49. Luna
LUNA
He proposed the only way he knew how. He made me hack my way to yes.
I could have typed the one letter. That was all the little program behind me was asking for, a single y on a black field, and the man kneeling at my back would have taken it and been happy the rest of his life.
But he had not asked me in one letter. He had built me a fortress of locks and made me earn every door, because that is how the two of us have always said the enormous things, in a language nobody else on earth can read, and I was not about to answer the best question anyone had ever asked me with the laziest keystroke on the board.
The very first time Pavel and I ever spoke, we were trying to take a flag off each other.
It was a dumb, glorious hacker duel, capture-the-flag between two strangers who had no idea they were minutes from detonating each other's whole lives, and I had won, barely, and planted my flag in his system with an insulting little note pinned to it.
He had written one line back, and that line had started every single thing that came after.
More than a year later, the last flag of the whole long game sat blinking on my screen, and this one was not a string of characters.
It was the rest of my life, and the only exploit I had left to run was to stop being afraid long enough to reach out and take it.
So I opened a shell, and I answered him the way I had answered him the very first night, except that this time nothing in it was hidden and there was nothing left to win.
NYX: flag captured. yes. obviously, completely, a thousand times yes, you beautiful menace. now get up off my floor and go marry me.
He laughed behind me, low and wrecked, and then his arms came around me and the chair and all of it at once, and he pressed his face into my hair, and the most controlled man I have ever known shook, just slightly, just the once, holding the yes he had made me build with my own two hands.
"You could have typed one letter," he murmured against my temple.
"I've never once done a thing the short way," I said. "You knew exactly what you were signing up for."
We married in the spring, by which point I was round enough that Baba Luda had quietly let out three separate seams in the dress and pronounced the result a personal triumph.
We did it at the compound, in the big glass room that had once been a place I was kept and had somehow turned into the safest place I know, and between us we made it look like nobody's idea of a Bratva wedding and nobody's idea of a normal one either.
There were peonies from Nai Nai's shop and there were men in very good suits with very obvious holsters.
There was a table of my old lab friends who could not stop staring at the holsters, and there was Baba Luda's food, which converted every last one of them before the first course was cleared.
Nai Nai cried through the entire ceremony and denied it through the entire reception.
She had flown in every cousin I had left, reorganized the seating chart four separate times, and informed Pavel in front of the whole room, in her careful and terrifying English, that he was a good boy but she would be watching him closely.
Pavel, who has stared down men who thought they were gods, said, "Yes, ma'am," like someone who had finally met a force he could not out-plan.
Danny walked me in. There was never a question about who would.
Our father was six years gone and our mother is a door neither of us knocks on anymore, and the person who was going to hand me to Pavel was the brother I had spent four years believing I had buried.
He held my arm the entire walk with his eyes forward and his jaw clenched tight, and about halfway down he muttered, "If you tell a single person I'm crying, I'll wipe your dissertation off every drive on earth. "
"You'd have to get past my off switch," I whispered back, and we both laughed, quietly and a little desperately, so we would not do the other thing in front of everyone.
Bex was my maid of honor and a complete weather system unto herself.
She lost the rings twice before the ceremony and located them both times in her own hair.
Her speech began as a roast, detoured through the now-legendary ginger-tea diagnosis, and ended with her sobbing into the microphone that she had once found me alone in a stairwell and was never, ever again, going to let me be that alone.
There was not a dry eye left in a room packed with armed men who would each have sworn under oath they had not so much as blinked.
Zoya had refused, in writing, to be a bridesmaid, and had then appointed herself head of security for the event with a zeal that visibly frightened the caterers.
Somewhere in that negotiation she had also ended up in charge of the flowers, a duty she discharged like a hostile takeover, walking ahead of me down the aisle and scattering petals with the grim precision of a woman deploying countermeasures, delivering a low threat assessment of each row as she cleared it.
It was the single most romantic act she is capable of, and every person there understood that, and not one of us was brave enough to say so out loud.
Kirill, enormous and finally healed and soft as a slow landslide, stood up as Pavel's best man, took one look at us waiting at the front of that glass room, and gave up entirely on the idea of controlling his own face.
He wept through the whole ceremony, silent and unashamed, this mountain of a man, and when he handed over the ring his hands were shaking, and Pavel gripped his wrist once, hard, which is how those two say the things they will never find the words for.
And then there was Pavel. My Pavel stood waiting at the altar in a perfect suit, the ghost, the alpha, the most frightening man in any city he has ever walked into, and he could not stop looking at me, like I was a system he had spent his whole life failing to breach and had somehow, impossibly, been invited all the way inside.
He was soft and he was certain in the same breath, no wall left standing anywhere on him, and when I reached him he took both my hands and held them the way a man holds the deed to the one thing he had never let himself believe he would get to keep.
Danny gave the toast. Of course he did.
"I'm supposed to open with an embarrassing story about my sister," he said, standing with his glass, "and I've got roughly forty of them queued up.
But I'm going to do something else first, because this family carries ghosts, and a wedding is exactly when you pull out a chair and let them sit down at the table with you.
" He lifted the glass. "To our father, who didn't get to be in this room.
He taught Luna to take things apart just to see how they worked, and he never once told her to stop.
She built a machine that beat a god, Dad. You'd have been unbearable about it."
The room had gone very quiet. I found I could not look at anything but my brother.
"To the four years I lost," Danny went on, steadier than I could ever have managed.
"I'm not going to stand here and pretend they didn't happen.
But I got out, and I got her back, and I got a desk that matters, and if that was the price of all this, I'd pay it again without blinking.
" He turned then, and he looked straight at Pavel.
"And to the man marrying my sister. I spent a little while wanting to hate you, and it simply wouldn't take, because I know exactly what you carry.
You've been grieving a kid you think you stole a life from for as long as I've been grieving mine. "
Pavel did not look away from him. I saw his throat work.
"So set him down, Pavel," Danny said, gentler now, lifting the glass higher.
"This is the day for it. Nobody at this table believes you stole a single thing.
You just finally showed up, and then you stayed.
To the ghosts we all carried into this room.
And to the ridiculous, over-catered, gun-heavy future we're about to carry back out of it. "
Everyone drank. Half the room was openly weeping. Zoya announced, through tears, that she would personally remove the next person who cried, and nobody moved, because she did not either.
When it came time for the vows, Pavel took my hands in his ruined, gentle ones and said his in a voice that did not once waver, which is how I knew exactly what they cost him.
"I have spent my whole life learning the fastest way out of every room I ever entered," he said.
"I am finished looking for exits. You are the first room I have ever walked into and wanted the door to lock behind me.
I vow to argue with you about the coffee until the day I die.
I vow to build you a home and never once mistake it for a wall.
I vow that our children will grow up certain they were never a price and never a debt, only wanted, all the way down to the ground.
And I vow that on the days you forget you out-coded a god, I will be standing right there to remind you, because I was in the room when you did it, and I am never going to get over it as long as I live. "
I had planned to be composed. I want that noted for the record, since I failed at it so completely.
"You made me hack my way to yes," I said, "so you're getting a vow you'll have to take partly on faith, because I'm not going to make it through all of it out loud.
You walked into my life as the single scariest thing in it and turned out to be the safest. You're my Shadow and my nerd and my alpha and my favorite argument in the world.
I vow to keep the door unlocked. I vow to let you catch me, and to catch you right back every time.
And I vow that this one," I pressed his hand flat to the round of my stomach, "and every one after, is going to grow up in a house with far more books than guns, which, given the numbers this family is starting with, is going to be the great engineering project of both our lives. "
Then we danced.
There was a song, and I could not tell you a single note of it, because Pavel drew me in against him, one hand low and sure at my back and the other spread wide over the small round proof of everything ahead of us, and he set his mouth to my ear and said the last private thing of the entire war.
It was not Shadow's voice, and it was not the alpha's.
It was only his, the man I had built and been built by, saying my name like it was the one flag he had ever truly wanted to capture and had finally, after everything, been handed.
We turned slow in the middle of a room that had held a hostage and a war and now, somehow, held a wedding, surrounded by every ghost we had named out loud and every living soul we had bled to keep.
I put my head on the chest of the man who has never once failed to catch me before I hit the ground, and I let the music carry the three of us out into the ordinary, gloriously boring forever we had fought so hard to earn.