EPILOGUE II RAE
SIX MONTHS LATER
Together with those they carry in their hearts,
Rae Everett
&
Lukas Lazarev
request the pleasure of your company
at the celebration of their marriage.
Friday, the thirty-first of July
Two thousand and twenty-six
at half past four in the afternoon
The woman in the mirror is someone I’m still getting used to.
Not because she’s wearing a white silk gown that cost an arm, a leg, and a kidney—though she is, and it did, and I’m trying very hard not to think about that.
Not because her hair is pinned up in a loose, romantic twist that took Jillian forty-five minutes and nine hundred bobby pins to achieve.
Not even because there are actual diamonds in her ears, a gift from the groom, delivered this morning in a velvet box with a note that read simply, For my forever.
No, the reason I’m still getting used to this woman is that she looks happy.
This kind of happy doesn’t hedge its bets or brace for impact.
This kind of happy glows. My nineteen-year-old self, standing in front of a different mirror in a black dress with cemetery dirt still on her shoes, would never have believed this kind of happy was even possible.
“Hold still,” Jillian orders as she jabs another pin into my veil with all the gentleness of someone tenderizing a steak. “If this thing falls off during the ceremony, I will never forgive you.”
“It’s just a veil, Jill. The stakes are low.”
“It’s a cathedral-length illusion tulle veil with hand-stitched French lace edging. The stakes have never been higher. So I repeat: Hold. The fuck. Still.”
I bite my lip and do as she orders.
When she’s done, Jillian steps back, surveys her handiwork, and presses her fingers to her mouth.
Her eyes are already glistening, which is concerning, given that we haven’t even left the bridal suite yet.
She’s wearing a deep green dress that makes her red hair look like it’s on fire. She looks beautiful.
She also looks like she’s about to completely lose it.
“Don’t you dare cry,” I warn her. “If you cry, I’ll cry, and then my mascara will run, and then Lukas will think I’m having second thoughts, and then he’ll probably buy the entire borough of Brooklyn to make me feel better, and I am not ready for that kind of responsibility.”
Jillian snorts. She dabs the corner of her eye with her pinky, careful not to smudge her own makeup. “You’re marrying a Bratva kingpin,” she mutters, adjusting the fall of my veil one final, obsessive time. “I hope you know I’m putting that in my maid of honor speech.”
I laugh. “Former kingpin. He’s legitimate now.”
“Mhmm.” She meets my eyes in the mirror. “Sure he is.”
“He is!” I insist. “… Mostly.”
Her expression is wry, affectionate, and just the tiniest bit skeptical, which is basically Jillian’s version of wholehearted endorsement.
Six months ago, I wasn’t sure we’d ever get back to this—to easy banter and reflexive honesty, to the shorthand of a friendship that’s survived worse things than intrepid journalism and sordid crime world secrets.
But here we are. Stronger at the broken parts, like those Japanese bowls repaired with gold.
Kintsugi. Lukas taught me that word. I like it.
“Perfecto.” Jillian turns me by the shoulders so I’m facing her instead of the mirror. She holds me at arm’s length and looks me over, head to toe. Her lower lip trembles in a very un-Jill-like way before she clamps it between her teeth. “You look like a fucking dream, Rae Everett.”
“Rae Lazareva soon,” I correct softly. “In about twenty minutes.”
Her eyes spill over. So do mine.
So much for the mascara.
We stand there leaking all over each other’s fancy outfits until a knock at the door makes us both jump.
“Rae?” Gideon’s voice, slightly muffled. “They’re, uh—they’re ready for us. Whenever you are.”
I wipe my eyes and Jillian wipes hers. “Go get ‘em, Sunshine,” she whispers.
She slips out the door ahead of me, and I hear her heels clomp down the stairs, followed by the distant sound of the garden door opening and closing. From outside, a lone violin drifts up through the window.
I take one last look in the mirror. “Okay, Mom,” I whisper. “Okay, Dad. Here I go.”
Then I open the door.
Gideon is waiting in the hallway. The sight of him nearly takes me out at the knees.
He’s wearing a charcoal suit that fits him properly.
Lukas had it tailored for him, and the two of them have been working out together for the last few months, ever since Gid finished rehab, so there’s actually some width to my brother’s shoulders.
His dirty blonde hair is trimmed and combed, his jaw clean-shaven for the first time in months, and his brown eyes are bright, clear, and brimming.
As good as he looks, his best accessory is one that’s tucked out of sight: a chip that marks ten months of sobriety. My heart swells ten sizes bigger with pride for him.
In fact, it swells so big that I get a little unsteady and have to reach out before I topple over.
“Whoa!” Gideon catches my elbow. “You okay there, princess?”
“You look so grown up,” I splutter.
He grins and waves me off. “Don’t start. If you make me cry before we even get outside, I’ll never live it down.”
“You’re allowed to cry at your sister’s wedding, you big cupcake. Your man card won’t get revoked or anything.”
He rolls his eyes and offers me his arm.
I take it. His bicep is solid under the charcoal wool.
Along with Lukas’s lifting sessions, kitchen work has filled him out and given him the quiet physical confidence that comes from actually using your body for something productive instead of trying to destroy it one high at a time.
I squeeze his arm and he squeezes back, and we start moving slowly out of the room.
“Mom and Dad would be so proud of you,” he says quietly as we walk.
The tears come back. I don’t fight them this time. “They’d be proud of you, G.”
He shakes his head. “I’m not the one who held everything together for six years. That was all you.” He clears his throat and sighs. “You never gave up on me. Not once. Even when I gave you every reason to.”
I can’t speak. I stop for a sec to just lean my head against his shoulder and breathe. He lets me gather myself back up.
“Ready?” he asks after a moment.
“Ready.”
We descend the stairs together.
The brownstone’s garden is small and imperfect, and it’s the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen.
Jillian has strung fairy lights through the leafy branches of the old maple tree and wound ivy around the wrought-iron fence.
White wooden folding chairs line a narrow aisle blanketed in white petals.
The violinist plays in the far corner. The summer air is hazy but not hot, the sky a clear, rich blue that feels like a gift.
The guests turn as I appear in the garden doorway.
There aren’t many, which was a conscious choice, made over coffee one morning when Lukas asked how many people I wanted and I said, Just the ones who matter.
Jillian is in the front row, already destroying a tissue, alongside a few others whose faces blur past me because my vision has tunneled down to a single point at the end of the aisle.
Lukas.
He’s standing beneath the maple tree in a cream suit, no tie, his silver hair catching the summer light. His hands are clasped in front of him, his jaw is set, and he’s looking at me like I’m the only thing in the world that matters.
It feels like we’re truly free for the first time in a long time.
The trial ended two months ago in a verdict of not guilty after the jury deliberated for less than four hours.
The media hubbub has slowly eased. The company is a work-in-progress, but a happy one: now that he’s back in charge, Lukas has been quietly restructuring and simplifying with a handful of trusted advisors.
Even the wedding planning, simple and lowkey as it was, is no longer hanging over our heads.
There’s just this. Him on the altar. Me, barefoot in the grass, wearing white silk and my parents’ memory and the reckless courage of a frightened woman who fell in love with the most dangerous man she’s ever met and decided to stay.
Gideon walks me down the aisle. His stride is steady, his arm is strong, and when we reach Lukas, my brother does something that breaks me open entirely: He takes Lukas’s hand, places mine inside it, and holds them together for a moment.
An understanding passes between them that I don’t fully see but completely feel.
Then Gideon releases us and steps back, and it’s just me and Lukas under a maple tree in Brooklyn.
Lukas lifts my hand to his mouth and presses his lips to my knuckles, right above the ring. “I would have paid a hundred million, you know,” he whispers.
I rise onto my tiptoes and whisper back, “I would have been yours for free.”
We exchange vows. His are short, because Lukas Lazarev doesn’t waste words. He tells me I gave him a reason to live when he’d forgotten he wanted one, and promises to spend whatever time he has left making sure I never doubt that I was chosen.
Mine are slightly longer, because I’m me and therefore biologically incapable of brevity.
I tell him that I spent six years believing love was just a prettier word for loss, that wanting someone was the fastest way to guarantee they’d be taken from you.
And then he walked into a dark office on my birthday and looked at me, and I realized I’d been wrong about everything.
We say I do.
He wastes no time in kissing me.
The twelve people in our garden applaud, and Gideon whistles, and Jillian sobs so loudly that a startled bird evacuates from the maple tree.
I like to think that it’s the pigeon who saw me on the roof of Lazarev Global and the stoop of that bodega, with a smug smile on his beak, like he can finally go back to his life now that he sees that I’m in good hands.
As the bird wings away overhead, Lukas holds my face in both scarred hands and kisses me until I can’t remember my own name, which is fine, because it’s about to change anyway.
The reception is cake and champagne in the brownstone’s living room.
It’s intimate and warm and lit by a huge swath of candles on every flat surface.
Lukas keeps one hand on the small of my back for the entire evening.
Every few minutes, I feel his fingers tighten—a small, involuntary squeeze, as if he’s checking I’m still real.
I’m cutting the cake, a three-tier monstrosity that Gideon baked himself and decorated with slightly lopsided buttercream roses that are, in my completely unbiased opinion, worthy of television, when a flicker of movement catches my eye through the garden window.
I look up.
At the far edge of the garden, half-hidden by the ivy-wrapped fence, a figure stands alone in the blue dusk. Dark hair, lean build, hands in his pockets. The fairy lights catch just enough of his profile for recognition to hit me.
Kir.
He’s watching the reception through the glass, standing apart from it the way he always stands apart from everything—at the edge, observing, never quite letting himself belong.
He looks thinner than I remember. Tanned, like he’s been somewhere warm.
His expression is unreadable at this distance, but his posture isn’t hostile. It’s something quieter. Wistful, maybe.
Our eyes meet across the garden. The noise of the reception fades to a background murmur.
Kir nods. Just once. It’s a small, precise inclination of his head that contains multitudes, though even I’m not sure exactly what those multitudes might be.
Then he turns, and as he does, someone steps out from behind the maple tree and falls into stride beside him. A woman with red hair catching the fairy lights, her green dress unmistakable even in the fading light.
… Jillian?!
She slips her arm through Kir’s, casual as could be, and they walk together toward the garden gate, her head tilting toward his as she says something I can’t hear. He dips his chin to listen and the ghost of a smile crosses his face before they disappear around the corner and into the evening.
I blink.
What. The. Hell?
My brain attempts to process what I just witnessed and immediately short-circuits, like a computer being asked to divide by zero.
Jillian.
Kir.
Jillian and Kir.
Jillian and Kir, slipping away from my wedding together like two people who have somewhere else to be. Together. The woman who exposed the Lazarev family’s darkest secret, arm in arm with the man who threatened to destroy her for it.
A dozen questions erupt simultaneously in my skull, but before I can chase any of them down, Lukas’s hand once again goes to the small of my back.
“Dance with me,” he murmurs against my ear.
I look up at him. He’s smiling.
Kir and Jillian. Jillian and Kir. I suppose that’ll have to be a story for another time.
Tonight belongs to us.
We dance in the candlelit living room of our Brooklyn brownstone, surrounded by buttercream roses and empty champagne flutes and the people we love most in the world.
I have my cheek against his chest and Lukas’s hand in my hair and the strong, hopeful thump of a heart that took eighteen years to start beating again.
Mine beats right alongside it.