Vows Written in Blood I: A Room with No Lock

The dress weighs more than I do, probably, and Sienna’s lacing the back of it tight enough that I feel my ribs move under the silk.

There’s a number stuck in my head that I can’t get rid of -- eleven thousand dollars, somebody told me that at the fitting in March.

I don’t know why that’s the detail that won’t leave, out of everything, but it won’t.

Eleven thousand dollars of surrender, laced up my spine by a girl who’s been doing my hair since we were both ten.

I don’t say that part out loud.

“Breathe,” Sienna says, like that’s a thing I still remember how to do.

I try.

It comes out wrong.

I genuinely don’t know what to do with my own lungs right now.

In the mirror my face is doing the thing it’s been doing all week -- going still, going composed.

While the rest of me is somewhere else entirely, somewhere underground, screaming into rock.

In four hours I marry a man who has killed people.

I keep saying that sentence to myself like it’ll eventually mean something.

It doesn’t yet.

My father told me last night.

Not allegedly -- he doesn’t deal in allegedly, never has, it’s one of maybe three things I actually respect about him.

He just said it, two fingers of scotch he didn’t offer me, sitting in that armchair he’s had since before I was born.

“Damiano Volkov shot Marcus Hale when he was nineteen.”

Then nothing for a second.

I remember the nothing more than the sentence, honestly.

“Three bullets.”

Another gap.

He was watching for something on my face, and I hope he didn’t get it.

“He didn’t hesitate, Vittoria. That’s what you need to understand. He doesn’t hesitate.”

My father always says the full name. Damiano.

Like it’s a charge being read out in court, not a person.

I’d find out soon enough that almost nobody else calls him that.

But I didn’t know it yet, sitting there, so for one more night he was just Damiano Volkov, three bullets, no hesitation, a sentence with a body count attached to it.

I didn’t flinch.

Three nights of practice, lying there rehearsing every terrible thing he might say so none of it would land fresh.

Mostly it worked.

“Good,” I said. Flat. “Then he’ll understand why I won’t hesitate either.”

He laughed.

That threw me more than the bullets did, if I’m being honest -- the actual sound of my father laughing.

For one second there was something on his face. Pride, maybe.

Or relief that I wasn’t going to cry and make a scene in front of people whose last names I’d have to remember by tomorrow.

I didn’t tell him what happened after he left the room.

Bathroom floor.

Some amount of time I didn’t count.

That one’s mine. He doesn’t get that one.

* * *

Here’s what I actually know about the Volkovs, which is less than people assume, given the wedding: dinner-table warnings, mostly.

And the specific shape of a silence whenever someone almost says the name Nikolai and then doesn’t.

They don’t lose.

Empire’s the wrong word for what he built -- too clean, too official-sounding for what I understand it actually is.

But he built it out of other families’ wreckage, and his son is supposed to be the sharper version.

I don’t actually know if that’s true.

I’ve never met the son until today, technically, if you don’t count a photograph from a business gala four years ago that my father kept for reasons I never asked about.

Ten years ago something happened between our families.

A shipment, a body, maybe both -- I’ve never gotten the full version, and at this point I’m not sure anyone alive has it either.

These things get edited every time they’re retold, shaved down to whoever’s telling it looking better.

The result was a decade so brittle that apparently everyone just agreed, at some point, it would end in a wedding or a funeral.

They picked the wedding.

Mine, obviously.

I keep having to remind myself it’s actually mine and not something I’m watching happen to a character in a story someone’s telling me.

Sienna’s watching me in the mirror. She’s known me since we were eight.

“You’re doing the thing.”

“What thing.”

“The thing where you leave. Behind your eyes.”

She finishes the laces, turns me away from the mirror, and I let her.

Grateful, because I genuinely don’t think I can look at that face again before this is over.

“Tell me what he actually said last night. Not the version you gave me over coffee.”

I could lie.

I’m good at it, mostly because I’ve had so much practice lying to myself first.

But Sienna’s never once let me get away with it, and today doesn’t feel like the day to start trying.

So I tell her.

The ledger. The files.

Names and numbers that would prove what happened ten years ago wasn’t a fair fight -- that the Volkovs set it up, that my father would have leverage forever if I found it.

“And if you get caught.”

“Fourth bullet, probably.”

I mean for it to come out light.

It doesn’t, quite.

There’s a half-second where neither of us says anything and the room just sort of holds its breath around us.

Then I add, “I’m not actually going to think about that part right now,” which isn’t an answer, but it’s the truest thing I’ve said all morning.

“That’s not funny, Tori.”

“I know.”

Here’s a thing I haven’t said to anyone, not even her, and I’m not sure I can say it now either.

Except that it’s sitting in my chest taking up room whether I name it or not: underneath the fear there’s something with its elbows out.

I do not know what to call it.

Purpose sounds too tidy, too much like something out of a movie about people braver than me.

It’s smaller than that and uglier than that.

My whole life I’ve been a thing waiting to be used for something -- a name on paper, a dress, proof the Castellanos could produce something worth trading.

And I watched what twenty years of that did to my mother.

Watched her go quiet in a way that wasn’t peaceful.

It was just absence, until I genuinely couldn’t tell you by the end what she liked, or wanted, or who she actually was underneath all the performing for other people.

I was fifteen when I swore, lying in the dark in my old room down the hall from hers, that it wouldn’t happen to me.

And here I am anyway.

Same dress, basically. Same hallway, different family waiting at the end of it.

The only thing that’s supposedly different is that this time there’s a job folded inside the dress.

And I’ve decided -- or repeated it to myself enough times that it has started wearing the shape of a decision -- that having a job makes this not the same thing that happened to her.

I don’t know if that’s true.

I just know it’s the only version that gets me standing up off this chair.

* * *

The ceremony is mostly gone already, even though it hasn’t ended yet, if that makes any sense.

I’m aware of things happening and aware, simultaneously, that I won’t actually remember most of them by tonight.

A church my family doesn’t believe in but uses anyway.

Too many lilies, that smell that’s going to mean this day forever now, whether I want it to or not.

My father’s hand under my elbow, more steering than supporting.

Somewhere around the hymn -- second one, maybe, though I’m genuinely not certain, I might be inventing that detail to have something to hold onto -- the thought comes sharp and mean: this is probably the most honest part of the whole day.

Him physically aiming my body toward the front of the church.

If he let go I don’t actually know what I’d do.

I’ve wondered about that more than once since.

Then I see him, and it’s almost funny, how unprepared I am for him to just be a person standing there.

Black suit.

The kind that fits like he’s never had to think about what anything costs.

Dark hair, a jaw I notice and then immediately feel stupid for noticing, given the context.

I’d built an entire monster in my head over the last three days out of that name my father kept saying -- Damiano, Damiano, three bullets, no hesitation.

And what’s actually standing at that altar is just a man with a face that gives away nothing, watching me come toward him.

I don’t know that yet, walking toward him.

Right now he’s still just Damiano Volkov, three bullets, the man at the end of the aisle.

That’s the name I’m going to keep using for him in my head until someone tells me different.

It feels safer that way. Easier to hate a name than a face.

I know that nothing on his face, though. The giving-away-nothing kind.

I have the same one.

It’s strange, recognizing your own particular brand of hiding on somebody else’s face from thirty feet away.

My father hands me off like he’s signing for something delivered to the wrong address.

I take the offered arm because the alternative is a scene in front of forty people, most of whom, I’m fairly sure, came hoping to watch this fail.

“You’re shaking,” Damiano says.

Quiet.

First words he’s ever said directly to me, and they’re an observation about my body, stored away, probably, for later.

“I’m not.”

His mouth gives one dangerous twitch, so brief I immediately doubt I saw it.

“No,” he says. “Of course not.”

He doesn’t push it.

I’d braced myself for him to use it -- first move in whatever this turns out to be.

Instead he just lets it sit there between us and moves on.

I don’t know what to do with that, so I do nothing, which is apparently what I do with most things lately.

The priest says words I’m only half hearing.

Union. Two families. Peace through marriage.

I’m standing in eleven thousand dollars of silk thinking about ledgers and bullets and my mother’s eyes near the end.

When it’s my turn to speak the words come out clean. No shake.

First time all day the outside actually matches something underneath that’s true: I will not lose.

I mean that one all the way down.

Damiano says his vows back to me, low, unhurried, not rushing a single word of it.

Right at the end -- right before the priest gets to the word bound, right before forty people start clapping in a way that sounds less like joy and more like a verdict being read out.

He leans in close enough that it’s just for me.

“Whatever you’re looking for in my house.”

A beat.

“Be careful where you look first.”

I don’t know what my face does.

I genuinely don’t -- I wasn’t watching it from the outside the way I usually am, and that scares me more than the sentence itself.

The fact that for one second I lost the thread of my own performance.

He’s already pulling back, already turning toward the first wave of congratulations.

Like he hasn’t just told me, on our wedding day, in front of everyone we both know, that he already knows exactly why I’m here.

It’s at the reception, twenty minutes later, glass of champagne I’m not drinking sweating in my hand, that I hear someone call him Dante.

Easy, casual, the way you’d say the name of someone you’ve known your whole life.

Something in me files the correction without my permission.

Dante. That’s apparently who he is, to people who aren’t trying to make him sound like a charge sheet.

I test the name privately, once, the way you’d test ice before putting your weight on it.

It fits him better than the other one did.

I resent that a little, for reasons I don’t examine too closely.

I smile at people.

Someone tells me I look beautiful.

Someone else tells me I’m lucky, and I say thank you in a voice that sounds, almost, like it belongs to me.

Underneath all of it -- and I mean really underneath, the part nobody in this building gets within ten feet of -- there’s just one fact sitting there, taking up all the space.

He knows. He let me walk down that aisle anyway.

I don’t fall asleep that night wondering if he’s dangerous.

My father already answered that one for me, days ago, over scotch he didn’t share.

I fall asleep -- eventually, somewhere past three -- wondering why a man like that would let me do it anyway.