Chapter 31
ELENA
The elevator is what wakes me.
I open my eyes and the ceiling of my bedroom is still dark and Roman is standing at the foot of the bed in his full suit, jacket on, phone already in his hand.
I push myself up onto my elbows and squint at him and he says there is a mandatory council session this morning. He doesn’t know how long it will run.
“Okay,” I say.
He crosses the room and presses his mouth to my forehead and I close my eyes for the two seconds it lasts and then he is gone and the elevator hums and the penthouse goes quiet. I lie back down and stare at the ceiling and think about the fact that I still have not told him about Aleksei.
I need to tell him about Aleksei.
I get up.
I’m standing at the kitchen counter in my robe waiting for the kettle when the intercom buzzes and Irina’s voice comes through saying, “Miss Mara is here.”
I say, “Send her up,” and thirty seconds later Mara comes through the kitchen door with a paper bag from the bakery on 56th Street and her coat still on and her eyes bright in the way they get when she has been sitting on something since last night and has run out of patience for sitting on it.
“He said he loves me,” she says, dropping the bag on the counter.
I turn around. “Danny.”
“Danny.” She pulls her coat off and drapes it over the stool. “We were on his couch watching something genuinely terrible and he just said it. Like he was commenting on the traffic. I love you. Then kept watching the television.”
“What did you say.”
“Nothing. I sat there for approximately forty-five seconds and then I said I was hungry and went to the kitchen.”
“Mara.”
“I know.” She opens the bag and puts two pastries on the counter between us. “I panicked. You know I panic at that part.”
“You have to tell him.”
“I know I have to tell him.” She props her chin in her hand and looks at me across the counter. “Do you think he meant it?”
“He said it unprompted during bad television. He meant it.”
She looks at the pastry in front of her. Breaks a piece off. “I think I love him too.”
“I know you do. You’ve been describing his shower pressure to me for two months.”
She laughs and I laugh and she passes me a piece of pastry even though buttery smells in the mornings have been making me nauseous for weeks.
This morning my stomach is calm, so I take it and eat it and she tells me everything—the exact words Danny used, the expression on his face, what he was wearing, the terrible television program.
I lean against the counter and listen, and the morning feels easy in a way I did not expect it to feel.
“How are you feeling?” she says after a while.
“Better this week, actually. The nausea has backed off.” I wrap my hands around my chamomile. “I had a moment last night where I just lay there thinking about how fast everything has moved. How none of this is what I thought twenty-three would look like.”
“Is that bad?”
I think about Roman’s mouth on my forehead this morning. The coffee he left warm on the counter. His hands in the dark and the way he said I am glad about the child, quiet and certain, like it cost him something to say it, and he paid it anyway.
“No,” I say. “It’s just fast.”
Mara looks at me across the counter. She doesn’t say anything. She breaks off another piece of pastry and passes it to me, and we stay in the warm kitchen, and the morning holds us both for a little while.
I’m back in my bedroom pulling my hair up in the mirror, bobby pins between my teeth, when I feel it.
Sharp. Low. A line of pain cutting across my abdomen that makes my hands drop from my hair and my stomach clench, and I grab the edge of the dresser because my knees have decided they are no longer fully reliable.
I breathe.
It doesn’t pass. It sharpens.
“Mara.” My voice comes out wrong, thin, and I hear her in the other room stop moving.
She’s in the doorway in four seconds. She looks at my face in the mirror, and she says, “We’re going now.” She’s already picking up my bag from the chair.
Two of Roman’s men meet us in the lobby. Only two. I notice this as I step out of the elevator, my hand pressed to my stomach. I think Roman said there would be more, but then the pain shifts, and I stop thinking about the number of men and start thinking about breathing.
Mara gets in the car beside me, takes my hand, and tells the driver to go.
The clinic is on the Upper East Side. We turn onto the street, and I can see the entrance from the car window, the small awning, and the glass doors.
I’m reaching for the door handle when Viktor says something sharp from the front seat, and the two men in the car ahead of us are already out and moving, and I don’t understand what I’m seeing.
Four men on the pavement. Coming from two directions, fast, with no gap between the decision and the execution.
One of Roman’s men goes down. I’m out of the car, both feet on the pavement, and someone grabs my right arm, and someone grabs my left, and I pull with everything I have, and it makes no difference. I’m moving toward the black van at the end of the block whether I choose to be or not.
“Elena!” Mara is out of the car. She has both hands on the man’s jacket, gripping my right arm, pulling, her voice high and sharp. “Let her go, let her go—”
He turns and shoves her. She hits the car door hard, stumbles, and goes down onto one knee.
I scream her name so hard my throat tears.
The gunshot cracks the morning open.
One shot. Close. The sound of it bounces off the buildings on both sides of the street, and Mara screams, a sound I have never heard come out of her before. The van door is open, and I am inside, and the door slams, and the vehicle is already moving.
I’m on my knees on the metal floor. Both hands pressed flat to my stomach. The pain is still there, low, insistent, and outside the sealed doors, the city slides past. Mara’s scream is still living in my ears, and I don’t know what the bullet hit.
I press both hands harder against my stomach.
The baby is fine. On Tuesday, Dr. Park said everything looks good. The baby is fine.
Mara’s scream.
The way she hit that door.
I press my hands against my stomach, and I stare at the sealed door. I breathe, and I think her name over and over and over again.