18 MONTHS LATER
A big wedding. The dumbest thing he’d ever agreed to. Anton yanked at his tie and peeked out the back of his mother’s house. Half of Spokane was out there.
Well, it was only 30 or so people. But still. That was a lot of people for Anton.
Anything for AJ, he reminded himself. She’d wanted a white wedding. And she’d wanted to wait until she’d lost the baby weight. So, here they were.
“Your Mama gets what Mama wants,” Anton whispered to the baby in his arms as he ducked away from the back window so he wouldn’t have to look at the guests anymore. Looking down at his son soothed him. Andrei had brown eyes and brown hair, just like his Papa. But his eyes were heavy lidded and sleepy like AJ’s. Unable to stop himself, Anton pressed a kiss to his little guy’s chubby, sticky cheek.
“Blech, Andrei. Bananas?” Anton wiped the sticky mess off his mouth.
“Okay,” Katya said, charging into the room. “I take boy. Your wife is ready to marry you.”
Katya had said ‘wife’ and not ‘bride’ because the only way that Anton had been able to wait 18 months to marry AJ had been to drag her down to city hall and get the papers signed about a day after everything with Navuka had gone down. She’d agreed, as long as they could still have a big, white wedding ceremony.
Anton reluctantly passed off his son to his mother, a surge of love bursting through him as he watched the baby’s fuzzy little head bob away.
He rarely had trouble with his beast anymore. Something about Andrei’s presence in Anton’s life had deeply calmed him. He wanted to be a gentle father. And he was.
Besides, if the beast ever wanted to come out and play, AJ was more than ready to put it in its place. They’d acquired a few more tools for her to use. Her favorite was still just good old, natural slapping, hair pulling, and biting. Anton smiled to himself as he absently trailed his fingers over the fresh bite mark she’d given him on his chest just that morning.
“Okay, little brother,” Maxim said from behind Anton as the music started to play outside. The guests quickly filed to their seats. “Now is time for you to go into hell for just 20 minutes. And stand in front of people. But then you will marry AJ. And then we party.”
He smacked a huge hand on Anton’s shoulder and pulled him in for the hug. Something that all his brothers had been doing since that day with Navuka. Touching him easily. Joking with him. Never taking it easy anymore. They had no fear or sadness when they were with him. In their eyes, he was healed.
And, Anton realized, maybe that was a big piece of the puzzle. To have your family treat you as if you were better. AJ certainly did. And Glory always had.
Ivy and Dora had been pretty mad for a few days that they’d all rushed off to fight Navuka without them. And, he knew, they’d been less quick to forgive their husbands’ injuries than his brothers were. But Dora and Ivy had gotten theirs.
“A girls’ trip,” they’d called it. They’d left for two weeks about a month after that day with Navuka. Gotten on a plane and flown to Europe. Their husbands, only minimally clued in to their itineraries, had been the grumpiest bastards imaginable for the entire two weeks. And when they’d gotten back, they’d said nothing about where they’d been.
A week later, international news had broken. The President of Belarus had been arrested by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity. Apparently, the enslavement and experimentation of a group of one’s constituents was frowned upon by the UN.
Dora, a former PI and current investigative journalist, apparently knew exactly whom to pass some extremely damning evidence to.
And that was all she was saying about it.
It meant that the Malashoviks could breathe easy for the first time since Anton had been captured. The head of Navuka had been imprisoned, most of its soldiers were scattered, and Sergei and Lana were dead.
They were safe. He was safe. Hell, they could even travel back to Belarus if they ever wanted. Anton would like to show AJ his home country someday. Take Andrei to see his roots.
“I’m going first,” Danil said, straightening his tie and stepping in front of his brothers.
“No,” Emin growled, dragging his brother back by the scruff of his neck. “Groom goes first. Then we go by age. You are last. And then bride.”
“I’m always last,” Danil grumbled.
But Anton ignored his brothers’ bickering. He took a deep breath and opened the door to the backyard. He felt the people turn to stare at him. But for once, it didn’t matter. Because he was stepping into his future. Walking forward into a life he never thought he’d be able to have.
***
Well, it was a miracle, AJ thought as she twirled in Maxim’s arms. She’d married Anton Malashovik. She could barely believe it.
She’d spent so long dreaming about him, and now he was hers. And she was his. She found herself effortlessly being twirled over to Ilya and she grinned back at Maxim. He was already running his hands over Ivy’s hair. It was a light, washed-out turquoise right now. She’d stopped dyeing it while she was pregnant. And boy, was she pregnant. She swayed back and forth with her husband, but it was about the best she could do on the dancing thing with her baby belly.
And that was nothing compared to Dora, who sat back on a deck chair, a pillow stuffed under her feet and a virgin daiquiri in one hand. “Danil!” Dora called. “Will you get me a burger the size of your head, please? The babies are being real assholes right now.”
Ilya and AJ grinned at each other. No one would ever forget the moment Dora had dropped it on Danil in the middle of dinner that they were pregnant with twins. A plane could have landed in his open mouth.
Just then, Glory danced past, two glasses of champagne in one hand and a newborn in the other. Emin had gotten her pregnant again about two months after she’d given birth to her first girl, Joy. Now she bounced baby Grace on her hip and shoved a glass of champagne into AJ’s hands.
“Here’s to pumping and dumping!” They clinked glasses as Emin came up behind Glory and slipped his hands around her waist.
Katya danced with Anton, Andrei snuggled between them where he slept at her chest. She had tears in her eyes, smiling down at her grandson, smiling at them all.
“Gram?” Linc asked from below, pulling at her dress. “Can I dance with you, too?”
Anton shoved the two of them together before he ducked onto the dance floor and tugged his wife away with him. He slipped into the house with her, closing the door behind them and flipping the lock.
“Anton, what-” AJ started.
Her words were cut off as Anton picked her right up, waded through the galoshes and discarded shoes on the floor of the laundry room and set her right up on the washing machine. The way he had so long ago.
Without preamble, he leaned in and kissed her. He could kiss her for the rest of his life. She was breathless when he pulled away.
“That is what I want to do so long ago. Put you up here and kiss you like that.”
“I thought you were mad at me that day,” she whispered, raising a hand to his hair. “That you were teaching me a lesson.”
“I thought that you were scared of me that day,” he replied. “That I disgust you.” He framed her face. “But really, even then, I love you so bad it hurt.”
“So much misunderstanding,” she shook her head, cast her eyes down. “For so long.”
“Autumn,” he whispered, taking her chin and bringing her eyes to meet his. “Our story is not sad anymore.”
“No,” she agreed, a smile creeping across her face as she nipped at his lip. “The sad part’s in the past.”
THE END