Chapter Nadia
Nadia
A week ago, I didn't know what happy felt like. I'd forgotten the shape of it. The way it sits in your chest like something warm, filling up spaces you didn't realize were hollow.
I remember now.
"What about this one?" Darya holds up a swatch of ivory fabric against my face and tilts her head. "Too yellow?"
"It's fine."
"Fine isn't good enough for a wedding dress, Nadia. Fine is what you say about a sandwich." She tosses the swatch onto the growing pile on the kitchen table and picks up another. "This one. Cream. It's softer against your skin."
My mother is standing at the counter with her reading glasses on, flipping through a catalog she picked up from a bridal shop in town.
She's been circling things with a red pen all morning.
Dresses, shoes, hair accessories. She has a system.
She has spreadsheets. My mother approaches wedding planning the way generals approach warfare, and she is in her element.
"We don't have time for a custom dress," she says without looking up. "Not with this timeline. But Valentina's daughter got married last year, and she had a beautiful gown from that shop on Birch Street. We could go today."
"Mom, I have a shift at noon."
"About that." She puts the pen down and looks at me over the top of her glasses. "You've cut back to three shifts a week. Rosa said you could take more time off if you needed it. Why are you still working at all? The wedding is in six days."
Because I've worked sixty-hour weeks for three years and my body doesn't know how to stop.
Because the routine is familiar. Because even though Kyle's messages have stopped and the silence on my phone feels like a miracle, there's a part of me that doesn't trust it yet.
A part that keeps waiting for the other shoe to fall through the floor.
"I like working," I say. "It keeps me busy."
"You have plenty to keep you busy." She gestures at the table, which is covered in fabric swatches, seating charts, menu options, and a guest list that keeps growing because apparently every connected family within a hundred miles needs to be invited when her daughter gets married. "This is a full-time job, Nadia."
Darya nudges me with her elbow. She's nineteen, sharp-eyed, and far too perceptive for my comfort. "You seem different," she says quietly while Mom goes back to her catalog.
"Different how?"
"I don't know. Lighter." She studies me. "When Dad first told us about the arrangement, I thought you'd fight it. You've been so... closed off. For years. I figured you'd say no and lock yourself in your room."
I pick up a swatch and run it between my fingers. Silk. Cool and smooth. "I thought about it."
"What changed?"
Rafferty. I want to say. Everything changed because of Rafferty.
I've seen him every day this week. He meets me after my shifts at Rosa's and we drive back to the Orlov estate, or sometimes just park somewhere and talk.
He took me to the grounds two days ago and walked me through the garden where the ceremony will be held.
He showed me the library, and the kitchen where Saoirse holds court every morning over coffee and scones.
He introduced me to Iris, who hugged me like she'd known me her whole life and immediately started asking what flowers I was planning for the wedding.
He doesn't push me or crowd me. He exists beside me like a wall I can lean against or walk past, and either option is fine with him. When I talk, he listens with his whole body. When I don't talk, he lets the silence sit without trying to fill it.
We haven't slept together again since that morning.
We've come close. In his car, his hand on my thigh, my fingers in his hair.
On the estate, in a hallway, pressed against a wall with his mouth on my neck and his hands gripping my hips until I gasped.
But each time, he pulls back and asks me if I'm sure, and each time I say yes, and each time he says, "After the wedding. Properly. In our bed."
Our bed. The words do something to me I can't explain.
"He's a good man," I tell Darya. "I got lucky."
She raises an eyebrow. "An arranged marriage to a Bratva enforcer and you're calling it lucky?"
"I am."
She watches me for a moment. Then she smiles. A real one. "Good. You deserve lucky, Nad. It's been a long time coming."
I don't trust myself to answer that, so I pick up another fabric swatch and hold it against my wrist and pretend to care about the difference between cream and eggshell.
My mother looks up from her catalog. "You're eating better," she says. It's not a question. It's an observation delivered with the quiet satisfaction of a woman who's been worrying for years and is finally seeing evidence that the worry might be easing.
She's right. I am eating better. Not a lot, but more than I have in months.
Rafferty makes sure of it. He shows up with food he's brought from the estate, containers of whatever Saoirse cooked that morning, and watches me eat with an expression that's somewhere between gentle and immovable.
It feels good that in the last week I've started wanting to take care of myself again.
I've gained back a few pounds. My hands have stopped shaking. I slept seven hours last night without waking up once.
For the first time in three years, I feel like I might be okay.
"I'm good," I tell my mother. "I'm really good."
She reaches across the table and squeezes my hand. Her eyes are bright. She doesn't say anything else. She doesn't need to.
I do the lunch shift at Rosa's. It's busy, which is good.
The rhythm of it grounds me, taking orders, running plates, refilling coffees.
My body knows this work so well it could do it without my brain, which used to be the point.
Now it's just comfortable. A familiar thing in a life that's changing fast.
Rosa watches me from behind the line the way she always does. Quiet assessment. Maternal concern disguised as professional oversight.
"You look better, honey," she says when I pass through the kitchen to pick up an order. "Whatever's going on, keep doing it."
"I will." I smile, a genuine smile because Rosa has been a pillar in my life for the last three years though I don’t think I knew it until now.
"That man of yours came in yesterday asking for a container of my chicken soup. Said you liked it."
I stop. "Rafferty came here?"
"Big guy. Dark hair. Very polite, very intense. Tipped forty percent." She grins. "I like him."
I carry the plates out with a smile I can't quite control. Rafferty Orlov, Bratva enforcer, youngest brother of the most feared family in the territory, came to my restaurant and asked for takeout soup because I mentioned once that I liked it.
The shift ends at six. I cash out my tips and hang up my apron, saying goodnight to Rosa as I grab the last trash bag to take to the bins.
The parking lot is quiet. Late autumn dark, the kind that comes early and settles heavy.
There are only two cars in the parking lot, neither of them mine as Darya dropped me off so Rafferty could pick me up.
I toss the trash into the bin beside the diner, then dig my phone from my bag as I walk to the lamp that’s buzzing and flickering to wait for Rafferty.
My mind is on the wedding. Six days. My mother wants to go to the bridal shop tomorrow morning.
Iris texted me about cake. I decide not to text back since I’ll see her in an hour or so anyway at dinner.
I'm thinking about all of this when I hear footsteps behind me.
I turn, expecting Rafferty, and instead come face to face with Kyle.
The world stops. Every nerve in my body fires at once, a full-body shock that roots me to the asphalt beneath my feet.
He looks terrible. His left eye is swollen shut, a deep purple bruise that extends down his cheekbone and across the bridge of his nose.
His lip is split and badly healed. He's thinner than I remember.
Twitchy. His eyes, the one that's open, is wild.
"Kyle." His name comes out of my mouth like a reflex. Like a flinch.
"You fucking bitch." His voice is high and tight. "You sent him after me? You sent a fucking psycho to my apartment?"
My phone is in my hand. The lamp is four steps away. My keys are in my bag. I run through the calculations the way I've been running calculations for three years; except this time the math involves something I've never factored in before. Physical danger.
"I don't know what you're—"
"Don't." He steps closer. I step back. "He broke my phone.
My laptop. My backup drive. He broke three of my fingers, Nadia.
Look at this." He holds up his right hand.
Two fingers are splinted crudely with tape and what looks like popsicle sticks.
"And he said if I ever contacted you again, he'd come back and finish it.
So I figured, why contact you? Why not just come find you? "
"Kyle, please. It's over. Just walk away."
"Over?" He laughs. High, brittle, unhinged. "You owe me. You've always owed me. Those photos were worth a fortune and your boyfriend destroyed everything. You think I'm just going to eat that?"
He grabs my arm. His grip is hard and desperate, the grip of a man with nothing left to lose. I try to pull back, but he's got my wrist and he's pulling me away from the lamp and into the darkness at the edge of the parking lot. My phone falls to the ground.
"Let go of me, or I swear to god I’ll scream.”
His laugh is cold and merciless. "You're going to get me my money. Every cent. Or I'll find another way to make your life hell. Your dad, your sister, your brother. I know where they live, Nadia. I know where you live. I've always known."
Panic floods through me. The old panic. The kind I thought was gone. He's dragging me across the parking lot toward a car I don't recognize, a beat-up sedan parked under the dead streetlight at the far end.
"Kyle, stop" I'm digging my heels in but he's bigger than me. "Someone will see."
"Nobody's here. Nobody's ever here when you close. I've watched you, Nadia. For weeks. I know your schedule better than you do."
He opens the passenger door of his car and shoves me toward it. I grab the frame and brace myself. My fingers slip on the metal.
"Get in the car."
"No. If you’d been watching me, you’d know my fiancé picks me up every night after my shift."
He hits me. Open palm, across the face. My head snaps to the side and the parking lot blurs. The taste of blood fills my mouth, sharp and metallic. My ears ring.
"Fuck you and your psycho fiancé. Get in the fucking car, Nadia."
He pushes me and I fall into the passenger seat. The door slams. I hear him run around to the driver's side. My hand finds the door handle but he's already in, already starting the engine, already hitting the locks.
The car pulls out of the parking lot and I watch Rosa's shrink in the side mirror. My bag is on the ground next to my phone.
Nobody knows where I am.