Chapter Vadim
Vadim
The cathedral was cold in the way that old stone is always cold—not the cold of neglect but the cold of permanence, the kind that lives in walls three feet thick and outlasts every human event conducted before them.
The candles did nothing to touch it. Hundreds of them, tall and thin, burning in iron stands and along the iconostasis in trembling rows, their light catching the gold leaf of the icon screen and throwing it back warm and ancient across the nave.
The flat faces of the saints watched from every surface.
They had seen everything in this building, and their expressions had never changed.
I had been married in my mind already. The contract was signed. The lawyer had filed. The arrangements were made. This was the performance—the part my father required, the part the vor recognised, the part that would be spoken of by the men who needed to know that the Dragunov line was secured.
I glanced at my watch. She was due in thirty minutes.
Father Dmitri was at the Holy Table, adjusting something with the focused concentration of a man trying to appear busy.
I crossed the nave toward him, my footsteps loud on the stone floor, and watched him freeze before I reached him.
His hands disappeared beneath his outer cassock.
The pectoral cross swung as he straightened his kamilavka.
“Batyushka,” I said. The same tone I used with my men. Respectful. Final.
He cleared his throat.
“Is everything to your liking, Mr Dragunov?”
“Da. But I would appreciate a swift ceremony. The essential steps. Nothing more.” I let the pause do its work. “You understand.”
He nodded. His eyes had gone slightly unfocused—the look of a man mentally working through an ancient rite and deciding what he could quietly omit without it constituting a theological offence.
Given that he conducted his ministry in the shadow of my compound, I trusted he would find a workable answer.
I turned back toward the nave.
The men were distributed throughout—Bogdan near the door, Tikhon further back, others stationed at intervals with the practised stillness of people armed and waiting.
My father stood with Konstantin and my uncle near the front.
Ruslan and Valentin further along. The Kozlov family had not yet arrived, which was either poor timekeeping or something else.
Then one of the great doors slammed open.
Half the men moved. Hands dropped to holsters, bodies turned—the automatic response of people who had learned that loud, unexpected sounds were rarely good news.
Iskra stood in the doorway.
The winter came in with her. A cold draught swept down the nave, guttering the nearest candles and carrying the smell of frozen stone and outside air.
She stood in it for a moment—framed by the doorway, the pale winter light behind her, the cathedral stretching ahead—and then she walked in as though she had been the one waiting for us.
My eyes went immediately to either side of her.
Radovan. Spartak. Her byki, holding the back of her dress. Not how byki hold a door or clear a room—the way choirboys carry a hymnal. Carefully. Reverently. Both of them dropped the fabric the instant they registered my expression and straightened into something approximating their actual function.
I looked behind them.
No family.
She walked the length of the nave alone.
Head up, shoulders back, the beadwork catching candlelight as she moved so that she arrived in fragments of gold and white, the veil shimmering against the icon screen behind her.
The dress that had been chosen to contain her was not containing her.
She moved inside it as though she had decided, somewhere between the car and these doors, that it belonged to her now.
My father appeared at my shoulder.
“Leonid is on his way,” he said, low and tight. “Sort that girl out. This does not bode well.”
“She seems eager,” I said, watching her close the remaining distance. “And I want to be finished here. My work is waiting.”
He said nothing to that.
Father Dmitri gathered himself as Iskra came to stand before the Holy Table.
Whatever he had been flustered about a moment ago, he set it aside with the practised composure of a man who had learned that in Chernograd, the safest response to the unexpected was to proceed as though it had been planned.
The candles were placed in our hands first—tall white tapers, the wax warm within seconds.
Then the stefana. The crowns were old, heavy metalwork, linked by a ribbon of white silk.
Father Dmitri placed them with the careful deliberateness of the rite, his voice finding its register as the words of the ceremony began to fill the cold air, rise toward the vaulted ceiling, and disperse there, absorbed by the stone.
At some point her family joined us, but when I glanced sideways at her, she was looking at the back wall.
Not at the iconostasis, not at the priest, not at me.
At the wall. As though she had identified a fixed point on the far side of this event and intended to keep her eyes on it until she reached it.
She never flinched.
She never looked away.
The crowns meant we were bound. The ribbon meant we were one.
Father Dmitri led us three times around the Holy Table—the steps slow and ceremonial on cold stone, the candles held, the crowns catching the candlelight—and she completed each circuit without faltering, without softening, without once acknowledging that any of this had anything to do with her.
I had expected fear, or performance, or the brittle composure of a woman holding herself together with great effort.
What I got was absence.
She had gone somewhere inside herself and left a body behind to complete the ceremony. A body that stood straight, held its candle, and moved when directed and said what was required.
It was, I thought, a more sophisticated response than I had anticipated.
The shared cup came last. The wine was dark, and the cup was passed between us, and she drank without hesitation, which was either courage or indifference, and I found I couldn’t determine which.
Father Dmitri pronounced the words that made it binding under God, in this city where God and I had reached our own accommodation long ago.
It was done.
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The ceremony had barely concluded before the nave filled with noise.
People surged forward—the Bratva contingent first, as they always were, moving with the enthusiasm of men who had been standing still and silent for too long.
My brother got to me before anyone else and pulled me into an embrace that had more force behind it than was strictly necessary for the occasion.
“Get off me,” I said.
He didn’t immediately. Neither did the three men behind him.
I extracted myself with less patience than I might otherwise have shown and turned to find the rest of them forming a disorganised queue of congratulation—bear hugs, back slaps, remarks I didn’t dignify.
The cathedral, which had been cold and ceremonial thirty minutes ago, was now loud and warm with bodies and the smell of melting candle wax and men who had been drinking since this morning.
It was her parents who cleared the noise without meaning to.
Leonid and Vera moved forward carrying the ceremonial bread and salt—the traditional blessing, the welcome into the family, the performance of warmth that the occasion required.
Vera was smiling. Leonid was squared up with pride.
Behind them, someone had produced the glasses for the final element of the rite.
Iskra took both glasses before anyone had extended them to her.
And smashed them. Not one—both. On the stone floor, at her parents’ feet, in the echo of a cathedral that had very good acoustics for that sort of thing.
The sound rang out across the nave and the noise dropped and every head turned and Leonid and Vera stood in the settling fragments with their expressions suspended somewhere between shock and the beginning of understanding.
Iskra looked at them with complete composure.
The silence lasted several seconds.
“Weren’t you supposed to break one of those?” Valentin murmured beside me.
He had appeared from somewhere in the middle of the gathering—Valentin rarely attended events of this nature, his time being valuable enough that he selected his appearances with care. He was watching the scene with the measured attention he brought to financial irregularities.
“Hm,” I said.
“Get her out of here,” my father said, appearing at my other side, his voice low and tight with the specific displeasure of a man whose performance has been disrupted.
He was already turning away, already moving toward Leonid to begin whatever management that situation required.
“And keep a close eye on her,” he added, directed at me without looking back.
Valentin watched him go.
“What was all that about?” he asked.
“No idea,” I said.
Iskra had stepped forward and was grinding the heel of her shoe into what remained of the glasses with a thoroughness that suggested she wanted to be certain.
I watched her for a moment.
Psychotic. Entirely mine. And apparently determined to make that fact as complicated as possible from the first minute of the marriage.
I didn’t need my father’s advice on how to manage my own wife. I had been handling difficult situations since before he decided to make this one my problem.
“Time to go,” I said, and moved to collect her before she found something else to destroy in a house of God.