Page 38 of The Bratva's Secret Baby
Dominik glances at me and gives the smallest smile.
The man keeps his eyes on the clipboard while Dominik counts out the cash, slow and exact, and he doesn’t give a receipt or waste time talking about the car. The keys change hands and that’s the whole transaction.
Dominik opens the hood and listens to the engine idle, lets it run long enough to know its sound, taps the gas once, then shuts it off and nods.
That’s how we get our first car.
We drive straight into the city afterward, not away from it. That surprises me, though I don’t ask why.
“We’re not returning to the old house,” Dominik says, his eyes on the road, and then he doesn’t say anything else.
The place we end up isn’t hidden. It sits above a row of shops in a neighborhood where no one watches too closely because everyone is busy with their own movements. Families live here. Kids wander down the sidewalk with ice cream cones after school and on weekends, chattering like kids do.
Our apartment is on the third floor. The stairs are narrow and the railings are chipped, and there’s no elevator. Two rooms, a small kitchen, and windows that look out over a street that never really empties.
Voices drift up in a dozen languages. The first morning, I stand at the window and watch a couple crossing with a small dog at their heels, their voices rising as they argue about something only they understand.
Across the street, two girls hang dresses on the mannequins in the thrift shop window. A bread truck waits at the bakery, andthe driver chats with the tailor next door while he puffs on a cigarette.
Next day, I go on walks in the neighborhood. Dominik says it’s safe as long as I watch reflections. I put on the usual makeup and a scarf and stick to familiar blocks where I can watch my reflection in shop windows. I pretend I’m just looking at China, dresses, or shoes.
For the first time in many days, I feel something unfamiliar settle into my chest. Relief. It feels normal.
We live under a borrowed name. It’s not completely made up. It belonged to someone who’s dead, and we use it now because it still works on paper without raising questions. Dominik handles the documents. I don’t ask where they came from.
I learn how to write the new surname until my hand stops hesitating. I start buying bread from the bakery across the street every other day, enough that the girl behind the counter stops asking questions and just hands me the loaf wrapped in brown paper.
The woman sweeping the entry every morning now barely looks up when I nod her hello.
Dominik doesn’t relax. He never will. He listens to the street like it’s a language he never forgets. He leaves at odd hours and comes back with groceries, news. But he loosens enough to sit at the small kitchen table in the mornings with coffee instead of pacing the room. He gives the reassurance of someone who knows the exit plans.
I catch myself laughing without glancing around first.
Two days later, my body gives out onme.
I'm on my way back from the usual morning walk, and a dull ache builds in my skull and doesn’t lift, pressing long enough that it leaves me unsettled. I make it home, drop onto the bed, and stay there. Dominik looks up from his phone, eyes narrowing. “Are you all right?” he asks.
“Just tired,” I say, but the words feel shallow.
At lunch, I slide the plate aside halfway through and head for the bathroom. Once there, I retch and can’t catch my breath. Dominik rises from the table and steadies me as I try to regain some control. Back in bed, he sits beside me, his brow lifted on one side, a look of concern plain on his face.
“It’ll pass,” I say unevenly. “I just need rest.”
But it doesn’t. By morning the nausea is back, heavy enough to leave me unsteady, the room pitching just slightly under my feet. I go downstairs for bread, anyway, thinking a few minutes outside might help.
The cleaning woman looks up from where she’s kneeling, scrubbing tiles.
“You look pale,” she says, her voice warm, familiar in a way that catches me off guard.
I shrug it off with a thin smile. “Just a bit squeamish.”
She tilts her head, eyes kind but direct. “You should see a doctor.”
“Why?” I ask, half amused, half uneasy.
She smiles the way women do when they think the answer is obvious. “It happens,” she says, “when a woman’s expecting.”
Expecting. My grip tightens on the handrail as the word settles. Memory rushes back on itself, body and time colliding. Dominik. His hands. The nights that drew us close without asking. The way I never pulled away, the way I reached for him just as surely, because without that gravity I would have come apart.
