected and impersonal.
Padraig O'Brien approved this marriage from a prison payphone and moved on to his next piece of business before I'd left the room.
He didn't call this morning. He won't call tonight.
I am a transaction that has been completed, and completed transactions don't require follow-up.
There's no empty chair in the front row with his name on it.
No phone propped on a pew, no speakerphone crackling with his voice the way it did at Elysium.
He was present for the deal. He's absent for the ceremony.
That tells me everything I need to know about the difference between a father and a businessman, and which one Padraig O'Brien chose to be.
I should feel something about that. I don't. Or maybe I do, but it's buried so deep and so old that it doesn't register as pain anymore. It registers as architecture — load bearing, structural. The absence of my father is a wall I built my spine against. I'm standing straighter because of it.
No one is walking me down this aisle. No one is giving me away, because I'm not anyone's to give.
If I'm marrying a stranger, I'll walk myself to him.
The music shifts to something classical, Greek, a string arrangement I don't recognize. Every head turns.
I walk.
The aisle at St. Demetrios is not long, somewhere around thirty feet, maybe less. It feels infinite. I keep my eyes forward, my shoulders back, and my pace steady. I don't look at the families or the security or the candles. I look at Nico.
He stands at the altar in a dark suit that fits him the way weapons fit soldiers — precisely, inevitably.
Dark hair with silver threading the temples, more visible in the candlelight than it was at Elysium.
His jaw is set. His hands are at his sides.
The scar on his left hand is thin, pale, and runs from his index finger to his wrist, catching the light.
I've never noticed it before. It looks old.
It looks like it has a story, and the story isn't kind.
And his eyes. Gold in this light, warm in a way that doesn't match anything else about him. He watches me approach with his full attention — the same focused, consuming attention he gave me in his office, except there's something different now. Something cracked.
I'm ten feet away when I see it. His chest rises — a breath that's deeper than the one before it, a fraction of a second where the mask slips and what's underneath isn't the cold strategist or the calculated king.
It's a man watching a woman walk toward him in a white dress, and the look on his face is not control.
It's awe.
It lasts one heartbeat. Then the mask returns.
But I saw it, and across the aisle, Lex saw it too — I catch the flicker of something crossing the enforcer's face.
Not surprise. Recognition. Like he's seeing his brother do something for the first time and he's not sure whether to be relieved or afraid.
I reach the altar. Nico extends his hand. I take it. His palm is warm and dry and his fingers close around mine with a steadiness that feels like a promise.
"Siobhan." My name in his mouth. Low. Private. Like we're the only two people in the church.
"Nico."
The priest begins.
I don't understand most of it — the ceremony is in Greek, the words flowing over and around me in rhythms I can't parse.
But I understand the weight. The priest places the stefana — wedding crowns connected by a white ribbon — on our heads.
They're heavier than they look, cold metal against my hair, and when the ribbon catches between us I feel the pull of it. Bound. Tethered.
We circle the altar three times. Nico's hand doesn't leave mine.
His grip is steady, guiding without pulling, and I follow because the circling is disorienting and beautiful and I don't know the steps but he does, and for once in my life I let someone lead without resenting it.
We drink from the common cup — wine, sweet and sharp — and his lips touch the same spot mine did, and the intimacy of that small thing hits me harder than it should.
The ceremony is ancient. Binding. Real in a way the legal paperwork wasn't. I may not understand the words, but I understand what's happening in this room: two families, two worlds, two people being fused together by ritual and necessity and something neither of us has named yet.
Throughout it all, Nico's hand stays in mine.
His thumb traces a slow circle on my wrist — unconscious, I think, a gesture he's not aware of making.
But I feel every revolution. My pulse is right there, under his thumb, and he must be able to feel how fast it's beating, and if he can then he knows this isn't performance for me either.
The crowns are removed. The priest speaks a final blessing. And then it's over — the formal part, the sacred part. We turn to face each other.
This is the moment. Not the priest's words or the crowns or the circling. This.
Nico cups my face. Both hands. His palms are warm against my cheeks, his fingers threading into my hair. He studies me, giving me time. Giving me the option to pull back, the same way he gave me the option in his office. The same pattern: he offers, I choose.
I don't pull back.
He kisses me.
Soft. Brief. Almost gentle. His mouth on mine is warm and careful and nothing like what I expected. I expected conquest — the hard press of a man claiming what's his in front of an audience. I expected performance.
What I get is a question, though I can’t make it out.
I only know I'm here.
The gentleness undoes me more than force ever could.
My brothers are hard men. My father is a hard man.
Every man I've ever known communicates in pressure and volume and the weight of their presence.
Nico Konstantinos — a man who kills with precision, who runs an empire built on blood, who hasn't felt anything in fifteen years — kisses me like I'm something that might break.
I won't break. But the fact that he's even slightly worried I might, changes something between us that I can't take back.
He pulls back. His thumb brushes my cheekbone — slow, deliberate, a touch meant only for me.
"Wife."
"Husband." My voice steadier than I feel. Steadier than I have any right to feel with his hands still on my face and his breath still on my lips and fifty people watching us pretend this is real when it's starting to feel like something far more dangerous.
He drops his hands. We turn to face the church. The applause starts, polite, measured, the sound of two criminal organizations agreeing to stop killing each other.
Cormac doesn't applaud. He nods. Once. It's enough.
As the noise settles, Lex appears at Nico's shoulder.
Materializes — that's the only word for it.
One moment the space beside Nico is empty; the next, six-foot-three of silence is murmuring something I can't hear.
Nico's jaw tightens. The warmth I saw at the altar drains from his face like water from a cracked glass.
"What?" I say.
"Reznikov soldiers. Outside the church." His voice is flat. Controlled. "They didn't engage. They watched."
"Watched."
"Viktor wanted us to know he was here. On our wedding day. In front of our families." A pause. "It's a message."
"What message?"
"That he can reach us anywhere." Nico's hand finds the small of my back. "It's been handled. Lex took care of it."
I look at him — my husband, as of three minutes ago — and I see the war behind his eyes. The ceremony, the crowns, the kiss — all of it was real. And all of it happened inside a church surrounded by men who'd kill us if they could get past security.
This is my life now. Incense and gunpowder. Vows and violence. A man who kisses like a question and kills like a statement.
I should be afraid.
I take his hand. Squeeze it. "Then let's go celebrate."
Something moves across his face — surprise, then warmth, then the mask again. But the warmth was there. I saw it.