A Baby for the BRATVA King (A Baby for the BRATVA #5)

Mia

There's blood on my hands.

I keep looking at them. The way you look at something that doesn't make sense yet, the way your brain keeps offering explanations and your eyes keep refusing them.

My palms are pale. My knuckles are pale.

The blood has dried in the creases of my fingers, rust-brown and quiet, like it's been there a long time.

It hasn't been there a long time.

I should call someone.

I keep thinking that. The thought surfaces, floats there for a moment, and then sinks again before I can make it into an action.

Call someone. Call who? Sasha is the only person I would call, and it's Sasha's uncle I left on the kitchen floor of his own house with a chef's knife in his neck and his eyes going glassy.

The smell comes back. Onions and garlic still warm in the air from whatever he'd been cooking, something ordinary, something domestic, the smell of a man who had been alive and making dinner an hour ago.

My mind keeps snagging on that. The garlic.

The domesticity of it. The wrongness of the way those two things live in the same memory.

Something so normal and something so final, sharing the same room.

His hand on my wrist. That comes next. The grip of it, too hard, fingers digging in with a certainty that told me he'd done this before. Done it and faced no consequences, or he wouldn't have had that certainty. Wouldn't have had that look.

The look.

I don't want to remember the look, but I can't stop it.

The way his face arranged itself when he understood I wasn't going to be easy.

The irritation first, actual irritation, like I was being inconvenient, and then something else when I grabbed for the counter, and my hand found the handle of the knife.

Not fear. More like surprise. The specific surprise of a man who has never once had to reckon with the word no from someone of the opposite sex.

The sound it made going into the side of his neck.

I stop that thought. I stop it the same way I've been stopping thoughts for the past however long I've been walking. Slamming a door on it, standing with my back against it, feeling it shudder.

My mouth still tastes like fear.

I don't know how long I've been walking.

The city is loud around me. Bass from passing cars, someone laughing from an upper window, the hiss of wet tires on slick asphalt, and all of it sounds like it's happening underwater.

Like I'm hearing the world from the bottom of something very deep. My fingertips are numb. Not from cold, because I can’t even feel that.

From something else, something internal, the body redistributing itself away from the extremities and toward the core, keeping the heart going, keeping the lungs going, triaging.

A siren wails three streets over. I stop walking so fast I nearly fall.

I stand completely still on the pavement and listen to it come closer. Every muscle in my body goes rigid. My mind assembles the sequence with horrible efficiency: someone found him, a neighbor heard, someone looked through the window. Someone saw me.

The siren fades as it moves away from me, not toward me. Nothing to do with me.

I breathe out. My hands are shaking and I press them flat against my thighs and I tell myself to keep moving, keep moving, because standing still draws attention and I can’t afford to draw attention.

I am a woman in a sparkly blue dress with blood on her and if anyone looks at me long enough, they will see.

I start walking again.

A car slows as it passes and I feel every hair on my body stand up. Don't look at me. Don't look at me. It keeps going. Nothing. Someone double-parked or is looking for an address. Not for me.

A man brushes past me on the narrow pavement, shoulder catching mine, and I make a sound. Small. Involuntary. He gives me an odd look and keeps walking.

I should have said no.

I should have said no, but I never say no.

I have been not-saying-no my entire life.

I was the girl at school who stayed to help stack chairs when everyone else had already left, because the teacher said you're always so easy, Mia, so reliable, and I smiled and felt the praise land warm inside me.

I was the girlfriend who laughed when he called me so low-maintenance, like it was a compliment, like being someone who made no demands was a virtue and not a quiet erasure.

I am the friend who Sasha calls when she needs someone to pick something up, to drop something off, to cover something over, because Mia will do it and Mia won't make it weird and Mia is so helpful.

I should have said no. To all of it, every time, going back years.

I didn't say no tonight because I am helpful and quiet and I do not make a fuss, and now there is dried blood on me, and somewhere back there a man is on a kitchen floor, and his eyes are glassy, and I stepped around him, and I am not thinking about that, I am not—

I look up.

The sign above me reads CROWNED in backlit letters, elegant and understated, the kind of sign that's more threat than invitation.

Light and noise bleed out from the entrance.

There's a queue behind a velvet rope, women in sequins and heels and men who smell expensive from twenty feet away, all of them existing in the uncomplicated dark of a normal Friday night.

I catch my reflection in the wide glass panel beside the door.

I don't recognize her immediately.

She's slight. Blonde hair that was tied up nicely and is now half loose from where he grabbed it.

A sparkly blue dress that Sasha picked out, saying: this one, Mia, you'll look gorgeous.

Her arms are wrapped around herself, her dress is torn.

And there, very clearly, even in the dim and flattering light from the sign above, the blood staining her hands, part of her dress, and even strands of her hair.

I stare at her.

She looks like a before-and-after standing in the same body.

Like two photographs overlaid. The girl who got dressed tonight with a flicker of hope about meeting someone new, the girl who blow-dried her hair and found the matching earrings and thought maybe, the way you keep thinking maybe even when experience has given you no particular reason to.

And this other girl, the one in the glass, who doesn't know what she is now.

My heart kicks too hard, once, and then settles into something too fast and too shallow.

I need to go inside. I need to find Sasha.

I look down and force my hands into loose fists and then I take a breath that doesn't go all the way down. I take a step forward and think: one thing at a time. Just one thing.

The bouncer is watching me.

He's large in the specific intentional way of men whose size is professional.

But it's not his size I notice, it's the quality of his attention.

He's not looking at me the way the rest of the queue looks at me.

He's looking at me the way you look when something doesn't fit.

When the pattern is off. His eyes move from my face to my arms to my hands and back.

I keep walking.

"I'm on the list," I say. My voice comes out flat and strange. "Sasha Vinzlee. I'm her guest."

He doesn't look at the clipboard.

"Are you hurt, miss?"

The question stops me. I blink at him.

"I'm fine."

"Your dress—"

"I'm fine." Too fast. I hear it. "I just…I need to find my friend. She's inside."

He takes a slow step toward me, and I take one back without meaning to because suddenly the idea of being touched, of anyone touching me or making contact with my skin, sends a spike of something animal up my spine.

He sees it. His hands come up. Careful. The way you move around something that might attack when it’s cornered.

"I'm not going to hurt you," he says, and the gentleness of it is somehow worse than if he'd been sharp. "Can I see your hands?"

"No." The word comes out clear, for the first time all night. "No. I need to find Sasha. I'm her guest. Please."

"Okay, Miss." He's already reaching for the earpiece I didn’t notice until now. "Come with me."

With him. Through a side door I hadn't noticed, into a corridor that smells of cold stone and pine cleaner. My heels click against smooth concrete. The music dies to a low throb behind us. My dress sticks against the small of my back.

I follow, because my legs are still working even though my brain has gone somewhere very far away, and because in some dim and distant part of me I understand that whatever comes next is already inevitable.