8. Sofiya
SOFIYA
Budapest is busy enough to hide in if you do it right, and for three weeks, I do.
I rent rooms by the week, always cash, always different neighborhoods, and never anywhere that would remember my face if someone came asking later.
The room I’m in now sits at the back of a narrow building with a green front door, a cracked sink, and one stubborn radiator that bangs every night like it has a grudge.
The window faces a courtyard where old women smoke in slippers and slap sheets onto lines before breakfast.
I don’t bother with unpacking.
One suitcase stays latched under the bed, my documents stay in the same inside pocket, and cash stays split three ways. The gun reaches me through a courier Zhenya trusts, and once I have it back in my hand, I sleep better. Not well, but better.
After the first week, fear stops getting in the way of my life. You stop calling it panic. You call it routine, and then you build your days around it.
I take a job at a shipping office and call myself Katalin.
The man who hires me barely looks at my papers.
He watches me correct a customs field his clerk missed, asks whether I can start Monday, and slides an envelope across the desk before lunch.
The office is small, badly ventilated, and full of men who lie for a living and then act offended when paperwork calls them on it.
It suits me.
I get there early every morning because early gives me time to walk the block once, check the parked cars, and see whether the same faces show up twice. Then I go upstairs, boot the terminal, and fix whatever disaster was left behind the night before.
Usually, Ferenc comes in first. He smells like cigarettes and mint gum, and he flirts like a man who thinks wearing down a woman counts as charm.
He leans on my desk while I log in. “You’re wasted here, Katalin.”
I keep my eyes on the screen. “On this salary? Obviously.”
He grins. “No, I mean it. You fix things before anyone else even notices they’re broken.”
“I like it here,” I say, softening my voice on purpose. Men like Ferenc always mistake politeness for progress, and by tomorrow, he’ll be back at my desk acting like persistence is romantic and “later” is a prize.
He’s still smiling when our manager stomps in barking about fuel receipts, and the office starts moving all at once.
That becomes my life. Cash wages, bad coffee, freight lies, and a name that isn’t mine sliding into my mouth easily enough to answer to.
By the second week, I start feeling off.
At first, I blame the obvious things. Bad sleep, or maybe too much tension.
Cheap bread, too much coffee, cigarette smoke that clings to the walls and comes home in my hair.
Then the tiredness changes shape and gets harder to argue with.
It sits behind my eyes by noon, it drags at my back, and it makes the office lights feel hostile.
Food turns on me next.
One morning, I buy eggs and nearly gag when I crack them into the pan.
Another day, I’m hungry enough to shake, then I smell reheated sausage in the office kitchen and have to walk out before I disgrace myself in the stairwell sink.
My breasts ache. My temper gets shorter.
I start counting dates in my head, then I stop, because I already know where the counting leads.
I keep moving anyway.
After work, I switch routes home, step off trams early, double back twice, and buy groceries where the cameras face the street instead of the till.
I learn which underpass always smells like piss after rain and which bridge fills up just after dusk.
I tell myself all of that matters more than what my body is trying to tell me.
At night it gets worse, because there’s nothing to do but think.
And when I think, I think of Anton. Prague was the last time anything in my life happened because I chose it. He was dangerous, but he was danger with a face, a voice, and hands I walked into willingly.
That’s the part that stays with me.
One afternoon, I’m in a pharmacy buying toothpaste and painkillers when I see a man outside in a charcoal coat, broad through the shoulders, dark-haired, roughly Anton’s height.
Heat hits me so fast, it scrambles my thoughts.
I look up hard, my pulse jumps, and then the man turns and he’s nobody I know.
I leave angry with myself.
The next day, Ferenc says, “You look terrible,” and he means it flirtatiously, which should be impossible, but all I can think is that if Anton said it, it would sound like an order and a hand under my chin.
That night, I sleep badly, wake twice, then drift back under into the kind of half-sleep that makes everything feel too close. I dream his mouth at my throat, his hand on my jaw, his voice rough in my ear, and when I wake, I’m hot and restless and furious about it.
I shove a hand under the blanket anyway.
My fingers slip under the waistband of my shorts, and the first touch makes my breath catch. I tell myself not to think about him, and then I do exactly that. His mouth. His hands. The way he told me to look at him. The way he handled me like he already knew I would take it.
“Anton,” I whisper into the pillow before I can stop myself.
That does it.
I come with my face turned into the pillow so I don’t make noise, and afterward I lie there staring at the dark ceiling, breathing hard and feeling worse instead of better.
In the morning, I make three mistakes before lunch.
I catch all of them myself, but the errors piss me off and the nausea is back by noon. A small refrigerated load from Bratislava gets held over a bad product code, our manager starts shouting at everyone in range, and I spend forty minutes cleaning up a lie someone else wrote badly.
By the time I leave, I’m done pretending.
That night, I count properly.
Then I do it again in the morning because I trust myself more before coffee.
The answer doesn’t change—I miss a cycle marker.
Stress can do a lot to a body, and I’ve got enough stress to explain almost anything, but I know what denial sounds like when it’s coming out of my own mouth. By the next afternoon, I stop in front of a shop window full of baby things and stand there like an idiot staring at tiny socks.
I walk away swearing at myself under my breath.
The clinic can wait. I don’t want a paper trail, I don’t want a receptionist asking questions, and I definitely don’t want some brisk woman in a white coat telling me my life in a voice that makes it sound ordinary.
What I want is privacy.
So after work the next day, I go the long way home, double back twice, make sure no one’s behind me, and stop outside a pharmacy on a side street near the tram line. A woman with dyed red hair is behind the counter inside doing stock with a pen between her teeth. She glances up. “Can I help you?”
I walk past the vitamins and the cold medicine to the shelf with pregnancy tests lined up in neat little boxes that make my stomach drop.
My hand hovers for one second, then I grab one, and for some reason also grab a shampoo and toothpaste. The woman scans everything without expression. “Cash or card?”
“Cash.”
I pay, shove the small bag into my tote, and walk out without checking whether anyone’s watching. I don’t breathe properly until I’m back in my room with the door locked, the chain up, and the gun on the table beside me.
I set the pharmacy bag on the bed, wash my hands twice, and stare at the box like it might open itself and spare me the part where I have to choose. Then I tear it open.
The instructions are in Hungarian. I understand enough and do exactly what it says.
Then I set the test on the edge of the sink and force myself to step back.
Waiting is uglier than fear.
I pace once across the room and back. The radiator bangs. Somebody runs water through old pipes, and the walls make it sound like the whole building is swallowing.
I think of Maks, of the drive hidden under the false bottom of my suitcase, of Anton in Prague and how he was the only man who felt like my match.
I’ve dated, I’ve slept with men, but none of them split things cleanly down the middle.
There’s a before him and an after him, and it’s annoyingly permanent.
With a grimace, I stop pacing and look and my heart skips a beat. The lines are there, clean and unmistakable, and the room goes dead quiet around me even though nothing has actually changed.
I grip the sink so hard my knuckles ache, and all I can do is stare. The birth control pill I took after slipping out of the hotel has done me zero favors.
I’m pregnant with Anton Reznikov’s baby.