Taylor
The first man keeps one hand around my arm as he pushes me deeper into the private treatment wing.
Behind us, alarms pulse through the hospital.
People shout instructions over one another.
Somewhere beyond the sealed doors, the public event has dissolved into panic. Ahead of us, the corridor is empty.
Hospitals are never empty. That’s when I know. We are not being escorted to safety. We are being abducted.
Nikita knows too. “This is not the evacuation route,” she says in Russian. The man holding her does not answer. His hand tightens around the back of her neck.
I understand enough of the conversation between the guards to catch fragments. Ambulance. Service entrance. Orlov. Then one of them says, “Do not strike the stomach.”
My free hand covers it instinctively. The order makes the hair on my arms stand cold. It also gives me something useful. They have orders.
I stumble. The man jerks me upright. “Move.”
“I can’t.”
He tries to drag me forward. I double over and clutch my stomach.
A low sound leaves me. I don’t have to fake all of it.
Terror is twisting everything inside me hard enough to make pain believable, and suddenly my stomach pulls tight beneath my hands.
Harder than the tightening I have been having for weeks, but gone almost as quickly as it came.
Nikita says my name. I look at her, hoping she understands. Then I whisper, “Blood.”
Her eyes widen. “Oh God,” she says in English. “Taylor, are you bleeding?”
The men stop. One curses in Russian. Another tells him to check.
“I think something is wrong,” I gasp. “The baby.”
It is horrible to say. Effective, though.
The guard releases my arm and crouches in front of me. “Where is the blood?”
The crying comes naturally. It’s true. I wipe tears from my face and look at him. He looks young and earnest in the moment. He doesn’t look evil or too serious. He looks like someone doing a job, someone who has a woman he loves at home.
I hold the bottom half of my protruding stomach, and he touches my hand, and he tries to use a commanding voice when he says, “Show me.”
I lie to him. It feels like bad luck to do it. I close my eyes and pray to whoever is listening that they won’t count it against me, and I say, “I feel it warm on my thighs.” Tears are gathering in the corners of my eyes whether it’s true or not.
His hand moves toward the hem of my dress, and I remember the warehouse. A frightened boy on his hands and knees. At the time, I had been too afraid to look away. I had stared right at him as he bled on the concrete, as his bones crunched in front of me.
The guard’s fingers close around the hem of my dress, and sickness rolls through my body. No man except Mikhail has ever put his hands beneath my clothes. I look down at him, and he looks up at me.
“I don’t see any blood.”
I cradle my stomach harder, crying out, “Please!”
He crouches lower, lifting the hem of my dress to look. His face is almost level with my knee. I brace one hand against the wall. Then I seize the back of the guard’s head with both hands and pull. My knee connects with his nose.
There’s a wet crack. Blood splatters across my legs and onto the polished floor.
I try to hold on like he’s a bucking bronco, weaving my fingers into his hair, and knee him again, but he wrenches free.
Strands of his hair are stuck wound around my fingers, and blood spills over his mouth as he reels backward, his hand clamped over his nose, his eyes wide.
I stare at him for what feels like an eternity without reacting, my heartbeat in my throat, his hair in my fingers. Then I run. My shoes slide against the polished floor.
A green stairwell sign glows at the end of the corridor. Twenty feet. Ten. Five. My hand closes around the stairwell handle.
Then behind me, the man shouts, “Hey!”
I look back. The second guard has one arm locked around Nikita’s throat, a gun pressed into her side. The first is still bent over several feet away, blood running through his fingers as he curses at me.
Nikita squirms against the man holding her, her face hard. She stomps on his foot with her heeled shoe, but she’s frail, and he barely registers it. Just a small micro-expression passes over his face, and he moves his foot. Nikita shakes her head at me.
I look at the green stairwell sign, sweat clinging to my every pore, then back.
“Go!” Nikita calls out to me, anger etched into her drawn-together, overplucked eyebrows. She sees me considering, and she yells it louder. “Go, moy rebenok!” My child.
The man sees it too. He pushes the gun against her side harder and calls to me, “Save your baby’s grandmother. Come back to us.” It’s almost gentle, his tone.
I could reach another floor. Find doctors. Police. Mikhail’s men. I could save the baby.
Nikita shakes her head. “Taylor,” she warns, her voice low. “Run.”
The man says, “Come back, Taylor. I have orders not to kill you. I have no such orders for Nikita.”
She gave me the pregnancy test. She offered to help me leave her son. She gave me Mikhail’s baby blanket. She became my family before I realized I was missing one here. She called me her child and told me to save myself and my baby.
The man’s elbow digs into Nikita’s throat, and she stops talking. My shoulders drop.
Nikita’s voice breaks, her face collapsing. “No.”
I turn away from the stairwell.