Page 65 of Babies for the Boss
“You shouldn’t have done that,” he says, smirking. Then his forehead blooms red.
The car swerves as Andrei reacts, the country tilting in the open door, and the screech of something mechanical deafens me. A massive black SUV pulls alongside us.
Pavel’s SUV.
Andrei pulls over. I don’t think he has decided to pull over—I think the decision is made for him by the SUV pressing into our lane with the implacable momentum of a man who does not offer alternatives.
The car stops.
My door flings open, and Pavel is there. He pulls me out of the car and into him. He holds me with both arms, fully, and I press my face against his chest. It’s only then that I feel myself shaking. I might black out from relief. Sound bleeds in and out, and then smells—I smell Pavel. That scent that is comfort and safety and love. And then I start to cry.
Behind us, Igor has Andrei. I don’t see what Igor does. But I hear it.
It goes on for longer than I expect, and the sounds that it makes are varied and wet and crunchy and deeply unpleasant in ways that my imagination is involuntarily helpful about. Interspersed with those sounds is the wailing.
Andrei was a quiet man in life. In torment, he has a lot to say. Most of it is not words.
I press closer to Pavel, and he cups his hand to the back of my head, and I breathe through it and think about the babies and think about Vet and think about flowers, which I never got, which seems like a very long time ago now.
When the sounds stop, the silence is significant.
“The car,” Pavel says, to someone who is not me.
Doors close. An engine moves away.
He pulls back to look at my face, and what is in his expression is relief and fury and love and the residue of the past several minutes all present simultaneously, making a landscape of his face that I have not seen before and which I understand, looking at it, is something he is not trying to contain right now.
“You pushed a man out of a moving car,” he says.
“He had a gun pointed at us.” I shrug. “I asked him to aim lower first. I was as safe as I could be about it, and… then I punched him in the groin and kicked him out.”
He looks at me for a moment. Then he closes his eyes briefly in the way he does when something has exceeded his available processing, and he requires a second to absorb it. “You asked him to aim lower.”
“So he’d hit my foot instead of the babies, if the gun went off. Tactically, it made sense.”
“Molly.”
“It worked,” I point out.
He laughs sharply once, then looks at me for another long moment, and he pulls me back in, and I go, happy he’s not lecturing me and also happy to be alive. Somewhere behind us, Igor is cleaning up the evidence of whatever he just did to Andrei.
I’m alive, and my babies are alive, and the man whose arms I’m standing in showed up for me. The sounds, the smells, the texture of the morning—I will deal with later. Much later.
After a very long shower and possibly an unreasonable amount of soup. I don’t think I can handle anything else.
24
PAVEL
The man Mollykicked out of the car is still in the drainage ditch when I get back to him.
I had expected him to be gone. Fedor doesn’t like loose ends, so I had half prepared myself for his absence. Instead, I find him draped on the grass, with his feet still in the ditch water and both hands pressed to the side of his head, which is bleeding with the enthusiasm of head wounds. He’s conscious in the loose way that happens after a bad knock to the head.
He looks up when I stop in front of him. “Help.” In Russian.
I look at him for a moment, but I’m distracted by flashes of Molly in the back seat of that cursed car with a gun pointed at her torso. The two lives she is carrying. The calculation she made, asking him to aim lower. What would have happened if she had not been exactly who she is, which is the smartest and most composed person I have ever seen in a crisis.
“Help,” he says again.
