Page 67 of The Pakhan's Secret Babies
“I know.”
“You have to tell Roman. Tonight.”
“He has so much happening right now. The council thing, Grigori, all of it. I don’t want to hand him another?—”
“You are not a problem to be handed to him. You are his wife, and someone is following you to your medical appointments.” She looks at me across the table. “Tell him.”
I wrap my hands around my mug, and I look at the table, and I think about the files on his desk and the phone calls at five in the morning and his shoulders under my hands last night.
“Soon,” I say.
Mara looks at me with the expression that means she disagrees and has decided to let me get there on my own.
Roman comes home at nine, and I find him in the kitchen. I look at him, and I think about the empty chair beside the examination table this morning and the heartbeat filling that small room alone.
“The prenatal appointments,” I say. “You need to come. Both of us are having this child, and I should not be sitting in that room by myself.”
He looks at me, and something moves across his face, a man taking the full measure of something he has missed.
“You’re right,” he says. “I should have been there from the beginning.”
“Yes,” I say. “You should.”
“I will be at the next one.” He holds my gaze. “Every one.”
I look at him standing in his kitchen in his shirt with his sleeves rolled up and his eyes steady on mine, and he means it. I know he means it because Roman does not say things he does not mean, and I think about Aleksei’s voice this morning, saying his world is going to consume everything around it.
“Okay,” I say.
He nods and goes to his study, and I stand at the counter, and I listen to his door close, and I tell myself that I will tell him about Aleksei.
Soon.
Not tonight.
28
ROMAN
Kostya does not call.He comes in person, which tells me everything before he opens his mouth.
He closes the study door behind him and he sits down across from my desk and he puts his folder on his knee and he looks at me with the expression I’ve seen on his face a handful of times in eleven years, each time preceding information that required me to make decisions I would not have chosen to make.
“Tell me,” I say.
He opens the folder. “The Marchetti communication is fully decoded. We finished it an hour ago.” He doesn’t look down at the page. He has already memorized what is on it. “Grigori offered them everything they have been negotiating for since September. Full territorial rights to the Red Hook corridor. Council protection for their eastern operations for a period of three years. Immunity from Petrov enforcement actions during the transition.” He pauses. “In exchange for one thing.”
I wait.
“Elena,” he says. “And the child. Taken alive. Grigori’s exact language was that she represents leverage sufficient to force a full concession or a voluntary step down. He told them a pregnant wife in enemy hands is the one variable you cannot calculate around.” Kostya’s voice stays even, the way it always stays even, stripped of everything except the information itself. “He passed them her prenatal clinic address. The days she attends. The approximate size of her security detail. The route Viktor takes from the penthouse.” A pause. “The last communication was sent four days ago.”
I look at him across the desk.
Earlier today, Elena was at that clinic. She walked through those doors with a detail that Grigori had already told Marchetti the size of, on a route Grigori had already mapped for them, at a time Grigori had already confirmed. And she walked back out, got into Viktor’s car, came home, sat across from me in the kitchen, and told me I should have been at her appointments. I told her she was right, and I went to my study. I did not know.
I did not know.
I set my pen down on the desk.
