Chapter 5: The Wedding Night
The ceremony was not what she had ever imagined. It was a swift, austere affair conducted in the main room of the house, the air dense with the smell of roasted lamb and impending snow. An elderly imam, his voice a dry whisper, recited the necessary verses. Vanja, in a simple but new green dress provided by Nazmije, gave her responses in clear Albanian. Adem stood beside her, a granite pillar in his best wool suit, his fingers tightly wrapped around hers. His family watched, a sea of solemn, assessing faces.
When it was done, there was no cheer, only a collective release of breath. Hands were shaken, cheeks kissed. Nazmije gripped Vanja’s shoulders, her eyes shining with something harder than joy. “You are Jashari now,” she said, the words a brand. Adem’s brother Hamza clapped him on the back, a gesture that spoke of duty fulfilled as much as congratulations.
The celebration was a subdued meal. Men talked of border patrols and supply chains. The women kept glancing at the newlyweds, whispers hidden behind their hands. Vanja felt the locket, now on a new silver chain around her neck, burn against her skin beneath the dress. A ghost bride. A debt paid.
Finally, the crowd dissipated. Well-wishes given, the compound settled into a watchful quiet. Adem led her by the hand down a cold corridor she had never been allowed to enter. His wing. His room.
He opened a heavy wooden door. The space inside was a reflection of the man: functional, stark, charged with purpose. A large bed with a rough wool blanket, a massive wooden armoire, a table strewn with maps, ammunition boxes, and a half-empty bottle of rakia. His rifle leaned against the wall near the headboard, within easy reach. The air was cold and smelled of damp stone, gun oil, and him.
He closed the door and turned the old iron key in the lock. The click was final.
For a long moment, they just looked at each other in the guttering light of the single oil lamp on the table. The public masks were gone. Here, there was only the raw truth of their wanting, complicated by history, sanctified by paper and promise.
“Come here,” he said, his voice low.
She went to him. He didn’t kiss her. His hands came up to frame her face, his thumbs stroking her cheekbones, his eyes tracing her features as if memorizing them for a long siege.
“My wife,” he murmured, the word sounding foreign and profound on his lips.
“My husband,” she replied, and it was the truest, most terrifying thing she had ever said.
Then his mouth crashed down on hers. This kiss was different. It held no frantic secrecy, no fear of interruption. It was a claiming, deliberate and deep. He tasted of the sweet festival baklava and the bitter rakia. His hands slid down to the buttons of her dress, his big fingers surprisingly deft as he worked them open, one by one.
The green fabric pooled at her feet. She stood before him in only her white slip, the lace edge brushing her thighs. The chill of the room pebbled her skin. He stepped back, his gaze a physical heat as it traveled from the dark cascade of her hair over her shoulders, down the swell of her breasts barely contained by the silk, the curve of her waist, the generous flare of her hips. His breathing grew heavier.
“Take it off,” he commanded, his voice gravelly.
She hooked her thumbs in the straps and slowly pushed the slip down, letting it fall to join the dress. The cold air kissed her naked skin. She stood utterly exposed, the lamplight gilding her curves, shadowing the hollows.
A sound, almost a groan, escaped him. “Zoteri,” he whispered. God.
He closed the distance, his hands landing on her waist, hot and rough. He bent his head and took one nipple into his mouth, sucking deeply, his tongue circling the tightened peak. She cried out, her fingers tangling in his thick, dark hair. He lavished the same attention on the other breast, his beard scraping sensitively against her soft flesh. His hands slid down to grip the backs of her thighs, hiking her up until she was pinned against him, her legs wrapping around his waist. He carried her the few steps to the bed and laid her down on the rough wool blanket, following her down, covering her body with his.
He stripped quickly, his own clothing discarded in hurried heaps. In the lamplight, his body was a landscape of taut muscle and old scars. The dark hair on his chest trailed down his flat belly to the thick, heavy erection that rose from between his legs. He was fully, magnificently hard.
He knelt between her thighs, spreading her open with his hands. He looked his fill, his eyes dark with lust. “All mine,” he growled. “This sweet cunt. This heart. This history. Mine.”
He leaned down and replaced his gaze with his tongue.
She arched off the bed with a sharp gasp. It was not a gentle exploration. It was a devouring. He ate her with a starved intensity, his tongue fucking into her, flicking against her clit, sucking the very essence from her. He held her hips down when she bucked, his grip unyielding. The coarse hair of his beard rubbed against her inner thighs, a delicious abrasion. The filthy, wet sounds filled the room, and the obscenity of it, here in his Spartan commander’s room, pushed her higher.
“Adem… I’m going to…”
“Come,” he ordered, his voice muffled against her. “Come on my mouth. Give it to me.”
The climax ripped through her, violent and shattering. She screamed, her heels digging into the small of his back, her hands fisting in the blanket. He stayed with her, drinking every pulse, until she collapsed, boneless and trembling.
Before the last tremor had subsided, he was moving up her body. He kissed her, letting her taste herself on his lips and tongue. He reached for the rakia bottle on the bedside table, took a swift pull, then poured a small amount into his palm. The sharp, alcoholic scent mixed with the musk of sex. He slicked himself, the liquid cool before the heat of his skin warmed it.
He positioned himself at her entrance, the broad head of his cock pressing insistently against her slick, swollen flesh. He looked into her eyes, his own black with need and something fiercer—possession.
“You will feel me for days,” he promised, a raw edge in his voice.
He pushed in.
The stretch was immense, breathtaking. He filled her completely, a burning, perfect invasion. She cried out, her nails scoring his shoulders. He paused, buried to the hilt, letting her adjust, his body shaking with the effort of holding still.
“Ti je e imja,” he breathed. You are mine.
Then he began to move.
It was a hard, driving rhythm from the start. No tentative lovemaking. This was a consummation. Each deep thrust punched a choked sound from her throat. He shifted her hips, angling them, and the next push struck a spot within her that made her vision whiten.
“There! Oh God, there!”
He grunted, a feral sound of satisfaction, and hammered that same spot, over and over. The bedframe protested, creaking against the stone wall in a steady, frantic rhythm. His hand slipped between their sweat-slick bodies, his thumb finding her clit again, rubbing in tight, dirty circles.
“You take me so well,” he rasped, his breath hot against her ear. “This perfect, tight cunt was made for my cock. You feel that? How deep I am?”
“Yes,” she sobbed, her body coiling again, impossibly, around the brutal, glorious friction.
“Come again,” he demanded, his pace becoming punishing. “Come on your husband’s cock. Now.”
The second orgasm didn’t build; it detonated. It was deeper, more convulsive than the first, a white-hot seizure of pleasure that clenched around his driving length. She screamed, the sound raw and unchecked.
Her internal spasms tore his control from him. With a ragged roar, he slammed into her one last time, his body bowing as he emptied himself deep inside her in hot, pulsing jets. He collapsed atop her, his full weight driving her into the mattress, his face buried in her neck.
For long minutes, the only sounds were their ragged breaths and the pop of the oil lamp. Slowly, he softened and slid out of her. He rolled to the side, pulling her with him, wrapping her in the rough blanket and his arms. They were both slick with sweat, the smell of sex and alcohol and their joined bodies thick in the air.
He nuzzled her hair, his lips against her temple. “I hurt you?”
“No,” she whispered, and it was true. There was a delicious, worked-over soreness, a possession etched into her flesh. “It was perfect.”
He let out a long, exhausted breath. His hand came up to idly trace the line of her shoulder, her arm. His finger hooked the chain of the locket, pulling it from where it lay between her breasts. He didn’t open it. Just held the cool silver disc.
“My uncle would curse me,” he said, his voice a low rumble in the dark. “Or bless me. I don’t know.”
“He’d understand,” she said softly. “Love isn’t a betrayal. It’s a different kind of loyalty.”
He was silent for so long she thought he’d fallen asleep. Then he said, “The police will come tomorrow. Not for the checkpoint. For you. They watch. They know a Serb woman married a Jashari. They will see it as a provocation.”
The warmth of the afterglow chilled. “What will we do?”
“We will show them a happy bride,” he said, and his arms tightened around her. “We will give them nothing. But the world is getting smaller, Vanja. The walls are closing in.”
She turned in his arms to face him. In the dim light, his face was all stark planes and shadow, the face of a man already halfway to legend. “I’m not leaving you.”
A ghost of a smile touched his lips. “I know.” He kissed her forehead. “Sleep. Tomorrow is a new war.”
She lay curled against him, listening to his heartbeat steady into sleep. Her body thrummed with the echoes of him, satisfied and claimed. But her mind raced, darting from the cold silver against her skin to the rifle leaning by the bed, from the taste of him in her mouth to the sound of mortar fire she alone could hear coming.
Outside, the wind rose, whistling through the cracks in the stone, carrying the first, sharp flakes of snow. It whispered of a long winter, of a earth soon to be iron-hard, of a history that was no longer a distant page to be read, but a tide she was now standing in, waiting for it to break over them both.
The sound of his breathing, steady and deep, was the only truth in the dark. Vanja lay awake, her mind tracing the phantom lines of the map on his table. The locket was a cold weight between her breasts. His seed was a drying warmth inside her. These contradicting sensations anchored her to this moment, to this man who was now her husband in every raw, definitive sense.
“You’re thinking too loud,” his voice startled her, rough with sleep. His arm, heavy across her ribs, tightened.
“They’re coming tomorrow,” she said.
“Let them come.” He shifted, rolling onto his side to face her. In the near-dark, his eyes were black pools. “They will see a wife. A married woman. A fact. It changes the calculation.”
“Does it?”
He didn’t answer. Instead, his hand came up, Calloused fingers traced her eyebrow, the line of her jaw, her lips. The tenderness was a shock after the earlier bruising possession. “This was not the plan,” he murmured, more to himself than to her. “You were never part of the plan, Vanja Vranic.”
“What was the plan?”
“To fight. To die if necessary. To be a stone in their shoe forever.” His thumb brushed her lower lip. “Simple.”
“And now?”
He was silent for a long time. The wind battered the shutters. “Now it is not simple.”
He kissed her then, a slow, searching kiss that tasted of sleep and lingering raki. It was a kiss that asked a question. When he pulled back, his forehead resting against hers, he gave the answer. “Ti i doni,” he whispered. I love you.
The words, so quiet, detonated in the silent room. They were not part of any calculation. They were a surrender.
A tear broke free, tracing a hot path down her cheek into the rough wool of the blanket. “Adem.”
“Say it,” he breathed, his voice cracking. “Or don’t. It is already true.”
She clutched the locket in her fist, the metal biting into her palm. The dam within her, holding back the torrent of her reality, shattered. “I love you.” She sucked in a ragged breath. “And I am from the future.”
He went utterly still. Not a muscle moved. The air vanished from the room.
“The year 2020,” she rushed on, the words a frantic, whispered confession against his motionless lips. “I was researching my family. Why they left Kosovo in 1967. I fell asleep in my apartment in Basel and woke up in that one in Srbica. With a passport that shouldn’t exist. I knew your name. I knew what happens here.”
“You’re lying.” The words were flat, hollow.
“January twenty-fourth,” she hissed, squeezing her eyes shut. “The Special Police. They surround the compound. They give an ultimatum for you to surrender. You refuse. They use mortars. They fire anti-tank rockets into the houses.” Each detail was a shard of glass in her throat. “Hamza dies first, in the yard. Nazmije is shot in the chest retrieving his body. Your father... he fights from the basement until a grenade…”
“Stop.”
“You and your brother Sheref retreat to the upstairs room of the main house. You fight for sixteen hours. You run out of ammunition. They storm the room. You, Sheref, your son....” She couldn't say it. The images from the history books, the pixelated photos of the aftermath, swam behind her eyes. “They kill everyone. Fifty-eight people. They pile the bodies in the yard for the cameras. They make Prekaz an example.” She opened her eyes. His face was a mask of horror. “You become a legend. A dead one. Kosovo burns for another year, and then it burns for real, and thousands more die. Your legend helps, but you are not there to see it.”
He shoved himself upright, away from her, as if her skin had scorched him. He sat on the edge of the bed, his back a tense, broad wall. He put his head in his hands. The silence was a physical pressure.
“You are a spy,” he said finally, the words muffled.
“What spy would tell this story? What spy would marry you?” She sat up, the blanket falling. The cold air bit her skin. “The locket. Open it.”
He didn't move.
She grabbed it from the nightstand, her hands trembling. She pressed the catch. It sprang open. She thrust it toward him in the dim light. “Look. My grandmother, Shpresa. And her brother. Your uncle. The one you said would curse you or bless you.” Her voice broke. “I am the debt, Adem. I came back. I don’t know how, or why, but I am here. And I woke up on the road to you.”
He took the locket. He stared at the tiny, faded photographs for an eternity, his expression unreadable. When he looked at her, his eyes were liquid with a turmoil so profound it shook her. Disbelief warred with a dawning, terrible recognition. The specific, brutal details she had given—the tactics, the sequence, the intimacy of the tragedy—were beyond any intelligence report. They were the stuff of nightmares not yet dreamed.
“You know this,” he whispered. “You know this will happen.”
“In nine weeks. If nothing changes.”
A terrible, fractured sound escaped him. It was half-sob, half-laugh. He dragged his hands down his face. “God. Oh, God.” He looked at her, truly looked at her, seeing the ghost she was. “You are not just from another place. You are from another time.”
“Yes.”
“And you came here. To this.” He gestured around the room, at the rifle, at the map of his doomed homeland. “You married me. Knowing.”
“Because I love you. And because knowing is the only weapon I have.”
He surged forward, his hands clutching her face, his thumbs wiping at her tears. His own were now cutting tracks through the dust and sweat on his cheeks. He kissed her fiercely, a kiss of drowning desperation and staggering gratitude. “You could have run,” he rasped against her mouth. “You could have gone to Switzerland, to safety.”
“There is no safety. Not for me. Not now.” She grabbed his wrists, holding him to her. “Do you believe me?”
He rested his forehead against hers, his breath coming in short, sharp gusts. “The checkpoint. You knew. You spoke Albanian like one of us. You weren’t surprised by anything. You looked at me like you were remembering a ghost.” He pulled back, his gaze scanning her face as if reading a sacred text. “I believe you.” The words sealed their new, impossible reality. “What do we do?”
The question, practical and urgent, broke the spell of shock. He released her and stood, pacing the narrow space between the bed and the table. The commander was reasserting himself, channeling the paralyzing terror into motion. “We cannot evacuate. To leave Prekaz is to surrender the cause. It is to tell every Albanian in Drenica we are scared.”
“We don’t evacuate,” she said, her mind switching into a cold, focused gear she recognized from a hundred journalistic crises. “We prepare. We turn a massacre into a siege they cannot win.”
He stopped pacing. “How?”
She threw off the blanket and joined him at the table, naked and unselfconscious. Her finger stabbed the map, at the depiction of his family compound. “We dig. Not just bunkers. Tunnels. Interconnecting tunnels between every house, every barn. Escape routes into the woods they don’t know about. We stockpile not for days, but for months. Water, food, medicine, ammunition. We bring in more people, trusted people, now. We turn this place into a fortress, not a target.”
He stared at her, then at the map, his mind racing alongside hers. “The mortars. The rockets. The houses will not withstand them.”
“Then we don’t try.” She tapped the stone foundation depicted on the crude drawing. “We go deeper. We reinforce the basements with concrete, with railroad ties. We create firing positions they cannot spot. We make them waste their shells on empty buildings while we move underground.”
A wild, grim light ignited in his eyes. It was the light of a man given a second chance at his own destiny. “They will still come. In force.”
“Let them.” Vanja’s voice was steel. “But when they do, they won’t find a family hiding in a house. They’ll find an army waiting in a labyrinth. They won’t get a martyr in sixteen hours. They’ll get a war that bleeds them dry on international television for weeks. We change the story, Adem. We rewrite the fucking ending.”
He grabbed her then, pulling her naked body against his, crushing her in an embrace that felt like a vow. He buried his face in her hair. “You are a miracle,” he whispered, his voice thick. “A terrifying, impossible miracle.”
Outside, the first grey light of dawn began to bleed into the sky. The long winter was here. But in the cold room, bent over a map of their possible graves, they began to plot its defiance. The tide of history was coming, but they were no longer waiting for it to break.
They were building a wall.
The grey dawn found them still at the table, the map now a web of urgent pencil lines. Vanja’s forearm ached from drawing, her nakedness forgotten in the frigid air. Adem dressed in silence, his movements precise, his mind visibly churning through logistics, through the monstrous truth he now carried. He handed her his wool shirt. It swallowed her, smelling of him, a tangible armor as the world snapped back into focus.
“The police will come today,” he said, buckling his belt. His voice was hoarse but clear. “You will stay close to Nazmije. You will say nothing unless asked directly. You are a Swiss journalist. You are my wife. You are fascinated by our rural life. You understand?”
“I understand.” She pulled the shirt tighter.
He paused, his hand on the door. “Last night…” He couldn’t finish. The words—future, massacre, love—hung between them, too colossal for the chill morning light.
“Last night is the reason we keep breathing today,” she said, meeting his gaze.
He gave a single, sharp nod and opened the door.
The compound was already stirring. The sight of Vanja emerging from Adem’s room in his shirt drew a few silent looks, but they were quickly veiled by the morning routine. Nazmije met her at the hearth, a cup of bitter coffee thrust into her hands. “You look like you did not sleep,” she said, her eyes knowing and wary.
“There was much to discuss,” Vanja said.
“With a new husband, there always is.” Nazmije’s tone offered no comfort. “The special police have a checkpoint on the road. They are asking questions about a Serbian woman. Dress properly. And speak only German if you can.”
The coffee turned to acid in Vanja’s stomach. She changed into her own clothes, the fabric feeling foreign, a costume for a play where a missed cue meant death. She was in the courtyard, pretending to watch the children chase a ragged football, when the gates opened. Two men in navy blue Serbian police uniforms walked in, their eyes sliding over the house, the barns, the armed men who had stopped working to stare.
Adem appeared from the stable, wiping grease from his hands with a rag. He looked like any other farmer, only taller, his stillness more pronounced. “Officers.”
“Jashari. We are making inquiries.” The older one’s eyes landed on Vanja. “A visitor?”
“My wife,” Adem said. The word, still new, sounded like a challenge.
The policeman’s eyebrows rose. “Your wife. A swift courtship. Papers?”
Vanja produced her Swiss passport. The officer scrutinized it, the altered birth year, the Basel address. “Vanja Vranic. A Serb name.”
“My father was Serbian,” she said in careful, textbook German, feigning difficulty. “My mother is Swiss. I am a journalist. I am here writing about provincial life.”
He switched to Serbian. “You speak your father’s language?”
She pretended to struggle, replying in German again. “A little. It is… rusty. I am more comfortable in German or French.”
He stared at her, probing for a crack. Adem moved casually, coming to stand slightly in front of her, a shield of muscle and unspoken threat. The moment stretched, taut. Finally, the officer handed back the passport. “Congratulations on your marriage. The Drenica is not… cozy for outsiders. Even wives.”
“My home is cozy enough,” Adem said, his voice devoid of warmth.
The police left, the gate creaking shut behind them. The compound remained frozen until the sound of their engine faded. Then, a collective exhale. Adem’s jaw was a knot of stone. He turned and walked toward the main house, snapping his fingers at Hamza, at Sheref. “Now. We begin now.”
The family council was held in the smoky basement, a place of concrete and dangling bulbs. Adem did not tell them everything. He spoke of credible threats, of a major offensive being planned for the winter, of the need for unprecedented preparation. He painted a picture of a siege, not a skirmish.
“They will come with everything,” he said, his hands flat on the scarred wooden table. “Mortars. Rockets. To survive, we cannot be where they aim. We must be underground, moving like ghosts.”
Sheref frowned. “We have the bunker. The trenches.”
“It is not enough,” Adem said, his finality brooking no argument. He looked at Vanja, a flicker of that shared, terrible knowledge passing between them. “We dig. Not just deeper. We dig connections. House to house. Barn to forest. We make a web under their feet.”
Silence met the order. The scale of it was daunting. Hamza rubbed his beard. “The ground is frozen. The noise… the police patrol the woods.”
“We start inside,” Vanja said, all eyes swinging to her. She kept her voice calm, analytical. “Basement to basement. Use the existing root cellars. Muffle the sounds with hay, with blankets. Work at night. The earth… the earth is softer beneath the foundations, where the frost doesn’t bite.”
Adem’s brothers looked at her, then at Adem, understanding dawning. This was not just his command; it was their shared strategy. The foreign wife had a tactical mind. Nazmije’s gaze was inscrutable.
“We dig,” Adem repeated, and it was a decree.
That night, after the last patrol was set, he came to her in the pink room. The tension of the day, the performative calm, the grinding fear, had coiled into a tight spring inside them both. He closed the door and leaned against it, just looking at her. The raw need in his eyes had nothing to do with strategy.
“Tell me again,” he said, his voice a rough whisper. “Tell me I am not dreaming this. Tell me you are real.”
She crossed the room and stopped before him. “I’m real.” She took his work-calloused hand and placed it over her heart. “Feel that? It’s beating for you. It’s been beating for you since before I was born.”
A broken sound escaped him. He crushed her to him, his mouth finding hers in a kiss that tasted of despair and wild hope. It was violent in its gratitude, his teeth catching her lip, his tongue claiming her. They stumbled toward the narrow bed, a tangle of frantic hands and shedding clothes.
He pushed her down on the coarse sheets, his body a heavy, welcome weight. There was no tenderness now, only a feverish, driving need to occupy the same space, to fuse into one creature against the coming storm. He kissed down her throat, sucking a bruise into the hollow above her collarbone, a brand. His hand shoved between her legs, fingers plunging into her wetness without preamble.
“You’re soaked,” he growled against her skin. “Is this for me? For this fucking doomed future we’re building?”
“Yes,” she gasped, arching into his touch. “It’s all for you. Everything.”
He notched the thick head of his cock at her entrance. He didn’t push in. He looked down, watching where their bodies almost joined. “Last night, I took you as my wife.” He met her eyes, his gaze burning. “Tonight, I take you as my accomplice.”
He drove in, a single, deep, devastating stroke that punched the air from her lungs. She cried out, her legs locking around his hips. He set a brutal, punishing rhythm, each thrust a rebellion against fate. The bed slammed into the wall with a rhythmic thud. He fucked her like he was digging a tunnel to salvation, with a desperate, focused strength that bordered on rage.
“This cunt,” he panted, sweat dripping from his brow onto her chest. “This perfect, genius, time-traveling cunt is mine. You understand? Even when the world fucking ends, this is mine.”
“Yours,” she sobbed, her fingers clawing at his back, urged on by the crude, possessive words. “Always yours. Fuck me harder. Make me feel it tomorrow when I’m digging.”
He snarled, shifting her hips, angling himself to go deeper. The new angle crushed a spot inside her that unraveled her completely. Her climax tore through her, a raw, screaming thing that clenched around his driving length like a vise. He followed with a guttural roar, pumping his release into her with shuddering, exhaustive jerks before collapsing, his body spent and hot and heavy upon hers.
Long minutes later, he rolled off, gathering her shaking form against his side. Their sweat cooled in the dark. The only sound was their slowing breath, and from deep within the house, the faint, muffled scrape of a shovel on earth.
They dug.
They dug at night, in shifts, the compound becoming a living organism with a secret, growing labyrinth beneath its skin. The men excavated, their muscles corded and shining in the low lantern light. The women hauled away the dirt in buckets, spreading it in the animal pens, in the garden, anywhere it wouldn’t be seen.
Vanja worked alongside them, her hands blistering, her back screaming. She was no longer just the bride. She was the woman who drew the maps, who suggested the support beams, who knew where the water table was lowest. She earned grunts of approval, wary respect.
Adem was a force of nature, digging with a silent, terrifying fury for hours, then emerging covered in dust to check patrols, to consult with distant cell leaders. He slept in brief, violent naps, often with his head in her lap, his body twitching with exhaustion. The love between them was no longer a separate thing. It was in the water she handed him, in the silent massage of his shoulders at dawn, in the way his eyes found her across a dusty basement, a momentary anchor in the chaos.
One week into the digging, beneath the main house, Hamza’s pickaxe broke through into a small, forgotten cellar. A cheer went up, ragged and hopeful. They had connected two wings. Adem clasped his brother’s shoulder, a rare, grim smile on his face. He looked at Vanja, dirt smeared on her cheek, her hair tied in a rough kerchief.
She smiled back, weary and fierce. The first tunnel was complete. The wall was no longer an idea. It was a hole in the earth, dark, deep, and waiting.