Epilogue Cass #3
I am no detective, but I am a wife-in-training, and I know my husband-presumptive’s tells. That envelope is something he has been carrying for a while. I wonder what it says.
But when Matvei comes back to me a moment later, he shows no interest in explaining what the hell that was all about.
Not that that stops me from asking. “Gonna fill me in?”
He looks at me sidelong, then shrugs. “It’s not for me to say. Bill kept an envelope in his deposit box . It got lost in the chaos and I only just rediscovered it last week. I don’t know how I missed it.”
“You read it?”
“Hell no.” He tips his beer to his mouth. “Wasn’t mine to read.”
I lean my head against his shoulder for a second. Out the side door, through the propped-open vestibule, I can just see the shape of Caroline sitting on the curb, her shoulders very still, the envelope’s contents unfolded in her hands.
“Should one of us go check…?”
“Let her have it,” he demurs. “She’ll come back when she’s ready.”
I nod. He’s right. There are some things you need to process alone, with the city sounds around you, and not in a wedding hall where Lizzo is reminding you, at considerable volume, that you are 100% that bitch.
But it does give me a very different kind of idea.
I tilt my chin toward the outside world. “Want to get some air?” I ask cheekily.
Matvei gets my drift right away. His mouth pulls up at the corner. Without a word, he sets his beer down on the closest flat surface, takes my hand, and leads me out the opposite door, the one nobody is watching.
It’s not the same alley as the very first one we ever shared, but it’s close enough to bring back the memories.
The brick walls on both sides have turned melted margarine yellow in the streetlamp light. The smell of last night’s rain rises up from the warm concrete. From across the bay, the lights of Manhattan shine and ripple over the water.
The second the door clicks shut behind us, Mat turns me by the hip and pushes me back until my shoulder blades meet the brick. His mouth is on mine before I can make a single joke about it.
He kisses me like he’s got something to prove. He knows he doesn’t, but I’m not about to discourage him from trying. What woman alive wouldn’t want to be wanted like this? Fully, completely, with every fiber of his being?
And also with every fiber of the extremely large, extremely hard thing I can feel pressing against my inner thigh?
When he finally lets me come up for air, I’m breathless and grinning like an idiot. “You’ve got cornbread crumbs on your collar,” I tell him.
“Whose fault is that?”
“Entirely yours. You distracted me mid-bite.”
“My deepest apologies, Mrs. Almost-Satyrin.”
I groan. “Don’t Mrs. me. I had one of those, remember? Didn’t go great.”
“Mm.” He brushes my hair back from my temple. “I think the second time around will go much better than the first.”
“It had better.” I tug on his lapel. “Speaking of which, when are you going to make an honest woman out of me, Satyrin? I have a baby, a mortgage, and a very real concern about being misfiled at preschool drop-off.”
“Soon enough” is all he says.
“But, like, if ‘soon enough’ had a date, then…?”
He kisses me again, which is the most effective way to shut me up and he knows it. The brick is rough through the silk at my back. His other hand is at the side of my throat, thumb under my jaw, tilting me up to open wider for him.
Alright then. We’ll resume this discussion in a little bit.
I yank his belt loose with hands that have gotten very good at this in the last year. He shoves the hem of my dress up to my hips and hooks my underwear aside without bothering to pull it down.
That’s fine by me. The truth is that I have been wet for him since the moment I saw a sneaky stray tear escape his eye during Dani and Chad’s ceremony earlier in the day.
My beautiful man, holding our beautiful daughter, crying at the wedding of my beautiful cousin and her beautiful new husband?
Uh, take me now, please. On the altar, if necessary.
He lifts me by the backs of the thighs against the brick, and pushes himself in.
I bite down on the side of his neck to keep quiet. He hisses something low and Russian into my hair, which I do not need translated, because I’ve heard him say in the dark of our bed again and again and again over the course of the last year.
He goes slow first, which is cruel of him, given the brief window of time we have available to us at first.
Then he goes very much not slow.
It is over fast but it’s good nonetheless. He holds me there for a second after, my legs still locked around him, his forehead pressed to mine.
“That was unbecoming of us,” I say as I feel his wet heat begin to drip from me.
“On the contrary,” he corrects, “I’d say there was a really good amount of cumming.”
He sets me down gently, fixes my dress and underwear, then crouches to retrieve one of my flats, which has tried to make a run for it during our frantic rutting. He slides it back on my foot like I’m a Disney princess instead of a postpartum woman who just got railed against an alley wall.
When he stands again, he’s looking at me strangely.
I fidget under the full blast of his attention. “Should we go back…?” I venture.
He shakes his head. “Stay there a second.”
He reaches into his inside pocket, the same one the envelope for Caroline came out of. I assume, for an instant, that it’s another envelope. Maybe one for me.
It’s not.
It’s a small velvet box, one that has clearly been opened many, many times before, because the velvet at one corner is rubbed almost bare.
Just like that, I stop breathing.
Matvei lowers himself onto one knee. The knee of his suit pants is going to take an expensive hit. By the single-minded solemnity on his face, though, he doesn’t give a shit.
He looks up at me, his eyes that color, that impossible color.
Then he opens the box.
The ring inside is so unlike the four-carat emerald-cut diamond that used to weigh down my left hand that for a second my brain can’t even classify them as the same category of object.
This one is small. Old. Gold, gone soft and warm with wear.
A single stone in the middle, more cloudy than brilliant, more honey than ice. A tiny garland of leaves etched into the band.
“It was my mother’s,” he says quietly. “Afon brought it to me from a box of his things last month. He said he’d been holding it for me since she passed. He didn’t think it was the right time, before. He thought it might be now.”
I press my hand to my mouth, unable to speak.
“Cassandra.” Matvei takes a breath. “Do you remember what I said to you in an alley, the night I met you?”
I shake my head, not because I don’t remember, but because I want to hear him say it again.
“I said,” he goes on, “that no one can claim you for themselves in this world. Only you can choose to give yourself away. That’s still true.
” His thumb runs over the worn velvet of the box.
“No one will ever own you. Not him. Not me. Not anyone. But, dikarka —if you choose to give yourself away… then give yourself to me.”
From inside, muffled through the brick, cousin Sal’s Bluetooth speaker swaps Lizzo for an old Otis Redding song. The world, on cue, slows and quiets.
I drop into a crouch in front of him, knees bumping his knee, my hands cupped around his on top of the ring box.
“Yes,” I say. “Yes, you beautiful blue-eyed bastard, yes, of course. Yes.”
He lets out a breath that sounds like he’s been holding it for a year.
He slides the ring onto my finger. Then I kiss him and he kisses me back. In the distant back of my head, it occurs to me that my meet-cute and proposal both took place in an alley.
Not exactly fairy tale stuff.
Then again, it kind of is.
Whatever you’d call it, I know Giana, wherever she is, is laughing her ass off. In fact, when the wind comes down the alleyway, I can almost hear her.
We straighten ourselves out as best we can. Matvei retucks his shirt. I pat my hair until I’m reasonably confident it does not look like I just had alley sex, although there is no mirror nearby to confirm that for me.
Even if I do look ratchet, I don’t give a damn. Let the wedding guests stare and whisper, or make jokes and call us silly names. The only name I care about anymore is the one Matvei gave me over a year ago.
Dikarka.
His wild little filly.
We slip back inside through the loading dock door. Dani and Chad have moved from the dance floor to one of the long picnic tables and are eating cake directly off each other’s forks, giggling madly. God, they’re so in love I can practically smell it. I couldn’t be happier for her.
We find Afon on a bench at the far edge of the dance floor, exactly where we left him.
Galina is still asleep on his chest. Her tiny mouth open, her rosy cheek squished.
One of her socks has come off and fallen out of reach, but Afon is clearly unwilling to disturb the little princess’s slumber by stooping for it.
Instead, he’s clutching her bare foot inside his palm to keep it warm.
We pull up chairs and join him. “Having fun?” he asks us with a knowing smile.
I pat nervously at my hair, afraid I’m going to find a piece of trash or something lodged in it. “Having a blast,” I tell him. “You?”
“It’s the best moment of my entire life,” he answers with complete and total seriousness.
Goodness gracious. Softie doesn’t even begin to cover it.
“You don’t have to go, you know,” I tell him softly.
Matvei nods from the other side. “We have room for you to live with us, if you want to stay near Galina.”
But Afon shakes his head.
He’s a hard man to read most of the time, but tonight, the usual flintiness has gone out of him entirely.
His silver-shot dark hair has been combed back and oiled.
His suit is a charcoal three-piece that’s a little too formal for a loading dock wedding, but I’ve come to understand that this is Afon’s version of dressing down.
There’s a small peony pinned to his lapel—Mat snuck it on him when he wasn’t looking.
The lines at the corners of his eyes have softened enough to almost pass for a smile, and his hands, big and scarred in places I would never dare ask about, look impossibly gentle wrapped around our daughter.
He looks, in short, like a man who has been on guard duty for fifteen years and has finally, finally been told he can rest.
“I’m sure,” he says quietly. “It’s time for me to go.
” He looks down at the baby and strokes the back of her head with one knuckle, light as a feather.
“There is nothing here for me to do anymore. Lukas has released me from my service. My nephew has a wife and a daughter and a life I do not need to be inserting myself in the middle of. The city… The city was never mine. It was just a place where I owed a debt.”
“And the Catskills are yours?” I ask.
He nods. “As of tomorrow, they will be. I bought a little place last week. A small cabin outside Phoenicia. I’m told there is a creek nearby.” His mouth twists upward. “I plan to do absolutely fuck-all for a year.”
“You’ll be bored in a month,” Mat predicts.
“Maybe. But it will be my boredom.”
I have to look away for a second, because my eyes are suddenly teary. Mat nods. He doesn’t say anything, but I see his jaw work and I know what it means to him that his uncle is vanishing into the mountains.
Afon turns and carefully transfers the baby into Mat’s arms. Galina’s mouth makes a small, unhappy O at the change in altitude, then resettles against her father’s chest.
When he’s satisfied that Galina hasn’t been disturbed, Afon rises. He pats Mat’s shoulder once, hard, then leans down and kisses the top of my head.
“Be good, all of you,” he says. “I’ll miss you very much.”
He walks out of the reception with his hands in his coat pockets, not looking back, but, to my utter surprise, whistling . Then he is through the door and gone into the Brooklyn night.
When Afon has left, I lean my head against Mat’s shoulder. We sit like that for a long time.
Across the room, near the edge of the dance floor, Caroline has finally come back inside. She’s standing with the letter folded in one hand, her eyes clear but lip quivering. It takes me a moment to realize it, but she’s looking out of the door through which Afon just walked out.
And she’s looking at it like it means something.
Her head tilts a quarter inch. Her brows knit. Her thumb works a corner of the envelope back and forth, back and forth, like she is trying to place a face she’s only seen once, in a photograph, a long time ago.
Then, with her jaw setting like she’s made up her mind, she charges out after him.
I frown at Matvei. “What’s that all about, do you think?”
He shrugs as much as he can with our baby in his arms. “No idea. Not our story. Maybe we’ll hear about it someday.”
“You think so?”
He stands slowly, then pulls me to my feet with him. “I’ve got a good feeling about it. Now, c’mon. I think it’s time I get my girls home.”
I laugh and let him usher me away, back out into the warm city night. “You know something,” I say, touching his chest as we go, “I’ve always liked how you look in ties.”
He chuckles. “Yeah? Well, I’ve got good news for you.”
“What’s that?”
He leans down to nibble my ear and whisper, “I look even better out of them.”