Page 36 of Bratva Bride
The anxiety that had lived in her body for days was melting. I could see it in the way her spine lengthened, the way her otherhand unclenched from the fist it had been since breakfast. A southern stingray rippled past, and she tracked it too, her whole body turning to follow its movement. Then a sand tiger shark, teeth visible but somehow not threatening in this controlled environment.
"They're so calm," she whispered. Her breath fogged the glass slightly. "Like nothing bad could ever touch them in there."
The innocence of it—the pure longing for that kind of safety—made my chest tight. She wanted to be the turtle. Protected by thick glass and four hundred thousand gallons of carefully controlled environment. No predators that could actually reach her. No threats that water and acrylic couldn't stop.
"The jellyfish are even better," I said, careful to keep my voice soft enough not to break whatever spell the water had cast. "More hypnotic."
She turned to look at me, and for a second I saw curiosity instead of fear in her dark eyes. "Jellyfish?"
"Come on."
I led her through the aquarium, past the touch tanks where the school group was shrieking about horseshoe crabs, past the penguin exhibit where the grandfather was still lecturing, to the circular room that always felt like stepping into someone else's dream.
The jellyfish gallery was darkness punctuated by light. Cylindrical tanks floor to ceiling, each one backlit by LEDs that shifted through colors like slow breathing. Pink to purple to blue to green and back again. The jellyfish pulsed in rhythm that had nothing to do with the lighting and everything to do with existence distilled to its simplest form. Move or die. Pulse or sink. No thoughts, no anxiety, just the ancient rhythm of survival.
Anya stopped three steps into the room. Her mouth opened slightly, closed, opened again. No words came out. Her eyeswent wide trying to take in everything at once—the Pacific sea nettles trailing tentacles like wedding veils, the moon jellies pulsing in perfect synchronization, the upside-down jellyfish that looked like flowers blooming in water.
"It's like watching thoughts move," she finally whispered. “Calm thoughts.”
She moved to the nearest tank, a column of crystal jellies that caught the shifting light and threw it back like living prisms. Her hand came up again, not quite touching the glass but hovering close enough that I could see her fingers tremble slightly. The purple light turned her skin lavender. Made her look otherworldly. Like she belonged here among the beautiful, dangerous things that survived by being exactly what they were.
A bench sat in the center of the room, curved to match the circular space, positioned so you could see all the tanks at once. Anya sank onto it like her legs had given up on standing. I sat beside her, careful to maintain distance—six inches between us, close enough to feel her presence but not close enough to seem like I was crowding her.
We watched in silence as the colors shifted. Pink washing over her face, then blue that made her look like she was already underwater. The moon jellies in the tank directly across from us moved in patterns that seemed choreographed but were really just physics. Water displacement. Primitive nervous systems firing. The kind of simplicity that humans made complicated by thinking too much.
"I used to dream about jellyfish," Anya said suddenly. Her voice was different here. Softer. Less guarded. "When I was young. Thirteen, maybe fourteen. I'd dream I was one. No bones to break. No solid parts to grab. Just floating. Transparent. Dangerous if you got too close but beautiful from the right distance."
She pulled her knees up onto the bench, making herself smaller, but it didn't look defensive this time. More like she was trying to fit entirely into this moment. This blue-green-pink space where nothing had to mean anything except what it was.
"My father hated that I read about marine biology," she continued. "Said it was useless. What good was knowing about jellyfish when I should be studying cryptography? But I'd hide the books under my mattress. Read them with a flashlight after he locked my door at night. Memorized everything. Box jellyfish have twenty-four eyes. Can you imagine what it must be like to live like that? Immortal jellyfish can revert to polyp stage and start their life cycle over. Some deep-sea species create their own light."
She was giving me pieces of herself. Small ones, wrapped in marine biology facts, but still more than she'd offered before. I wanted to tell her she could study whatever she wanted now. Buy every marine biology book ever written. Get a degree in it if that's what made her happy. But that felt too much like promises I might not be able to keep, so I stayed quiet and let her talk.
"That one," she said, pointing to a tank of flower hat jellies, their fluorescent ribbons trailing like party streamers, "those can eat things larger than themselves. They just wrap around their prey and digest it slowly. Horrifying. But also kind of impressive."
A small smile touched her lips. The first real smile I'd seen from her that wasn't performed or forced. Just genuine amusement at carnivorous jellyfish.
We sat there as time became irrelevant. Five minutes or fifty, I couldn't tell and didn't care. The school group's noise faded to distant static. The world narrowed to this room, these lights, the steady pulse of creatures that didn't think about treaties or fathers or failed wedding nights. Anya's breathing had synchronized with the jellyfish movement—in with thecontraction, out with the expansion. Her body had uncurled slightly, leaning back against the bench, finally not ready to run.
"Thank you," she said quietly, still watching the flower hat jellies. "For this. For knowing I needed—" She paused, searching for words. "—something that wasn't that penthouse."
"We can come back," I offered. "Whenever you want. They're open year-round."
She turned to look at me then, and the shifting lights played across her face like she was underwater with the jellyfish. Safe behind glass that no one could break.
“Come. Let’s get some food.”
Junior'sRestaurantsquattedonFlatbush Avenue Extension like a time capsule that refused to acknowledge the last forty years had happened. Red leather booths cracked from decades of use. Black-and-white checkered floors that had seen everything from first dates to mob meetings. The famous cheesecake displayed in the window like the Mona Lisa of diabetes. The whole place smelled like sugar and grease and that particular New York nostalgia that came from surviving when everything around you got demolished for condos.
The hostess—sixty if she was a day, red hair that definitely came from a bottle—looked at us like she'd seen everything and we didn't even rank as interesting. "Two?"
"Corner booth," I said, slipping her a fifty. "If you have one."
"Sugar, for fifty bucks you can have whatever booth you want."
She led us through the maze of tables, past families destroying plates of pancakes at two in the afternoon, past old men reading newspapers like the internet hadn't been invented, to a corner booth that felt like a fortress. High backs that blocked the viewfrom other tables. Position where I could see the entrance but Anya was hidden from anyone walking by. Perfect.
Anya slid in across from me, and something about the way the red leather creaked, the way the table was slightly sticky despite being wiped down, made her relax fractionally. This wasn't her father's world of white tablecloths and crystal. Wasn't my world of carefully curated modern furniture. This was neutral territory where the only thing that mattered was whether you wanted your eggs over easy or scrambled.
