Razvan
I’m getting married today.
I’ve said the words to myself four times since I woke up, and they still don’t produce a single recognizable human reaction. No nerves. No anticipation. Just a flat, factual weight sitting in my chest, heavy as a lead slab.
In the mirror, Lyosha is obsessively straightening his tie for the third time. Beside him, Dmitri examines his cufflinks with the smug satisfaction of a man who considers a wedding, even a forced one, primarily as an opportunity to look exceptional.
Mike, however, isn’t looking at his reflection. He’s looking at me.
I sigh. “Say what you have to say, Mike, and stop glaring daggers into my fucking skull.”
Mike exhales through his nose, his gaze dropping to the floor for a second before snapping back to mine. “Why are you putting her in a prison and dressing it up as a wedding, Razvan?”
There it is. The question that’s been vibrating in the room like a live wire.
“She has my son.” I adjust my jacket, my movements precise and cold. “I spent five years tearing the world apart looking for her. There is no version of this reality where I let her walk around loose in the world with my child. It’s not happening.”
“You could court her,” Mike says, his voice dangerously level. “Actually try. Woo her. Do this the right way instead of—”
“Woo her?” I turn around slowly, fixing him with a look that would have sent a lesser man reaching for his weapon. “Do I look like a man who woos people, Mike? Do I give off that particular energy to you?”
Dmitri makes a sound from the corner that is definitely a laugh converted at the last second into a cough.
“It’s not the worst idea,” Mike says, refusing to be deterred. “She’s not a prisoner. She’s the mother of your son. There’s a difference and you know there’s a—”
“This is part punishment,” I say. Flat. Final. “She kept my son from me for five years. She ran. She stole from me. There are consequences.”
I say the words. I mean them.
Mostly.
Something about the sentence tastes like ash in my mouth, but I don’t give myself the luxury of examining why. I turn back to the mirror, fixing a collar that is already perfect.
“You know, she could bolt,” Dmitri offers pleasantly, admiring his own silhouette. “Right down the aisle. Can you imagine the headlines? Bratva Pakhan Jilted at the Altar. I’d read that article. I’d probably frame it.”
“I have twenty men on her,” I say. “She’s not bolting anywhere.”
Dmitri sighs like this personally disappoints him.
Mike says nothing else. He just looks at me with that expression he has, the steady one that says he has more opinions and is choosing, for now, to keep them behind his teeth.
The ceremony is in the main hall and we’re standing at the altar, the hall is full of Bratva witnesses in dark suits, careful faces and I am about to get married.
It still doesn’t feel real.
The doors at the end of the hall open.
Theo comes first.
He’s in a miniature black suit that someone, presumably a team of very brave tailors, managed to get him into despite his vocal opinions on formal wear.
He’s walking with a velvet ring pillow held out in front of him at full arm’s length, moving with the agonizing concentration of a bomb technician defusing a live warhead.
His tongue is between his teeth. He takes each step like a decision.
Then he looks up, sees me at the altar, and his entire face transforms. The grim focus vanishes, replaced by a blinding, gap-toothed radiance.
“Superman!”
He breaks formation, taking three ecstatic lunges toward me before the wedding coordinator catches him by the shoulder and steers him back onto the carpet.
Beside me, I can feel Dmitri shaking. He isn’t making a sound, but his shoulders are hitching in a way that suggests he’s about to have a respiratory event from suppressed laughter.
Don’t laugh, I command myself, keeping my features carved from granite. Do not fucking laugh.
Theo finally makes it to the front. He thrusts the pillow up at me with both hands, his chest puffed out with a level of pride I haven’t seen in men receiving medals of honor.
“I didn’t drop the ring,” he whispers, his voice carrying through the silent, vaulted hall with the clarity of a bugle. “Not even one time!”
“Good work,” I tell him. My voice comes out lower than I intended, rough and snagged on something in my throat.
His smile does something violent to my ribcage. I look down at him, this tiny person in a clip-on tie with wet tongue marks still on his lip from the effort of walking, and the three days I’ve spent deliberately avoiding him come apart all at once.
I haven’t let myself near him. That’s the truth I haven’t admitted to Mike or anyone else. Since the warehouse, since I carried him out of that rot-hole and listened to him talk about Superman at full volume for an hour in the backseat, I have kept a careful, calculated distance.
I don’t know how to do this. I don’t know how to be what he needs, and I am terrified, genuinely, bone-deep terrified in a way that no hitman or federal agent has ever made me, of doing something wrong. I am afraid of breaking something in him that I don’t have the tools to fix.
I’ve bought dozens of books. Parenting. Child development. How to talk to four year olds. How to earn trust. How to be present. They’re in a stack on my nightstand and I read them at two in the morning when I can’t sleep. I feel equally educated and completely, hopelessly unprepared.
I missed five years of his life.
The thought lands with its full weight and I let it.
The pregnancy I didn’t know about. The birth I wasn’t there for.
First steps, first words, first everything, all of it happened somewhere in Budapest in an apartment with a crack in the kitchen ceiling and I was here, building an empire, searching for a ghost, not knowing that the most important thing I’d ever made was already out in the world learning to walk without me.
I should have been there.
The regret of it is enormous and I swallow it whole because this is not the place and there is nothing I can do with it except make sure that every day from this one forward is different.
Theo is still smiling up at me and I look at him. I will learn. Whatever it takes, I will learn.
Then Lena appears at the doors.
She’s in white that isn’t quite white, something between ivory and silver, and her hair is up in a way that leaves the line of her neck exposed. She’s holding her own hands in front of her because she has no one to walk her down the aisle and she made it clear she didn’t want anyone.
She looks furious.
Not obviously. Someone who didn’t know her face wouldn’t see it.
But I know the way her shoulders are braced as if she’s walking toward a firing squad rather than an altar.
She is fighting an emotion with teeth, and I find myself respecting the sheer, icy steel of her resolve. She doesn’t cry. She doesn’t stumble.
She reaches the altar and stands across from me. Her gaze lifts, clashing with mine like whetted blades.
“You look beautiful,” I say, my voice barely a murmur.
Her chin lifts, a defiant tilt that tells me exactly where I can shove my compliments. “My beauty is not for you, Razvan.”
The priest begins the liturgy.
I listen to approximately forty percent of what he says.
The other sixty percent of my attention is on her face, the way she refuses to look at me for longer than two seconds at a stretch, the way she glances down at Theo between responses, and the thing that happens in her expression when she does.
Soft. Involuntary. Gone again the second she looks back up.
And then, sliding in underneath all of it, the thought I’ve been keeping at the edges for three days.
Who took my son?
The men at the warehouse were professionals, but they weren’t anyone I recognized.
No markings. No tattoos I could place. The ones we took alive said nothing useful before they stopped being useful, and the trail from the warehouse went cold inside six hours.
Whoever orchestrated it knew how to clean up after themselves.
Knew Theo’s school. Knew Lena’s name and location in Budapest.
That level of intelligence doesn’t come cheap. It comes from somewhere organized. Somewhere with resources and reach and a specific reason to want leverage over me.
A Bratva family. Has to be. But which one and why now and what do they actually want?
The priest says something that requires my response and I give it without breaking stride.
I’ll find them. I turn the ring in my fingers before I slide it onto her hand. And when I do—
Lena’s hand is cold.
I hold it a beat longer than necessary. She doesn’t pull away, which costs her something, I can see it costing her, and I let go.
The reception moves through the Volkov estate’s main hall with the efficiency of an event staffed by people who know that Bratva occasions require both excellence and discretion.
The senior families come through in rotation.
Handshakes and congratulations and eyes that assess my new wife with varying degrees of subtlety.
Lena stands beside me and smiles at exactly no one.
Except Theo.
Every time Theo appears at her elbow, which is frequently because he has appointed himself her personal escort for the evening, her face does the thing.
The involuntary softening. She crouches to his level and listens to whatever he’s telling her, which based on his gestures involves something large and possibly a helicopter, and she laughs, actually laughs, and the sound of it hits me somewhere behind my sternum like a finger pressed on a bruise.
I look away.
Is it that terrible? The thought arrives before I can stop it. Being here. Being mine.
I don’t follow it further.
Dmitri materializes at my shoulder with two glasses and the expression of a man who is having an excellent evening. “Congratulations,” he says, handing me one. “She hasn’t stabbed you yet. Promising start.”
Lyosha appears on my other side, already on his third drink, looking genuinely cheerful in the way he only does when the evening has involved either violence or celebration and tonight qualifies as both. “The boy told me he wants to learn to fight,” he announces. “I said I’d teach him.”
“He’s four.”
Lyosha shrugs. “Start them early.”
Mike comes last. He stands beside me and we watch the room for a moment without speaking. Then he raises his glass slightly. “For what it’s worth,” he says quietly, “she’s doing well. Considering.”
I don’t answer.
Viktor appears from the crowd, silver-haired and impeccable, warmth arranged on his face.
He takes my hand in both of his and squeezes with the practiced sincerity of a man who has been performing family feeling for decades.
“Your father would have been proud. A wedding. A grandson.” His eyes move to Theo across the room, and something in them does a thing I file away without examining.
“Family is everything, Razvan. Remember that.”
“I will,” I say.
He moves on. I watch him go and the filing cabinet in the back of my mind, the one marked not yet understood, adds another entry.
The evening ends. Guests disperse. Theo falls asleep on Lyosha’s shoulder during the last hour, which Lyosha handles by sitting extremely still and not moving for forty minutes, and Mike carries him up to the newly decorated room while Lena watches from the doorway with her arms crossed over her chest.
I take my new wife upstairs.
The bedroom door closes and she turns around, her wedding-face dropping completely.
“We are not sharing a bed.” Her voice is flat. “You sleep on the couch. I take the bed. That’s how this works.”
I reach up and start on my jacket buttons.
“Did you hear me?”
I shrug the jacket off and my hands move to my shirt buttons.
“Razvan. I’m talking to you. We need to set ground rules right now before this goes any further, I will not be sharing a—” She stops. “Why aren’t you answering me?”
I turn around.
She’s standing in the middle of the room in her wedding dress and her jaw is set and her eyes are bright with something that isn’t quite fury and isn’t quite tears and is entirely both.
I look at her for a long moment and say, “Because your words mean nothing.”
Her mouth opens.
I walk toward her. She steps back. Again. Her heels hit the dresser and she makes a small startled sound. I put one hand on the dresser beside her hip and look down at her face.
“My words are what matter here.” My voice comes out low. “We share this room. We share this bed. And I will have you whenever I want you because you are mine now.”
“Marriage is not ownership—”
“No,” I agree. “Usually not.” I let that sit. “This marriage is.”
I take her face in both hands and kiss her.
She makes a sound against my mouth that is pure protest and her hands come up and hit my chest, once, twice, palms flat and pushing, and I don’t move. She hits again and I kiss her deeper then her teeth find my lip and she bites down hard enough that copper floods my tongue immediately.
The sound that comes out of me is not pain.
She freezes. Feels what the sound means.
And I take her face tighter in my hands and I kiss her harder, with everything I have, and her fists against my chest stop pushing and her fingers curl into my shirt instead, and we are both breathing like we’ve been running.
The dresser is at her back and I have absolutely no intention of stopping.