Page 64 of Babies for the Boss
“Forget it,” the one next to me says.
The other sits in front with Andrei. “Is no problem.” Both of them have heavy Russian accents.
Wish that made me feel better, but it doesn’t. What else have I forgotten? Will it come back?
I watch the city through the window, and I breathe carefully around my ribs, and I think about Vet, which I have been doing underneath everything since Igor told me. The grief runs like a current I’m not always attending to, but that’s always there. Always moments from washing me away.
I have to focus on the present. Get home, take the longest hot shower of my life, eat something made of food—not hospital food, and sleep in my own bed. And find out when Vet’s funeral is. I might call Carrie Ann to come with me, if Pavel’s too busy playing Bratva Batman to be there for me.
I have no idea what I’ll do about him. But if I keep thinking about him, I’ll get bogged down in a different kind of mess, and right now, thinking that hard is not an available option.
“Long drive?” I ask, to no one in particular. I have no clue how far this hospital is from the house. I’m still getting to know the town. Took a look at the map on my phone, but it’s hard for me to translate the map into knowledge.
The man beside me says nothing.
Andrei says, “Not long.”
The city moves past. I watch it, and I think about what I will tell Carrie Ann about all of this, and I breathe, and the two men I do not know are quiet, but that suits Andrei just fine, I’m sure of it. Suits me too. If they were chatting, I’d have a hard time thinking. Hell, I’m having a hard time right now. Stupid mild concussion.
Then we turn the wrong way.
At least, I think it’s the wrong way. The house is north of the hospital—it was on the map. But now, we’re heading east. “Detour?”
“Da.” Andrei doesn’t look at me in the rearview mirror.
The part of my brain that has been paying attention to everything for months goes very still, and I can’t tell if it’s the concussion or my instincts. “Why this route? I don’t mean to be a bother, but I’m still trying to learn my way around here, so if this detour is better or faster or something, I’d like to know why.”
Andrei is quiet for a moment. “Don’t make this harder than it already is.”
The cold starts at the base of my spine and moves upward. But my head is still foggy. “Make what…? What’s going on?”
The man in front with Andrei says something in Russian, and then I hear rustling beside me.
I turn, slowly, to look at the man next to me in the back seat, and I find that he has a gun. Pointed at me. At the center of my body, where two people who have survived everything this week are quietly and trustingly going about their business.
Everything goes very clear.
The car. The gun. The two men I do not know, and probably never knew. Andrei in the front. The wrong route. All of it assembles itself into a picture with hard edges and no ambiguity.
I breathe once. Carefully. “Point it lower.”
The man with the gun raises a brow at me, as if to say,You have no authority here.
My voice is steady. I don’t know how it is steady. “If you shoot me there, you might hit the babies.” I keep my eyes on his, keep my voice even, keep the terror that is trying to claw its way up my throat exactly where it is. “Aim it at my foot. If you shoot my foot, I can’t run, but the babies are fine. And if you’re going to use me as leverage, you need the babies to be fine, because he won’t negotiate for a dead woman with dead babies.”
The man considers this with the flat calculation of someone running a practical assessment. Then he shifts the gun downward.
I hit him in the balls with everything I have.
The sound he makes is not dignified and neither is what follows, which is him folding forward into the space between the seat and the door. Before he or Andrei or the other man can process what has happened, I have the door handle in my hand, opening it. I put my foot against the collapsed man, and I push.
He tumbles out of the moving car.
The door swings. The drainage ditches zip past the open frame, grass and trees behind them. Andrei snarls something in Russian, and Goon Two raises his gun and points it at me.
I have the door open and nowhere to go. We’re moving. The road is hard, and we’re moving, and jumping is not an option, which Goon Two knows and I know, and the calculus of the situation has shifted.
I didn’t have a plan beyond getting the first gun away from my babies.
