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“I am,” I say, sliding into the dark interior of the car waiting at the curb. “I have a bride to get back to.”

I let Alexei’s secrets go, for now. My hands are clean, the dark is quiet, and Cora is waiting in my bed.

The church is full.

I’m standing at the altar facing the back doors, watching the heavy oak frame for any sign of movement, staring past three hundred people who have gathered to see me get married. I haven’t looked at a single face in the pews.

Alexei is at my right shoulder, wearing a gray suit and cravat with a white floral buttonhole that matches mine. I have seen this man in prison-issue orange. I have seen his vor tattoos and his body covered in blood. We’ve never once worn suits like these. We don’t look wrong, exactly. But we look like weapons that someone has decided to gift-wrap.

My gaze drops to my wrist for the fourth time in ten minutes.

“If you look at your watch one more time,” Alexei murmurs, “I’m taking it off you.”

“I’m not nervous.”

“I didn’t say you were.”

“You’re thinking it.”

Stained-glass windows throw colored light across the stone floor in shifting pools of amber, blue, and deep red. There are flowers everywhere. Cora’s choice, simple and beautiful and entirely her.

The pews are full of people who, assembled in any other context, would make no sense together. Front and center on the left sits my family, who arrived from Russia three days ago. My father posed rigidly in his dark suit, his face carved from cold stone, but I can see pride shining in his eyes when they land on me. My sisters are sitting close together, their smiles radiant. And my mother, dabbing a lace handkerchief at the corners of her eyes, is already crying tears of happiness. They don’t entirely understand the man I’ve become because of Cora, but they came.

Dragan is in the third row on the left in his usual severe suit. Around him are people from Kosmos, people who never thought that Zevran Komarov would be standing at the altar.

Farther back I see Lorenzo Scava, in a pew with three more hard-looking men. Nestled safely between them, a rose between four thorns, is their woman; blonde and petite but no doubt fierce enough to handle all the dangerous men who love her.

On the right side are Anya, Katia, and Mila, luminous with joy for Cora. Behind them are faces I recognize from jobs. Women I pulled out of the worst moments of their lives, some of them with children now, some of them with husbands, all of them here because Cora asked them to be.

All these people are in one room, for us. For her.

I have never had an us before.

I check my watch.

“Komarov,” Alexei mutters.

I clench my fist and lower it.

The organ has been playing something soft for the last several minutes, and it’s still playing. She should be here by now. I’m not nervous; I’m simply acutely aware of how long it’s been since I’ve seen Cora, and I’m tensing over the unfounded possibility that—

The organ music changes.

The murmur in the pews drops away all at once, and the doors at the back of the church open.

My heart does a double-thump.

She’s there.

Ruslan on her left, Demyan on her right, both of them tall and proud beside her. Cora’s dress is white and voluminous. The flowers are right. All of it is right.

But it’s her face I can’t look away from.

She’s looking straight at me down the full length of the aisle, and the expression on her face is one I have never seen on anyone before in my life. Love, devotion, and happiness, but it’s more than that.

She’s looking at me like I’m where she’s safe.

After all the years of making herself small and invisible, she looked up and found me and decided: There. That’s where I belong.