Chapter 14
PAVEL
The call to Chicago takes longer to make than it should.
Delaying won’t change what must be done. I know that. But all the same, I sit with the phone in my hand for a full minute before I dial.
The decision is made. It has been made since I watched Snigir’s face twist with glee at the thought of threatening Molly.
My hesitation tastes like grief, bitter grit in my throat. Grieving the loss of her now—while she still lives—is futile. It doesn’t change what I must do.
Sister Mary Patrick answers on the fourth ring. She was busy, and knowing her, she was busy doing something charitable. Her voice is exactly as I remember it—unhurried, warm.
When I met her, I was jealous of her. The peace she exudes.
How does one attain such a thing? It’s not something I can buy—I’ve tried.
But she accepts all things and is therefore not rattled by anything.
As much as I try to portray someone with that coolness, I must try at it. It is an effort for me.
For Sister Mary Patrick, it’s like breathing.
“Pavel Strakov,” she says, and I can hear the smile in it. “It has been too long.”
“It has. I’m sorry for that.”
“You’re forgiven. You always are.” A brief pause, the comfortable kind. “You’re calling because you need something. You never call just to call, which we have discussed on several occasions.”
If she were anyone else to call me out that way, I’d snap at them. Instead, I sigh. “I need a favor. A significant one.”
She’s quiet in the way she is when she’s listening fully, a quality I noticed the first time I sat across from her in a church in Chicago twenty years ago, as a younger and considerably less composed version of myself, and found that I could not stop talking.
I had walked into that church because I didn’t know where else to go.
I had beaten the wrong man.
My target’s brother—identical in build, identical in coloring, standing outside the same building at the same hour with the same dark coat and the wrong face.
I did not know until after the beating. My ignorance changed nothing about the damage I had done and everything about the way I carried it afterward.
The man would walk with a cane for the rest of his life.
I sat in the wreckage of that fact for days, turning it over, and then I thought about what I was becoming and whether I wanted to keep becoming it.
I wasn’t sure, so I got on a plane to a city where no one knew my name and walked into the first church I found because I had run out of other options and the weight needed somewhere to go.
Sister Mary Patrick found me in a pew, sat down beside me without being asked, and simply waited. Eventually, I started talking, and once I started, I didn’t stop for a long time.
I told her more than I have told most people in my life, before or since. She listened to all of it without flinching, which was not the response I had expected from a nun, and when I finished, she was quiet for a moment. That silence shamed me, and I still feel that shame every day.
A woman who had faced her god and her devil, these cosmic forces, didn’t know what to say to me. How horrid must I have been in her opinion?
But that wasn’t it. She abruptly said, “Sounds like you have an opportunity to do some good.”
That may have been the last thing I expected. It didn’t wipe away the stain of the shame I felt in her silence, but it shook me up.
Sister Mary Patrick said that the world I moved in was populated by men considerably worse than me, and that a man with my skills in my position could choose to reduce their harm rather than compound it.
“I’m not sure that’s how it works—”
She shrugged and said, “God uses the Devil to punish those who deserve it. Perhaps you could be a useful Devil.”
I stared at her for a long moment. She looked back with calm, unimpressed eyes and waited for me to catch up, with the patience of a woman who has waited out considerably more difficult silences than mine.
I never went straight. With her supportive encouragement, I used my position to level certain playing fields and destroy those who are particularly evil in my realm.
I have been imperfect. But with that title as a consideration—Useful Devil—I have given her words more weight in my life than might be prudent. Since then, I have funded her neighborhood programs because it’s a small, concrete thing I can do with money made in an effort to balance the scales.
Now, I must balance one more. “I need someone looked after. A woman. She will relocate to Chicago, and there, I’ll need her to be set up comfortably, kept safe and occupied, and not alone. She doesn’t know anyone there. I would want someone she can trust nearby, someone consistent.”
“How long?”
“I don’t know yet. Until I’ve resolved a situation here. It could be weeks. It could be longer.” It will be longer. I know it in my gut.
Sister Mary Patrick is quiet for a moment. “Is this for her protection, or for yours?”
“What do you mean by that?”
“You have always kept people at a distance, Pavel. It’s how you have operated since I met you.
You fund programs, so the money helps people without you needing to be present for any of it.
You run your organization through intermediaries wherever the option exists.
You like keeping the world at a distance.
” Her voice is not unkind. It is simply accurate.
“Sending someone away can be genuine protection. It can also be an old habit wearing a convincing disguise.”
I look out the window at the gray, dangerous city. “I love her.”
Sister Mary Patrick’s next breath is audible. Not quite a gasp, but near enough.
The words are heavier than I expect them to be, and more certain, like something that has been waiting to be said aloud and is relieved to finally be there. “More than I knew was possible. I want her beside me. I want her there permanently, in every sense of that word.”
“Well, then, clearly, you must send her away.”
If I didn’t know her, I might not have picked up on the sarcasm, as she says this with no shift in tone.
“I love her, and I’m terrified for her. There is a man who has already demonstrated that he knows she matters to me and intends to use it. Keeping her close is what I want. It’s the selfish thing to do. Keeping her safe is what I have to choose instead, because I cannot have both right now.”
There’s a pause on the other end. “Alright. Send her to me. I’ll take good care of her, Pavel. You have my word.”
Something in my chest loosens by a fraction. “Thank you.”
“Call more often. You don’t need a reason.”
“I will.”
“You said that last time as well.” Warmth in it, not reproach. “How are you? Truthfully.”
“I’ve been better.”
“I imagine you have.” A brief pause. “And the funding—Pavel, you truly don’t need to continue at the level you—”
“Start new programs if the existing ones are covered.”
“I already have. Three in the last two years. A literacy program for adults, an after-school kitchen for children in the parish, and transitional housing for women who are rebuilding after difficult circumstances.” She pauses.
“Real good is being done. Consistent, daily good. People’s lives are different because of it. Because of you.”
Her kind words don’t staunch the wound in my chest. But it’s nice to know, all the same.
We say goodbye, and I set the phone down. This is the worst part, and I knew it would be. The silence of a decision that is made and waiting to be executed. It’s always the hardest interval in any operation.
Not the deciding. The waiting.
I’m going to send Molly away. To keep her safe. That is all that matters. My feelings on the subject are irrelevant.
Everything else—the office without her in it, the air in a room she has just left, the loss of the only thing in twenty years that has made me feel like a man rather than a mechanism—is the cost, and I have always paid my costs without complaint.
But I have never paid one that felt like this, and that is why Fedor knows he can use her.
He knows what truly losing her would cost me.
I’m still working out how he knows this when she walks back in from lunch.
Something is wrong. She’s pale in a way that comes from within rather than from the cold. As she moves across the office, she does so with the careful deliberateness of someone holding something fragile, most likely themselves.
Vet should have told me already. Where is she?
I’m beside her before I have made a conscious decision to move, which is becoming a pattern with her. “My office.”
She looks up at me, surprised. As though she did not see me move toward her. Something moves across her face that I cannot read cleanly, which is unusual. She picks up her bag and follows me in without comment.
Where is her talkative yammering I have come to depend on/delight in?
I close the door behind us and look at her in the pale afternoon light. She looks wan and tired, like she’s been worn through by something big.
I have seen Underslept Molly, Undercaffeinated Molly, and Stomach Bug Molly. This is none of them.
She opens her mouth. Closes it. Her thoughts weigh heavier than what she’s willing to announce—her eyes shift slightly side to side as she considers her next words. As if she had to rehearse them.
“Molly, are you ill? If you’re contagious, you should go home.”
“I’m not contagious.”
“Well, whatever it is, you can tell me any—”
“I’m pregnant.”
For a long time, I had wondered what would happen were a companion to tell me such a thing. Would all the sound bleed out of my hearing, as the times I had a concussion? Would my heart stop? Would the world cease spinning?
To my surprise, it’s none of these. It’s not even shock. Shock is a disruption, a thing that knocks you sideways into disorientation.
This is the opposite, as if my senses sharpen in a flash. I can see the fine lines around Molly’s eyes from across the room. The sound of voices in the room next to us. Her perfume carries to me, no matter how subtle it normally is.
And I feel everything. The weight of my clothes. The air-conditioning on my skin. The firmness of my chair beneath me.
I’m aware of everything rearranging itself into a new order. The most startling part of all is that it feels, against logic, as though it has always been the correct order.
I simply could not see it until this moment because I was standing in the wrong place.
Molly is carrying my child. This is how it was always supposed to be.
She’s standing in my office, pale and frightened and carrying my child, and every arrangement I have made since calling in Vet, every protocol and contingency, every sleepless calculation, including the call I made this morning to a nun in Chicago, reconfigures itself instantly and completely around this single fact.
She’s not only the woman I love. She’s the mother of my child, which means she is under my protection for all time. There is no version of any future I will build that does not have her at the center of it.
My world has been realigned in a breath, and somehow, I feel more solid, more capable than I ever have.
But she looks terrified.
“Molly, I will not let anything happen to you. Or to our baby.”
She looks at me with those steady brown eyes, and something in her face shifts, some of the tension going out of it. But still, her voice is quiet. “Babies, Pavel. Twins.”
The words spring out of my mouth. “Marry me.”