Page 79 of The Bratva's Secret Baby
We move into the sitting room, and Ana switches on Mila’s favorite cartoon, the one with the bright animals and the simple songs that repeat until they become background noise. Mila settles in with the plate in her lap, completely absorbed.
I leave them there and go into the spare room. I open my laptop. I take out a pen and paper. I start placing pieces, naming contacts, and timing routes, exits.
The phone vibrates on the desk.
The clinic.
I open the message and read it once. Then again. Then a third time, slower.
The confirmation is clean. The marker is in my blood too. High enough that there’s no ambiguity. My blood type matches hers. We share the same uncommon group.
I sit very still. It doesn’t hit all of a sudden. It feels like everything is falling into place, where it was always meant to be. Once the pieces settle, there’s nothing left to argue with.
I don’t move for a while. The papers stay where they are, the routes left unfinished. The house keeps moving around me. At some point, the cartoon ends, and Mila’s voice carries down the hall until I can’t make out the words.
Ana comes to the doorway.
“Dinner’s ready,” she says, then stops.
She takes in my face and doesn’t move any farther. Her hand tightens on the doorframe. She already knows.
It pulls everything into focus. How fast she shut down the idea of a parent test. How tense she got when the doctor brought it up. How she didn’t want to go back to the clinic the next day once Mila seemed fine. Even now, she’s trying to keep something from me that was never hers to keep.
I close the laptop and stand.
“Step inside,” I say. “We need to talk.”
She comes in and waits. I close the door behind her. The click is soft.
I stay where I am. I don’t touch her. I don’t sit.
“When did you know?” I ask.
She answers right away.
“From the beginning,” she says. “From the first missed period. There was never any doubt.”
“And you didn’t tell me.”
“No.”
I let the silence stretch until she shifts her weight.
“Why?” I say.
She looks up at me then, like she’s measuring the distance and realizing it’s fixed.
“The council was already circling,” she says. “Markov was dead. Anything tied to him was poison. Anything tied to you was leverage.” She pauses, then keeps going because stopping won’t help her. “If you’d known, you would’ve protected the child. Everyone would’ve seen it. That’s how they’d get to you.”
I don’t react. I don’t need to.
“You decided that for me,” I say.
“Yes.”
She doesn’t apologize. She stands there and takes it.
“And you were right,” I say after a moment. “About what they’d do.”
