Page 74 of The Pakhan's Secret Babies
Mara looks at me across the counter. She doesn’t say anything. She breaks off another piece of pastry and passes it to me, and we stay in the warm kitchen, and the morning holds us both for a little while.
I’m back in my bedroom pulling my hair up in the mirror, bobby pins between my teeth, when I feel it.
Sharp. Low. A line of pain cutting across my abdomen that makes my hands drop from my hair and my stomach clench, andI grab the edge of the dresser because my knees have decided they are no longer fully reliable.
I breathe.
It doesn’t pass. It sharpens.
“Mara.” My voice comes out wrong, thin, and I hear her in the other room stop moving.
She’s in the doorway in four seconds. She looks at my face in the mirror, and she says, “We’re going now.” She’s already picking up my bag from the chair.
Two of Roman’s men meet us in the lobby. Only two. I notice this as I step out of the elevator, my hand pressed to my stomach. I think Roman said there would be more, but then the pain shifts, and I stop thinking about the number of men and start thinking about breathing.
Mara gets in the car beside me, takes my hand, and tells the driver to go.
The clinic is on the Upper East Side. We turn onto the street, and I can see the entrance from the car window, the small awning, and the glass doors.
I’m reaching for the door handle when Viktor says something sharp from the front seat, and the two men in the car ahead of us are already out and moving, and I don’t understand what I’m seeing.
Four men on the pavement. Coming from two directions, fast, with no gap between the decision and the execution.
One of Roman’s men goes down. I’m out of the car, both feet on the pavement, and someone grabs my right arm, and someonegrabs my left, and I pull with everything I have, and it makes no difference. I’m moving toward the black van at the end of the block whether I choose to be or not.
“Elena!” Mara is out of the car. She has both hands on the man’s jacket, gripping my right arm, pulling, her voice high and sharp. “Let her go, let her go?—”
He turns and shoves her. She hits the car door hard, stumbles, and goes down onto one knee.
I scream her name so hard my throat tears.
The gunshot cracks the morning open.
One shot. Close. The sound of it bounces off the buildings on both sides of the street, and Mara screams, a sound I have never heard come out of her before. The van door is open, and I am inside, and the door slams, and the vehicle is already moving.
I’m on my knees on the metal floor. Both hands pressed flat to my stomach. The pain is still there, low, insistent, and outside the sealed doors, the city slides past. Mara’s scream is still living in my ears, and I don’t know what the bullet hit.
I press both hands harder against my stomach.
The baby is fine. On Tuesday, Dr. Park said everything looks good. The baby is fine.
Mara’s scream.
The way she hit that door.
I press my hands against my stomach, and I stare at the sealed door. I breathe, and I think her name over and over and over again.
32
ROMAN
Grigori ismid-sentence when my phone goes off.
I look at the screen under the table. Kostya. I stand up, pick up my folder, walk to the door. Someone says my name. I don’t stop. I pull the door open and walk through it and let it close behind me, and Kostya is already in the corridor with his phone in his hand and his face doing the thing it does when what he has to tell me cannot wait.
“Talk,” I say.
“Viktor called it in eight minutes ago. Four men in a black van, no plates, intercepted Elena on the street outside a building on 74th. Two of our details are down. Viktor has a graze on his left arm.” He looks at me directly. “Mara Sokolova took a bullet to the left shoulder. She’s at the Kessler facility on 68th. She went into surgery fifteen minutes ago.”
