Page 92 of Pas de Trois
I reach out to grip his arm, making sure he has my attention. “Hey, your ass will be on the line if this fails. Are you sure about this?” I realize after I’ve said it that I’m giving him an out. I don’t want to give him an out. We need him to make this work.
His eyes meet mine. “Yes. I made promise to Nikolai,” he assures me in his broken English and thick Russian accent. “If you stay, they will kill her eventually. I hear things you don’t. I owe Nikolai for our friendship.”
Anya is a blur, lurching forward and throwing her arms around him. “Thank you. Thank you, thank you.”
A tiny smile appears on Kostya’s face, but it disappears just as quickly. He gently unwraps her and pushes her back. “There is a camera in here. This will look suspicious. I just came to tell you I have plan. We must leave after you dance, before the board meeting.” He nods at me. “It is the only time we can leave without being followed.”
Anya looks at me, then back to Kostya. “Then that’s when we’ll do it.”
“You will have baby by then?” Kostya asks glancing at her ever-growing belly.
“I should. He’s due the week before.” Her eyes widen as she considers something. “Will they let me hold my baby while I’m hosting? Oh, God. Why didn’t I think of that before? They wouldn’t make me give him to someone else, would they? I couldn’t. I won’t. What if they want Renata or Cordelia to watch him?”
I press my palm to the small of her back as she rises to a panic.
“No worry,” Kostya says in a hurry. His eyebrows furrow with concern and it’s directed at her as he steps forward to touch her elbow softly. “They will let you keep him. Mother is important first year…they all know this. After that is what I worry about.”
“What if he can’t stay quiet when we try to leave?”
“It will be okay. It won’t matter once we are off manor grounds.”
She nods, his assurance seeming to calm her. Anya has come to trust Kostya, someone I never in a million years would’ve thought could be on our side. If Anya trusts him, then so do I. It’s not like we have much choice.
Kostya quickly tells us his plan and then excuses himself, worried about what this looks like on the security cameras, though we don’t really know if Murphy is keeping a watch on those. Regardless, it’s not worth the risk of looking suspicious.
With a plan in motion, the only thing left for us to do is prepare for the performance. Everything must look as it normally would. I have to dance as I would if I were dancing for my life—the way that Anya had danced for Nikolai all these years. She’ll never have to again, because she has me now and her turn to dance for them is over. Now it’s my turn, and I will readily take that burden from her, now and forever more.
I’ll dance for her.
I’ll dance for the baby.
I’ll dance for our future so that today’s pas de trois with my girl and our boy won’t be the last.
