Chapter 13 Mina
MINA
The reception is still going strong, and Roman already has a plan.
But I don’t want this. I don’t want to be bait. I don’t want to hand my babies to anyone and watch a door close between us. My body knows before my mouth does. My grip locks on the stroller. There isn’t enough air in here.
My voice scrapes out of my lungs. “Are you sure this is the only way?”
Roman’s voice stays even. “He can’t be two places at once. So, we divide the targets. It’s the safest plan for them, Mina, and it will help us handle him.”
I hate that it makes sense. I want to argue the logic, and I’ve got nothing, other than a mother’s instinct to keep her babies close to her.
The house is a maze of quiet halls and fast steps I try to keep pace with.
Wedding noise bleeds away. A female team waits by the service door.
Dark clothes. Flat shoes. No matching anything.
They look like the women who arrive first when a flood hits and nobody else has a plan.
Stocky, for the most part, with freshly trimmed hairstyles and nothing flashy on any of them.
So purposefully plain that they almost stand out.
Roman introduces me to Carol, who gives me a firm nod and not much else. But she looks like competency given form. “Our route is ready. Three cars. No stops.”
Roman faces me, not them. “Your mother goes with them. Among them are drivers, medics, guards, and nannies. They look like retreat staff because they are. We own the retreat. It’s far. No men on the grounds. No reason for Vitaly to look there.”
“Far where?”
“The woods, three towns over. It’s isolated private property. You’ll have two check-ins a day through a line that only rings to me.”
I want to say no. The word is useless. I know it. It still sits on my tongue and burns. This is madness, or maybe it just feels like madness because I’m going crazy every time I think of my boys being so far away.
Mom appears with the diaper bag and a set of knit hats. Her mouth is tight. Her eyes are clear. “I don’t like this. I get it, but I don’t like it.”
“Same here, Mom.”
Roman’s smile is small. “Thank you for protecting our boys, Jennifer.”
She takes a deep breath and nods. “I won’t let them out of my sight.”
I slide the hats on. Yuri scowls at the elastic and then forgets. Xander makes a breathy sound that could be a laugh or a complaint. Their cheeks are warm under my palms. Looking at them rips my heart out, knowing what’s coming. But not looking at them would be worse.
Roman stands so I can see him and the door. “The boys ride separate. One per car. Your mother with one. The house nurse with the second.”
“No,” I say before I can think. It comes out hard. “They stay together.”
“Not on the road,” he says gently. “If a tire goes. If a driver faints. If a branch falls. We do not risk both at once.”
He’s right. I hate him for being right. I appreciate him for being right. I nod and swallow the bitter taste of it. I’m queasy, and I don’t think that’s going to improve anytime soon.
The team moves like a single thought. Blankets. Extra formula. The small phone that only calls two numbers. Mom smiles, but it’s sad and complicated and I know precisely how she feels. “We’ll be fine. You finish this. Then you come get your sons.”
“I will.” Roman looks to Carol. “Five minutes.” Then to Marcus and Tanner behind him. “Clear the back. Quiet.”
Marcus is already moving. Tanner is already on the stairs. The door opens to the service garage. Night air pushes in. It smells like wet metal and cold stone and missing my babies.
Sergei helps them load up, and the first car rolls.
The second brakes light. The third sits ready to cover.
The nurse climbs in with Xander. My mother settles with Yuri and keeps her eyes on me as the door shuts.
He’s moodier than Xander, so I get why she picked him to ride with.
But I worry Xander will feel abandoned, surrounded by strangers.
I hear the soft grinding of rubber on concrete. Then nothing.
The space they leave is loud. I have to hold the stroller handle to stay upright.
Roman doesn’t speak at first. When the worst part passes, he touches the back of my arm and takes his hand away. “They will be fine.”
“Say it again.” It is not a request.
“They will be fine.” He keeps his voice level, and I didn’t know I needed that as much as I do.
We bid our farewells to the remaining guests, and the reception is over. The staff is invisible. Security isn’t. My body feels heavier. Air sounds different. Wrong. Empty.
My babies are gone.
In Roman’s office, a lamp glows on a neat desk and a phone that belongs to another decade. He points to the chair by the window. “Next is your job at the law firm.”
I sit because my legs don’t like standing anymore. “I should go in after the honeymoon. Pack my drawer. Give a week. Find someone to hand off to.”
“No. You say the truth that keeps you safe and ends the conversation.” He nods at the landline. “Use that. Untraceable.”
The number is in my bones. Mr. Kerr answers on the second ring like always. “Hello?”
“It’s Mina. I wanted to tell you in person, but there’s no time. I got married.”
A beat of surprise. “Congratulations. You sound…like there’s more to it than that.”
I sigh. “I won’t be coming back. We have a family emergency with no end date. My husband’s son is having a mental breakdown. We don’t know what the situation will require.” Not entirely a lie.
His words come out slowly, like he’s concerned. “Are you safe, Mina?”
“Yes, it’s nothing like that.” It’s exactly like that. “I can send notes to make the Mitchell handoff easy. Or at least a list.”
“No need, I’ll handle it. Sounds like you have your hands full as it is. When you want back in the rat race, I’ll welcome you with open arms or a glowing reference.”
My throat gets hot. “Thank you.”
“Go be married. And good luck.” He hangs up before I fail at being concise.
I put the handset down. “I hated that. Kerr was always good to me.”
“You okay?”
“Does it matter? I’m breathing, and that’s what I’ll settle for at the moment.”
“It matters to me.”
I meet his gaze and sigh again. He really does care, or near enough. “I’ll be okay, Roman.”
“Good.” He opens a drawer and takes out two passports and a slim folder. “Plane’s ready. We’re going to Fiji.”
“Fiji?”
“We’ll be at a private resort. Friendly police. Enough cameras to make tracking him on the island easy.”
“Will he come there?”
A simple nod is all I get. Not an apology—not that I need one. None of this is Roman’s fault. Nor do I get I’ll keep you safe forever and nothing bad will happen.
I appreciate that he doesn’t sugarcoat this for me. He doesn’t treat me like I’m fragile. It’s more respect than I’ve gotten from anyone I’ve dated.
We move through a service corridor that opens to a small underground garage. The car is plain and dark. The windows show a pinstripe of the world and nothing else. My chest wants to climb out of my ribs. I count streetlights to slow it down.
At the private terminal, light spills in strict lines across concrete.
The plane waits with the stairs down. Marcus talks to the crew.
Tanner checks a list. A man and a woman dressed like us step into a van and disappear toward the wrong gate to be seen by the right camera.
Decoys, I imagine. I keep my face blank because someone could be watching from anywhere.
It’s too open here, too exposed for my liking.
Hopefully, the decoys work.
I imagine walking into the tiny plane and facing Vitaly with nowhere to run or hide. My lungs don’t want to do their job. But I walk up the stairs anyway.
Inside, the cabin glows warm and quiet. My eyes take in the sights in flashes, still on the alert for our killer.
Pale wood. Soft tan leather that doesn’t squeak.
A blue runner of plush carpet on the aisle and between the seats.
Water bottles lined up like soldiers. I touch the back of a seat because I need to touch something that will not move when the rest of this does.
No Vitaly in sight.
Roman speaks to the pilot and sits across from me. He buckles. I buckle. If I do what he does, I don’t have to think, and right now, thinking is doing me no favors.
He suggests, “Call your mother now. The line will go dark after takeoff.”
He pulls a small secure handset from the armrest and taps two buttons. My mother’s voice fills the small room. “Hi, honey. We’re just fine, almost there. They made me turn in my phone. The women are not chatty. They know what they’re doing.”
“Are the boys okay?”
“Dead to the world,” she says. I hear her swallow. “We’ll call on the house phone when they let me.”
“Okay. I love you.”
“Love you,” she says. The line drops. Roman tucks the handset back and looks out the window.
The plane moves, and I take a quick breath.
I’m not a fan of flying. It’s not on my worst fears list, but it could be, depending on the day.
And this plane is tiny. The runway lights scroll under us like stitches.
I grip the armrests and try to relax my jaw.
No success. The engines lift. The city tips backward and falls away.
I close my eyes and see the things I don’t want to see. A cup that almost touched his mouth. A body on a rug with a hat near the hand. I open my eyes before the images stick.
“Tell me about yourself, Mina,” Roman says.
“I hate this.” The words spill out. I can’t stop them—my heart is too wound up to stop now. “I hate that I’m leaving them. I hate being bait. I hate that your son is a hurricane we have to fly into on purpose. I hate that I quit my job on a landline like it was a bad affair. I liked that job.”
“You will have another when you want one. Or something you like better.”
“I don’t want better. I want normal. I want a printer that jams and a bus stop view and a clerk who knows me. I want to count calendar days until my next vacation that I know I lied to myself about getting, but I use it as inspiration to go to work anyway.”
He looks perturbed. I can’t tell if I hurt his feelings by rambling all of that at him, but he asked, and if he’s going to be honest with me, I’ll be honest with him. He clears his throat before saying, “You’ll have whatever you want when this is over.”
I almost believe him. But I’ve never had whatever I wanted before today, and I can’t picture that happening now or ever in my future. I also cannot stop rambling, because my pulse and my brain are conspiring against me. “I like you. I wish I didn’t. It would make this simpler.”
That earns a flicker of a smile at the corner of his lips.
It’s hidden by a day’s worth of stubble, but I catch the ghost of that smile, and I wonder how handsome he’d be if he ever actually smiled fully.
“It would be simpler, but I’ve never had simple a day in my life, and from what little I know of you, neither have you.
What would you do with a simple circumstance, Mina? ”
I think my husband is flirting with me. But the question blanks my mind. “To be honest, I’m not sure what I’d do with a simple life. I got close to having one briefly…” I take a breath, trying to sort through the few thoughts I have. “But then your son showed up again, and now I’m here.”
The flight attendant appears long enough to set down water and vanish. The plane levels. The engine hum becomes a blanket I can live under for a while. I drink, and the world tastes less like metal.
“Tell me about the retreat Mom and the boys are at.”
“It’s for women who…need an escape from the life.” An escape from the Bratva, he means. “Some left bad men. Some left their own bad days. They tend a garden. They walk in pairs. The fence is for wolves and for men who think they are wolves.”
“Does he know it exists?”
“No. Few know about it. Otherwise, it wouldn’t work.
” He pauses, and I can’t tell if that’s because he doesn’t want to tell me more, or if there’s even more to tell.
“My mother…she could have used a place like it. She died, and then once my father had passed, I set the retreat up for women to tell their captain husbands that they were going to an exclusive spa or whatever lie they thought would work.”
“And the husbands buy that?”
“It is not uncommon for their wives to go overseas for the latest in plastic surgery or what have you. So, a few days at a spa is nothing to them.”
I nod, but it’s hard for me to imagine separate vacations like that. “Go on.”
“When they’re free, I send the team to meet up with her and ensure she doesn’t have a tail.
She can spend a few days there, or weeks, or we can help her fake her own death and relocate her.
Whatever she needs. Some merely need a break, but others…
they need a new life. If I let it be known that I offer such a thing, I would be a dead man.
So, I keep that resource a very guarded secret. ”
“Oh. Then it’s as safe as it can be, I guess.
They all are.” I let that settle me, even though it’s hard to believe my sons are okay without me.
Leaning against the window until the cold sinks into my skin helps.
The ocean is black below us. The map screen draws a thin line over it and writes one word at the end. Fiji.
I text my mother even though I know the phone is off. I love you. It goes nowhere. It helps anyway.
Roman moves to the seat beside me after the belt sign dims. He doesn’t touch me until I lift my hand. Then he covers it. Warmth moves from his palm to mine. It doesn’t fix anything.
I don’t know what could.