My husband Hated My Name

My father walked me down the aisle like a man delivering a debt.

St. Casimir's was freezing, the way old Chicago churches always are in November, and the radiators clanked like they were trying to warn me. Along both walls stood men in black coats with their hands folded in front of them. Nobody folds their hands that way unless there is something under the coat they would rather be holding.

"Nadia." My father's voice cracked on my name. "Look at me."

I did not want to look at him. If I looked at him I would cry, and I had promised myself in the car that I would not cry in front of the Vargas. I kept my eyes on the altar and the flowers I had not chosen and the man waiting beside them.

"Whatever happens in that house," Dad said, so quietly the organ almost covered it, "keep your eyes open and your mouth shut."

"That's your whole speech?"

"It's the only one I have left."

Gordon Whitlock had been an accountant for forty years and a coward for ten. Ten years ago he had sat in a federal courtroom and given the government everything it needed to put Viktor Varga in prison. Viktor died there two winters later. Since then our families had buried four Whitlocks and six Vargas, and I had stopped counting funerals around the time I turned twenty. Last month, someone with more patience than sense had put a treaty on a table. The treaty had one condition, and the condition was me.

So here I was, twenty-six years old, in a dress that cost more than my car, walking toward the son of the man my father had destroyed.

Elias Varga did not turn around until I was almost beside him. When he did, I forgot how to breathe for half a second, and I hated myself for it. He was tall and dark-haired with a jaw that looked like it had never been asked to relax. His eyes were a flat winter grey. There was a half-healed cut across his knuckles, and he stood like a man at a bank who has already decided to refuse the loan.

He did not look at my face. He looked at my hands, and then past me at my father, and what I saw in his expression was not anger. Anger would have been warmer. It was patience, the kind that waits ten years.

In the front pew on his side sat a young woman in a black dress, at a wedding. She had his eyes and none of his control. When I met her stare, she let her gaze travel slowly from my veil down to my shoes, the way a tailor measures a body. I understood that this was Mira, his sister, and that she had been seventeen when her father died.

On my side of the aisle, my uncle Desmond sat with his legs crossed and a small, pleasant smile on his face. Desmond smiled at everything. He smiled at christenings and at hospital waiting rooms. I had never once seen him look surprised.

The priest cleared his throat. He was an old man with trembling hands, and he kept glancing at the coats along the walls.

"Dearly beloved," he began, and for the next twelve minutes I heard the words without understanding any of them. I said yes when I was supposed to. I turned when I was told to turn. I slid a ring onto a finger that did not help me do it. The ring he gave me was plain gold and heavier than it should have been, and it settled on my hand like a handcuff.

When it was his turn to speak the vows, Elias said them without any expression at all. "I, Elias, take you, Nadia, to be my wife." His voice was low and even. It was the voice of someone reading a grocery list to a stranger. "To have and to hold, from this day forward."

I wanted to scream that I was not a thing to be had or held. I said my own vows in a voice I did not recognize, steady and small.

"You may now kiss the bride," the priest said.

Nobody in the church moved. Even the radiators seemed to hold their breath.

Elias stepped closer. I could smell cedar and cold air and something sharper underneath, like gun oil. He tilted my chin up with two fingers, not gently and not roughly, the way you would inspect something you had bought. His mouth brushed mine for less than a second. It was not a kiss. It was a signature.

Then his lips moved to my ear, and what he said was meant for no one else in the world.

"I married you to watch your family burn," he whispered. "Smile for the cameras, Mrs. Varga."

My blood went cold and then hot. Somewhere behind us a photographer's flash went off, and I did what I had been raised to do in rooms full of dangerous men. I smiled.

It was the best smile of my life. It had teeth in it.

The organ roared. The guests rose. Elias took my hand and led me back down the aisle, and I felt every eye in the church on the back of my neck. I looked for my father and found him in the front pew with his head in his hands. I looked for Desmond and found him watching us go, still smiling that pleasant, patient smile.

And then I looked for Mira, and she was not looking at me at all. She was looking at the guests behind me, the faces in the pews, one by one, slowly, like someone searching for a thief.

The church doors opened and the November light hit my face. I had been a wife for forty seconds, and I was fairly sure that someone in that church was already planning my funeral.