Chapter 11 #2
"Borscht." Dewey crouches, lets the bigger dog put his whole head in his lap. "Well, hey there, Borscht. You're a handsome fella."
"He knows," Yuri says. "They both know. They always know."
Cruz finds the food and doesn't move from it again. Halfway through his second plate he catches my eye across the garden and nods the way he nods at a mare that's finally eating after a bad week. "Good eats," he says, when I drift close enough. "Real good eats. Tell your husband."
"I'll tell him you said so."
"Also what's in the dumplings. Because I'd like to know if I'm eating them right."
I tell him the truth, which is I don't know either. He decides that's fine.
For one hour, in a garden ringed with armed men, my dead father's people sit down with my dangerous husband's people, eat the same cake, decide to like each other.
I stand in the middle of it in the dress that swallowed a truck whole.
Against every instinct I trust, I feel happy, the kind I didn't plan on.
Isaak finds me by the cake while the band is between songs. He doesn't touch me, still careful about reaching first, but he stands close enough that I have to look up.
"Your foreman threatened my second-in-command," he says. "Lev is delighted. He hasn't been threatened by an amateur in fifteen years. He says your man has, to quote him exactly, 'correct instincts about gold, correct instincts about people.' From Lev that's a marriage proposal."
"Hollis vetts everyone who comes near me. He once made Brandon change a tire in the rain to see if he'd whine." I watch that name do nothing at all to my husband's face, and the blankness is its own tell, because nothing this man chooses to show is an accident. "He whined."
"Good information." Isaak's mouth does the quarter-inch thing. "I'll keep it."
"Keep what, exactly."
"All of it." He says it low, just for me, no smirk under it, and the no-smirk is what undoes me every time. "I'm finding I want to keep all of it. The foreman. The dumb dog names. The way you said the vows like you were daring God to hold you to them."
"That wasn't daring God. That was daring you."
"I noticed." He holds a hand out, palm up, the first time he's asked me for anything instead of arranging it. "Dance with me. The quartet ran me an obscene amount and so far all they've scored is a foreman lecturing my consigliere about coffee cans."
"I don't dance. I muck stalls and I drive a stick. Dancing's for people who never had chores."
"You married into a different kind of chores." He keeps the hand out, patient, the way he was patient at the rail that first morning. "One dance. I'll let you lead and tell everyone it was me."
"You'll let me lead." I put my hand in his despite every instinct I came in here with. "Say that again where Lev can hear it."
"Lev would have a stroke. Come on."
"I don't dance," I tell him again, already dancing.
"You gentle half-ton animals that want to kill you. You can survive three minutes of a waltz with a man who's only mostly dangerous."
So I put my hand in his, because it's my wedding and I've already signed away everything more important than this. We dance. He's good at it, naturally, the same way he's good at everything that involves controlling a thing larger and angrier than the room expects.
The ranch hands watch. Yuri watches with both dogs sitting on his feet.
I rest my hand on the shoulder of the man I came here to convict, let him turn me slow under a string of lights, and feel the whole dangerous architecture of my plan creak under the weight of how badly I don't want this part to end.
Near the back, Tessa has her phone up, filming.
For the memories, she says when I catch her at it.
She smiles at me, all teeth, none of it reaching her eyes, a smile I'd have read as warm a year ago.
I don't think hard about it. I have a garden full of people, a husband I can't stop looking at, a piece of cake I intend to finish.
A friend filming a wedding is the most ordinary thing in the world.
I let it go, the way I'm letting most things go today.
Somewhere during the cake, the gate at the front of the estate swings shut behind the last arriving car, a deep iron clunk I feel in my sternum, final, expensive, the latch dropping home.
I'm married. It's done. Whatever I came in here to learn about the man who killed my father, I'll learn it from the inside now, as his wife, with his ring on my hand, his name on my life, no clean way back to the woman I was at dawn.
Dima finds me somewhere between the cake and the dancing. He doesn't introduce himself. He just appears beside me with a glass raised and a smile his brother never uses — the free kind, the one that costs nothing and expects nothing back.
"He booked the quartet," he says. "Six weeks ago.
He'll deny it. I'm telling you because you should know the kind of man you married.
" He drinks. "Also the violinist on the left has been watching Yuri for forty minutes and Yuri is completely oblivious, and that is now the most interesting thing at this wedding.
I'm keeping an eye on it." He tips his glass toward me like a toast and drifts away before I can say a word, already angling back toward the cellist with the quiet competence of a man who treats every room as his own.
I find Isaak across the garden. He's already looking at me.
He's been looking at me, I think, most of the day.
He lifts his glass an inch, just for me.
I lift my water back. The whole loud, dangerous, lovely party goes quiet around that one small private thing.
I think, God help me, we might be in trouble, the both of us, the good kind of trouble laid right on top of the bad, and I no longer have the first idea how to tell them apart.
Later, after the cars are gone, after the caterers have folded up the tables, after the men have melted back into whatever city they came out of, I stand at the bedroom window in the dress I haven't taken off yet and look down at the dark garden where I got married today.
My ring catches the light from the lamp.
It's heavy, a small constant pressure on my hand, and instead of wanting it gone I keep turning it to watch the light move in it.
Somewhere in this house my husband is finishing whatever a man like him finishes on the night he takes a wife.
Somewhere out past the gate, a whole life away, is the woman I was at dawn, who still believed there was a version of this where she walked back out.
There isn't. The gate's shut. The paper's signed.
I'm Nora Radulov now, in a dark garden full of folded tables and spent gold light, married to the question I came here to answer.
I almost take the ring off for the night, to set it on the nightstand next to the file I never let him burn.
I leave it on instead. Some nights you let yourself have the one thing and don't make yourself answer for it later.
In an hour we'll make the drive back to the penthouse, back to the city and the forty floors and the bed we've been circling for two weeks.
The garden will be here in the morning. The keeping-books woman will be back by then.
Tonight I'm just the one with the ring on.