Page 98 of Pas de Trois
Chapter 23
Ezra
We’ve been on the road toward the helipad for over twenty minutes and Anya is in agony. Despite the fact that we never expected her to be pregnant for this, let alone in labor, there’s a feeling in my gut that I can’t ignore—a nagging feeling that everything is wrong.
Fucking wrong.
Anya is trembling out of control and having what seems like contraction after contraction. I feel helpless and I can only imagine how much she’s suffering. It makes me sick to my stomach.
We’re sitting side by side on the bench seat with seatbelts on because the dirt path cutting through the woods is ice-covered—we’ve hit a few slick spots along the way, one that spun the car nearly all the way around. Anya’s in the middle seat beside me, leaning sideways against me for support as she struggles through her pain.
It was easy getting through the gate at Mikhailov Manor.
Too easy.
There’s a cadence of worry that’s been continually running through my mind since we passed through and drove away from the manor grounds.
Too easy.
Though there’s still the light of hope inside me, I can feel it slowly fade. It scares me because I can’t make sense of this feeling, this unease. It’s a heavy sense of foreboding weighing on my shoulders and I just can’t seem to shake it.
Kostya follows a curve that opens into a straightaway. The car goes up an incline. Kostya reduces his speed as we crest over the peak of the hill, then lets the car roll down the long, gradual decline. I feel gravity tugging me forward in my seat and my grip around Anya’s shoulders tightens.
I glance over at her to see her face contorted in absolute agony, her chin dropping toward her chest as she grits her teeth through another shattering contraction. A hiss and a moan escape her and morph into a piercing scream through the last seconds of her recurrent torture.
She gasps for a breath and I can see the sweat on her brow. “Hurry…please,” she begs.
She begs, but there’s nothing I can do. There’s not a goddamn thing I can do for my blue-eyed girl.
The back tires screech as they catch and skid over ice, tugging the car toward the right. I tense, holding Anya tighter, probably only hurting her more, but I’m terrified to let go of her. I don’t want her flung across the car. Kostya’s able to correct and ease the car straight again and we continue down the never-ending decline.
Our path is lined with trees—rows and rows of them creating the dense forest surrounding us. The tree line begins only yards away from the car on either side. I look out of the window on my left and it’s like looking out to see dark soldiers in the night, threatening to bring war upon us if we venture from our designated path.
The thick trunks are black in the night and they threaten to catch us, stop us dead in our tracks every time the car skids—and every time I’m certain we’ll skid off the road and take a beating by one of the monstrous soldier trees. I turn to look at Anya on my right and I see that she’s also looking out at them, at the rapidly falling snow that’s intent on smothering us from above.
I catch her gaze and even in the dark, her blue eyes are bewitching.
Tell her you love her.
Tell her now.
Tell her fast.
The voice inside me is insistent and urgent, and the instinctual tug of it makes my heart drop into my stomach. I open my mouth to speak, but then Kostya shouts something in Russian, something urgent.
Anya’s head snaps forward and her forehead wrinkles in confusion. “Spike strip?”
My chest feels hollow, my heart burning in acid where its sunk deep in my gut. This is it. That feeling that it’s too easy, that everything is wrong. It’s all going to hell and it’s happening right fucking now.
It’s unavoidable.
We feel the bump when the front tires roll over something in the road.
Spike strip?
There’s a loud blast, quickly followed by another—the car teeters down in the front, then in the back, rocking us as the tires blow. We fishtail.
A fucking spike strip.
