10. Ana
ANA
Time hasn’t moved straight since Dominik pulled me out of the transit house. Some days blur together with driving, switching names, keeping doors locked. Other days drag like they’re holding their breath, like something’s about to snap. But nothing does. The pressure just stays.
Dominik moves me twice after the rescue before we end up at a safehouse on the edge of the city.
It’s tucked behind a row of garages and a workshop that smells like oil and rust. From the outside, it looks like a supply unit, no number, no nameplate, just a metal door with a keypad.
Inside, it is bare but orderly. A cot pushed against the wall, a table near the window, shelves with tinned food and water bottles.
The curtains are thick, and the room carries the scent of dust and lime plaster.
He sets the bag down near the cot and glances around the room.
“What do you need in here? Food, clothes, anything specific?”
“Just something warm,” I say.
He nods, then slings the smaller bag over his shoulder.
“Keep the door shut. Don’t answer unless it’s me.”
I don’t say anything.
“Settle in,” he adds, pausing at the door. “I won’t be long.”
Then he’s gone.
Dominik is gone more than he’s here. When he is home, he talks less. He checks his phone less. He watches the street longer. I ask once what’s wrong. He doesn’t look at me when he answers.
“It doesn’t concern you.”
I press anyway.
“Contacts stopped answering,” he finally says. He doesn’t sound angry or alarmed. He says it like he’s naming a fact.
My stomach drops. He sees it happen and reaches for my wrist.
“Don’t worry,” he says. “I’ll manage.”
He takes me to a garage off the ring road one day, one of those concrete boxes wedged between a tire shop and a shuttered warehouse. A man looks up from under a lifted hood and grins through tobacco-stained teeth.
“Mr. Nikolai,” he says, wiping his hands on his jeans. “Your car’s ready.”
He points to a dented silver Tiggo parked near the wall. It’s just another car no one remembers after it passes.
“Nikolai?” I ask.
Dominik glances at me and gives the smallest smile.
The man keeps his eyes on the clipboard while Dominik counts out the cash, slow and exact, and he doesn’t give a receipt or waste time talking about the car. The keys change hands and that’s the whole transaction.
Dominik opens the hood and listens to the engine idle, lets it run long enough to know its sound, taps the gas once, then shuts it off and nods.
That’s how we get our first car.
We drive straight into the city afterward, not away from it. That surprises me, though I don’t ask why.
“We’re not returning to the old house,” Dominik says, his eyes on the road, and then he doesn’t say anything else.
The place we end up isn’t hidden. It sits above a row of shops in a neighborhood where no one watches too closely because everyone is busy with their own movements. Families live here. Kids wander down the sidewalk with ice cream cones after school and on weekends, chattering like kids do.
Our apartment is on the third floor. The stairs are narrow and the railings are chipped, and there’s no elevator. Two rooms, a small kitchen, and windows that look out over a street that never really empties.
Voices drift up in a dozen languages. The first morning, I stand at the window and watch a couple crossing with a small dog at their heels, their voices rising as they argue about something only they understand.
Across the street, two girls hang dresses on the mannequins in the thrift shop window. A bread truck waits at the bakery, and the driver chats with the tailor next door while he puffs on a cigarette.
Next day, I go on walks in the neighborhood. Dominik says it’s safe as long as I watch reflections. I put on the usual makeup and a scarf and stick to familiar blocks where I can watch my reflection in shop windows. I pretend I’m just looking at China, dresses, or shoes.
For the first time in many days, I feel something unfamiliar settle into my chest. Relief. It feels normal.
We live under a borrowed name. It’s not completely made up. It belonged to someone who’s dead, and we use it now because it still works on paper without raising questions. Dominik handles the documents. I don’t ask where they came from.
I learn how to write the new surname until my hand stops hesitating. I start buying bread from the bakery across the street every other day, enough that the girl behind the counter stops asking questions and just hands me the loaf wrapped in brown paper.
The woman sweeping the entry every morning now barely looks up when I nod her hello.
Dominik doesn’t relax. He never will. He listens to the street like it’s a language he never forgets.
He leaves at odd hours and comes back with groceries, news.
But he loosens enough to sit at the small kitchen table in the mornings with coffee instead of pacing the room.
He gives the reassurance of someone who knows the exit plans.
I catch myself laughing without glancing around first.
Two days later, my body gives out on me.
I'm on my way back from the usual morning walk, and a dull ache builds in my skull and doesn’t lift, pressing long enough that it leaves me unsettled. I make it home, drop onto the bed, and stay there. Dominik looks up from his phone, eyes narrowing. “Are you all right?” he asks.
“Just tired,” I say, but the words feel shallow.
At lunch, I slide the plate aside halfway through and head for the bathroom. Once there, I retch and can’t catch my breath. Dominik rises from the table and steadies me as I try to regain some control. Back in bed, he sits beside me, his brow lifted on one side, a look of concern plain on his face.
“It’ll pass,” I say unevenly. “I just need rest.”
But it doesn’t. By morning the nausea is back, heavy enough to leave me unsteady, the room pitching just slightly under my feet. I go downstairs for bread, anyway, thinking a few minutes outside might help.
The cleaning woman looks up from where she’s kneeling, scrubbing tiles.
“You look pale,” she says, her voice warm, familiar in a way that catches me off guard.
I shrug it off with a thin smile. “Just a bit squeamish.”
She tilts her head, eyes kind but direct. “You should see a doctor.”
“Why?” I ask, half amused, half uneasy.
She smiles the way women do when they think the answer is obvious. “It happens,” she says, “when a woman’s expecting.”
Expecting. My grip tightens on the handrail as the word settles.
Memory rushes back on itself, body and time colliding.
Dominik. His hands. The nights that drew us close without asking.
The way I never pulled away, the way I reached for him just as surely, because without that gravity I would have come apart.
The woman smiles again, sympathy softening her eyes.
“Doctor M is down the street,” she says. “Women go there.”
“Women?” I echo, my voice barely there.
“Yes,” she says, nodding. “Wives and mistresses both.” She takes a slow drag from her cigarette, like it’s something that happens every day.
I count backward, fast and silent, standing there in the stairwell. The missed cycle I hadn’t noticed. I tell myself it’s stress, travel, even fear settling late. My body has always slipped under pressure, and pressure has followed me for years.
I watch the symptoms for days, waiting for them to fade. When a second week passes and nothing changes, no bleeding, no relief, I decide to take her advice. Angela, the cleaning woman.
I don’t tell Dominik. Not because I doubt him. I’ve had too many decisions made for me already. I want this one in my hands first.
Doctor M’s clinic doesn’t advertise. The women who go there know where to find it. Wives, mistresses, women whose names appear beside powerful men’s on paper but never in conversation.
I book under my borrowed identity and pay in cash. When I ask for discretion, the receptionist only nods and slides a clipboard across the counter without looking up.
I sit in the waiting room with other women. Some don’t talk, eyes fixed on the floor. A young girl sits in the corner. She scrolls her phone over and over and chews gum nonstop. I stare at her long artificial nails, painted the color of blood.
After a while, a nurse opens the door a crack and says, “The doctor will see you now.”
Doctor M is behind a small desk, papers everywhere, a laptop pushed to one side, a few pill bottles near her elbow. She doesn’t soften her voice. She checks me, then gives me the facts and tells me to come back in two weeks. She reaches for a form and writes out several prescriptions.
“Considering you’re keeping the baby,” she says, dry and direct.
I walk home with my thoughts pulling in too many directions to follow. When I come in, Dominik is already there, standing at the stove.
“I waved at you,” he says without turning, hearing me before he looks.
“When?”
“You were walking down the street. You didn’t see me. You were staring straight ahead like you were somewhere else.” He pauses. “Where did you go?”
“I didn’t notice,” I say. “I’m sorry.”
I move to one of the rooms and lock the door behind me. I need time to put this together. For now, I don’t tell him.
Pregnant.
The word won’t settle. It collides with everything else and leaves nothing where it was. I press my palm to my stomach, then pull it away, like I’ve done something I’m not allowed to touch yet.
My breathing keeps changing on me. Too fast. Too shallow. Then suddenly slow, like my body forgets what it’s meant to do. I picture something small where there was nothing before, and the pressure in my chest forces me to sit down on the bed.
I try to think ahead and can’t get past tomorrow. A baby doesn’t fit into borrowed names, packed bags, exits mapped in advance. My parents are gone to me. I vanished after my husband’s funeral and crossed the council when I should have bowed. There’s no help waiting if I reach for it.
A laugh slips out before I can stop it. It sounds wrong in the still room. A moment later, my eyes burn, and I press my knuckles against them until it passes.
Boy or girl? The question arrives without asking. If it’s a boy, I flinch before I know why. Markov’s face rises in my mind, his temper, his voice, the way he filled a room with hate.
No.
It can’t be his.
The timing doesn’t lie. Weeks, not months. Days, not years. Markov barely touched me toward the end. Dominik did. The memory warms my skin and knots my stomach at the same time.
The council can never know.
If they think I’m carrying Markov’s child, the baby becomes an inheritance. A handle. Something to bargain with when it suits them. If they realize the child isn’t his, then I become a problem and Dominik becomes a threat who stepped out of line.
Either way, I lose the right to decide what happens next.
I wake early, before the bakery downstairs opens and before the street fills with voices and delivery trucks.
In the daylight, the apartment feels smaller.
The ceilings press lower. There’s nowhere to step without brushing a wall.
I shower and dress slowly, picking clothes that don’t cling, and drink water instead of coffee because my stomach won’t take the heat yet.
Dominik is already gone. A note in his careful block handwriting sits on the table.
Going out. Back soon. Stay inside.
I don’t argue when he tells me to stay in.
My limbs feel heavy. My thoughts drift and don’t settle.
I don’t go out for a walk. Instead, I sit at the kitchen table and force myself to eat a piece of bread, counting bites and keeping my breathing steady.
I count to ten between each one and keep my hands flat on the wood until they stop shaking.
I’ll need a plan. Not later. Now, while I can still think straight. I’ll need another name, papers that don’t point back here, and a place that isn’t on anyone’s usual path. Far north would be better. I know the right people who can help. I’ll see them this afternoon.
When I finish mapping it out, I exhale. The room feels steady again.
By midmorning, the street slips into its usual rhythm.
I hear the woman downstairs talking to someone.
I hear mothers guiding their children back home from school, the steady pattern of footsteps on pavement, the scrape of chairs being pushed out front, and a dog being dragged along by its owner.
The street keeps moving, unaware of what’s being carried through it.
There’s a knock at the door. My body tightens before my mind catches up. It isn’t loud, just steady, measured, the kind that expects an answer.
I don’t rush when I go to the door. I look through the peephole first. A man in a dark coat and cap stands in the hallway, shoulders down, hands behind his back. He’s neither police nor a courier.
I open the door halfway.
“Madam,” he says, smiling like we know each other. He holds out an envelope between two fingers, heavy paper, no stamp, no return address.
“For you.”
I take it. His eyes flick past me once, quick, checking the space behind my shoulder. He tips his cap, polite as a neighbor, and turns away before I can say anything.
When I step into the hall and peek through the window, he’s gone.
I close the door and lock it, then slide the chain into place out of habit. If it’s who I think it is, the lock won’t matter. The council wouldn’t knock unless they wanted me to know they came. I carry the envelope to the table and stare at it for a long time. I don’t open it right away.
When I do, there’s no threat inside. No raised voice.
No direct order. Just an invitation in formal language, clean phrasing, respectful tone.
A request for my presence to observe tradition, to discuss arrangements, to honor continuity.
The time is fixed. The place is exact. The names at the bottom carry enough weight that refusal would be noted, remembered, and corrected later.
The council didn’t guess. They didn’t wait. They acted because they already knew enough. I didn’t stay invisible as long as I hoped. My hand moves to my stomach before I can stop it. I press my palm flat on the table and hold it there until my breathing steadies.
I think of Dominik. How he plans ahead. How he counts exits, measures risk, doesn’t let emotion cloud the math. Something settles inside me. My pulse evens out. The noise in my head thins until there’s only one thought at a time. I don’t shake anymore.
That unsettles me. Panic still leaves room to turn back. This feels like the moment after the decision’s already been made, and the straight exit’s closed.
If I stay still, they’ll decide. If I wait, they’ll take what they want and call it order.
I fold the letter and slide it into my bag. I don’t tear it. I don’t hide it. There’s no point pretending this isn’t happening.
When Dominik comes back, I’ll let him think we still have time.
I stand, wash my hands, and look around the apartment one more time. The noise outside feels louder now, closer.
I won’t survive what comes next by standing still or waiting.