Page 28 of Crowned By the BRATVA Heir
Behind them, a woman in her thirties with a small girl on her lap.
Emma.
Emma, who let me clean a cut on her forehead with an alcohol wipe while she sat in a wrecked SUV singing to her unconscious mother. Emma, who waved at me from the arms of a paramedicwith a puppy band aid on her forehead. She's wearing a yellow dress, her dark hair is in two braids and she's looking around the church with the wide, fascinated expression of a child who has never been in a building this old.
Christina is standing beside her, holding her hand. Christina, who was barely conscious on a backboard the last time I saw her, whose vitals I wrote on her forearm in Sharpie. She's awake. She's alive. She's looking at me with an expression I can't name, something between gratitude and recognition, the look of a woman who knows she is here because the woman in the white dress made a decision on a freeway five weeks ago.
A man and woman near the end of the row. The paramedics. She catches my eye and nods, a single professional acknowledgment, the nod of someone who has worked enough emergencies to know what it means when the civilian on scene has already triaged and tagged before the rig arrives.
And at the end of the pew, in uniform, Officer Delgado. He's standing with his hands folded and he looks at me and nods in a gesture that's so sincere that I have to press my lips together to keep from making a sound.
They're all here. Every person I touched on that freeway. Every stranger whose arm I wrote on and whose hand I held. They're sitting in a church on a Saturday afternoon because someone found them and invited them and asked them to come.
The tears fall. I don't stop them. I don't try. They slide down my face and hit the ivory silk and darken two small spots on the bodice that will dry by the reception, and I don't care, because the church is full. My side is full. The left side of this church, the side I told Nick would be empty, the side that represented every gap Jason carved and every connection I lost and every person I failed to hold onto, is full.
Dr. Mehta's arm tightens against mine. She can feel me shaking.
"Steady," she murmurs. The same word she uses in the clinic when a needle goes in. The same calm, the same warmth. "I've got you."
I walk.
One step. Then another. The aisle is short, maybe thirty feet, and every foot of it is lit by colored light from the windows and lined on both sides by faces that are watching me with something that can’t be measured with words.
I walk past Emma, who tugs on Christina's sleeve and whispers something, and Christina bends down and whispers back, and Emma's face breaks into a grin that is missing two front teeth and is the most beautiful thing I've ever seen in my life.
I walk past Sarah, who is crying into a tissue already smeared with mascara. She mouths two words as I pass.Love you.Two words from a friendship I thought I'd lost through silence and distance. A friendship that survived anyway because some things are harder to break than we believe.
I walk past Ruby, who presses her hand over her heart once and holds it there.
I walk past Officer Delgado, who nods again, steady and sure.
I walk toward Nick.
He's watching me. He's been watching me since the doors opened, his eyes tracking every step, his face doing something I've never seen it do before. The control is still there. The composure, the precision, the mask that the Pakhan wears in every room he enters. But underneath it, visible only because I know where to look, something is cracking open. A softness in the grey of his eyes. A tension in his jaw that isn't anger. Astillness in his body that isn't control, it's restraint. The restraint of a man who is holding himself together because if he lets go right now, in this church, in front of his captains and his men and the woman who helped strangers on a freeway, he will come apart.
I reach the altar. Dr. Mehta releases my arm. She squeezes my hand once, then steps to the left and stands beside her wife. Anita takes her hand, and they hold each other the way people hold each other when they are watching something that reminds them of their own beginning.
I turn to Nick.
He takes my hands in his warm and steady grip.
"You did this," I whisper. "All these people."
"Dmitri did the logistics."
My eyes flit to Dmitri but he only nods while I blink back tears of gratitude.
Father Konstantin begins to speak.
Nick says his vows. I say mine.
We both say ‘I do.’
He slides a band onto my finger, next to his mother's ring, and the two sit together, the diamond and the gold, and they look like they've always been there.
"You may kiss your bride," Father Konstantin says.
Nick puts his hand on the back of my neck. The weight of his palm against my spine, his thumb in the dip at the base of my skull. The same hold. The same place. The hold that saysI have youin a language that predates every language I know of.
He kisses me.
The church erupts. Clapping, cheering, a sound that fills the stone walls and the arched ceiling and settles into the stainedglass and the wood and the bones of the building the way all the important sounds do.
Somewhere in the third pew, Emma shouts, "She's the band aid lady!" and the whole church laughs, and Nick smiles against my mouth, and I smile against his. The laughter, the light, the gold locket against my heart, the ring on my finger and the man in front of me all become one thing. One single, irreducible thing that I will carry for the rest of my life.
