BROOKLYN
The dress is the most beautiful thing I have ever wanted to set on fire.
It hangs on the back of the bathroom door exactly where he said it would be, and the second I unzip the garment bag I understand the whole sick point of it.
It’s lace. All ivory, hand-worked, the kind of thing that costs more than a car, and it is almost entirely see-through. There’s a panel sewn over each breast, a panel low across the front, and a panel for the back. Everything else is sheer.
Put it on, and I’ll be standing in front of a room full of strangers wearing the suggestion of modesty and nothing else.
It isn’t a wedding dress. It’s a display case.
I get it. I’m not stupid.
The pictures he keeps promising my father aren’t going to say your daughter is safe and married.
They’re going to say look what I have, look what I can do to her, look how little you can stop me.
He wants my dad to open a text and see his daughter turned into a thing to be looked at. A trophy in glass.
For one hot second I consider walking back out there in my own jeans and telling him to shoot me.
Then I think about my dad’s face. My mom’s hands.
My little brother, Antonio, who is eleven and brave.
I think about the man out there meaning every word he says, about the windows in that room with no balcony and the city beyond them that isn’t mine, and I do the math I’ve already done three times.
There’s no version of tonight where I fight my way out. There’s only the version where I stay alive, stay smart, and find the opening later. Every fighter knows you don’t win the match in the first ten seconds. You survive the first round. You learn him. You wait.
So I take off my clothes.
They took my boots and my phone and what was left of my dignity when they put me on that plane. They missed one thing, though. Small, flat, easy to miss if you’re not looking for something sharp, and they weren’t. I slide it in the back of an empty drawer. Not yet.
The lace settles over my skin and starts to prickle almost immediately.
A faint, familiar itch crawling up everywhere it touches, because of course it does, because my body wages a small private war against half the fabrics on earth.
I grit my teeth and ignore it. There are bigger problems than my skin tonight.
I look at myself in the mirror, and a stranger looks back. She’s pale and bare under all that delicate ivory, the pink diamond on my hand catching the light like it’s proud of itself.
The most beautiful thing anyone has ever put on me. I hate that some animalistic part of me notices.
When I open the door, the talking stops.
He’s standing in the center of the room in his black suit, and his eyes drag down the length of me, slow, and for half a heartbeat the cold mask slips. Something raw and starved moves across his face. There and gone, shoved back down before I can be sure I saw it.
But I saw it.
I file it with the ring that has a stone in my favorite color and the band that doesn’t itch and the way he says doll, in the box of things about this man that don’t add up.
“Beautiful,” he says, like a verdict.
“Drop dead,” I say, like a vow.
The corner of his mouth twitches. “Later. Come here, brat. You’re keeping the Father from his bed.”
I don’t move. “It’s a message. The dress. You want my father to open the message and see an object instead of his daughter. You want him to feel small, to know you reached into his house and there was nothing he could do.”
“And here I thought you weren’t paying attention.”
“I always pay attention.” I hold his stare instead of covering myself with my arms, because covering myself is what he wants, and I would rather die than give this man one single thing he wants. “It’s a lot of theater for a man who keeps insisting my family doesn’t scare him.”
Something flickers in his jaw, there and gone. I file it with the rest.
“Walk,” he says, “or I carry you, and the carrying ends up in the photos too.”
I walk.
The priest, when I cross to stand beside the monster, looks like he’d rather be anywhere on the planet but here.
His Bible trembles in his hands, and I finally understand the staging of it.
Because the second the old man opens his mouth to begin, my groom lifts the gun, unhurried, and points it not at me but at him.
“For motivation,” he tells the priest pleasantly. “Skip nothing. I want it valid.”
So that’s how I get married. Barefoot, in a dress made of nothing, my skin beginning to inflame, beside a man whose name I still don’t know, while he holds a pistol on the shaking priest reciting the words that are supposed to bind two people who love each other.
“Dearly beloved,” the priest croaks, and it would almost be funny if it weren’t happening to me.
“You can skip the part where anyone objects,” I tell the priest. “It’ll only upset him.”
“Brooklyn.” His voice is warning, a bite and a caress at once.
“What? I’m participating.”
He rushes it. I don’t blame the old man. He gets to the part that matters fast, and that’s when I finally hear it.
“Do you, Lorik Kovaci, take this woman—”
Lorik.
And then the rest. Kovaci.
The name goes through me like cold water. I was a little girl the last time I heard Kovaci, and I heard it in the voice people use for monsters under the bed. And I know what the name Kovaci did to my aunt Ciera.
Not the details, I was never handed those, and I never went looking for them.
But I know a Kovaci got his hands on her when she was a girl, younger than I am now, and did the kind of thing to a person that a family never says out loud.
You learn it anyway. From the careful way everyone moves around her.
From the particular softness in my uncles’ voices when they speak only to her.
The man who did it is dead; they made certain of that.
But the name outlived him. And now the name is about to be mine.
That’s the real cold flooding me while the priest waits.
Not only that I might die in this room. It’s the older fear, the one my whole family has carried most of my life and never once said aloud: that this is what a Kovaci is for.
That whatever happened to aunt Ciera has only been waiting its turn to happen to me.
I’m marrying the monster under the bed. He has a face after all, and it’s the most beautiful one I’ve ever seen, and that is so much worse.
“I do,” Lorik says, watching me realize it. Enjoying every second of it.
“And do you, Brooklyn De Salvo—” The priest’s eyes dart to the gun, then to me, pleading. “Take this man, to have and to hold, from this day forward…”
The whole room waits. His friend, lurking by the bar with a phone already up. The priest, gray-faced. And Lorik, who has gone very still, the gun steady on the holy man but every ounce of his attention on me, like my next word is the only thing in the world that has ever mattered to him.
Like he’s afraid of it.
That’s the thing that decides me, in the end. Not the gun. The fear. Because a man who’s afraid of your answer is a man with a weakness, and a weakness is an opening, and an opening is a way out. I’ll give him his two words. And someday I’ll use it to bury him.
“I do,” I say, and smile at him while I plan his end.
“The rings,” the priest whispers.
I already have the engagement ring on. Lorik takes my hand, his fingers warm, careful, wrong, and turns the pink diamond so it sits straight, then slides a thin band wrapped in more diamonds next to it.
I push something cold and plain onto his finger because the priest tells me to and because the sooner this is over the sooner I can breathe.
“By the power vested in me,” the old man says, almost weeping with relief, “I now pronounce you husband and wife. You may—” He stops. Just a breath, his eyes on the gun. “You may kiss the bride.”
Lorik holsters the weapon at last.
“Don’t,” I warn him, low, just for us.
“I have to,” he murmurs back, stepping into me, one hand sliding to cradle the back of my skull like I’m something breakable. “It has to be real.”
He kisses me.
And here is the part I will never tell a living soul: it does not feel like being kissed by a stranger.
It feels like coming home to a house I’ve never been inside.
His mouth is sure and slow and devastating, and my whole stupid traitorous body leans into it before my brain can stop it.
A low warm pull unspools in my chest that I have felt exactly once before, in the dark, against a man without a face.
For one humiliating second I forget the gun and the dress and the city that isn’t mine.
For one second I kiss him back like I’ve been waiting for it.
Then I catch myself and bite his lip hard enough to taste copper.
He pulls back an inch, eyes almost black and pupils blown, and licks the blood off with something that is absolutely not anger.
“There’s the woman I married,” he breathes.
“Kiss me again,” I say sweetly, “and next time I aim lower.”
“Promises, wife.”
I want to ask him why kissing him felt like that. I want to ask why a man I met half an hour ago tastes like a secret I’ve been keeping for well over a year. I don’t, because I’m afraid of the answer, and because some things you don’t say out loud or they become real.
“Photos,” Lorik says without looking away from me.
His friend crosses the room. “Smile, Mrs. Kovaci,” he says.
I don’t, but the flash goes off anyway. Me in my glass-case dress, my new husband’s hand splayed possessive across my bare lower back, the ring screaming pink between us.
Once. Twice. A handful of frames of the worst night of my life, dressed up to look like the best.
“You could try to look less like a hostage,” Casimir says, studying the screen.
“I am a hostage.”
“Details.” He angles his head. “You photograph like a dream, though. He’s going to lose his mind.”
“Which one of them?” I ask, unsure why.
“All of them,” Lorik says, and takes the phone.
Lorik swipes, then types. I watch his thumb move and I know exactly where those pictures are going.
To a brownstone in New York City where my mom is pacing angrily.
To my dad, who has never lost anything in his life until tonight, until me.
To a mafia boss who is already planning where he’s going to carve through flesh and muscle and tendons.
“It’s done,” Lorik says quietly, and hits send.
Somewhere across a few hundred miles, my family’s phones light up with proof that the Albanians took something back.
And Lord help me, the worst part isn’t the dress, or the gun, or even the name.
It’s that my mouth is still warm, and I can’t stop running my tongue over the place where I bit him, chasing the taste.