Page 73 of Pas de Trois
“You know the gender and the father?” I ask with too much nervous energy.
I’d been given an ultrasound a month and a half ago where Doctor Lombardi was able to see the gender of the baby, but no one would tell me. Now I understand why—the four families are nothing if not dramatic. And revealing this information here and now—determining the fate of my baby and my future as a board decision—was about as dramatic as they could get.
Murphy flips through his folio and produces a single white sealed envelope. He places it on the table and gives it a push, sliding it across the smooth surface so it glides toward me. Kostya grabs it to spare me the embarrassment of attempting to reach over my protruding belly for it and hands it to me. My name is scribbled on the front.
Anya Mikhailov.
I swallow, looking at Murphy for direction.
“Open it,” he urges. “Read it out loud for the board. This letter was sent to me directly by Doctor Lombardi. This first letter should contain the gender of your baby as determined via your twenty-week ultrasound. Depending on what this letter states, we may or may not need to open the second.”
“Why?” I run my fingers along the edges of the envelope.
“If your baby is a girl, the paternity result doesn’t really matter, now does it?”
My eyes immediately fall on Renata across the table from me. “Does she know?” I ask Murphy.
“No one knows. The result is in that envelope and in Doctor Lombardi’s personal notes. We’re all finding out together. For your sake, let’s hope it’s a boy. Now open it.”
I open my mouth to ask what will happen if it’s a girl, but I close it again, realizing I don’t really want to know.
They might kill her.
They might let her live and kill me.
They might raise her as one of them.
They might sell her for profit.
My fingers tear open the envelope before I even make a conscious decision to do it. I can’t bear not knowing. The baby has to be a boy and I need to prove it now. I need to know right now that he’s a boy and that he’ll be okay.
I need to know we’ll be alive in three months to escape with Ezra.
I tug the single sheet of white paper free from the envelope and unfold it with trembling fingers. But before I can read what it says, I squeeze my eyes shut.
I can’t bring myself to look.
I place it on the table and push it toward Kostya.
“What does it say?” I ask him.
I suck in a breath and hold it through a pause, a painful beat of not knowing. I hear the quiet rush of air as he sighs…a sound of relief.
“Boy,” Kostya says, angling the paper toward me to see it before sliding it back across the table to Murphy.
I struggle to hold my cold, regal expression when I feel the rush of relief wash over my body.
I knew it.
I knew he was a boy.
My baby has always been precious to me, but because he’s a boy, he’s now precious to the four families as well—a direct heir of the Mikhailov or Vittori Head of House. Both my hands cover my belly as an instinctive urge to protect him takes hold of me.
They’ll want him to become one of them. They’ll raise him to be the next Head of House. They’ll groom him for the role the same way they groomed Nikolai and Vigo. They’ll prime him for violence and brutality. They’ll strip him of his empathy and compassion.
Over my dead fucking body—and I will be dead if the results show he belongs to neither of them.
I inhale slowly and look at Murphy.
