Chapter Thirty-Eight
Mirabel
The morning starts with disappointment and eggs Benedict.
“I can’t go with you to the gynecologist,” Arkady says, setting down his coffee. He won’t look at me. Instead, he studies the table setting like the arrangement of silverware holds answers. “There’s a meeting. One I’ve been trying to reschedule for two weeks.”
“It’s fine.” I slice into my egg, watching the yolk bleed gold across the plate. It isn’t fine—not really—but I’ve learned to pick my battles in this house, and arguing about an appointment he genuinely seems conflicted about missing isn’t the hill I want to die on today.
“It’s not fine.” He says it like a correction. Sharp. “I should be there.”
“Arkady.” I reach across the table and cover his hand with mine, stilling it. “The baby and I will survive one checkup without you hovering over Dr. Petrov’s shoulder and making his sweat through his lab coat.”
He fights a smile and loses. “I don’t make him sweat.”
“Last visit, you asked him to explain the ultrasound measurements three times. The man’s hands were trembling by the second go.”
“His hands were cold.”
“His hands were terrified.”
Arkady exhales through his nose—the closest he comes to laughing when he doesn’t want to concede the point. “Debra can go with you,” he says. “And Yanis drives.”
“Yanis is not my chauffeur.”
“Today he is.” There’s no room for negotiation in his voice. “I’ll have a full detail on you—plainclothes. The armored sedan, not the SUV. It draws less attention.”
I want to roll my eyes. I want to tell him that a pregnant woman waddling through a shopping center is not exactly a high-value target requiring a motorcade.
But I know better. Since the attack at the gate, since Gavriil’s men opened fire on our home, every outing has become a military operation with logistics documents and extraction routes and a man I love who can’t sleep unless he knows every exit between me and danger.
So I nod. “Okay. Debra, Yanis, armor-plated car, invisible soldiers. Got it.”
“And the panic button.”
I pat my coat pocket where the armband sits. “Always.”
He studies me for a long moment—not the hardened man he once was, but something softer, something that still makes my skin warm even after all these months.
His eyes drop to my belly, to the swell that’s become impossible to disguise, and something unguarded moves behind his expression.
Fear, maybe. Or wonder. Or the place where those two things live tangled together in a man who never expected to want this.
“Come home safe,” he says. Quiet. Not a command for once. A request.
“We will.” I squeeze his hand, then release it and stand… or rather, perform the laborious process that standing has become, which involves bracing, pushing, and internally cursing gravity. “Both of us.”
We gather our things, call for the car, and after too much fussing, finally get on the road.
“I didn’t think he was going to let you leave.” Debra smiles as we take the route to the doctors’ suites.
I give a wry smile. “He’s an impossible man. But his heart’s in the right place.”
“Don’t let anyone hear you say that,” Yanis chimes in. “As far as our men are concerned, Arkady Laurov keeps his heart in the armory, and it pumps pure gun oil.”
The car turns off the road, and Yanis pulls up right in front of the entrance. “You go in while I park the car,” he tells me. “The men will be right behind you until I catch up.”
I nod, exit the car, and head through the front door.
Dr. Petrov’s clinic smells like antiseptic and the lavender diffuser his receptionist insists on running, a combination that shouldn’t work but somehow does.
The waiting room is populated with the usual suspects—women at various stages of transformation, clutching partners or phones or both, flipping through magazines they’re not reading.
Debra sits beside me, her hands folded in her lap.
Not frozen, but purposeful. Chosen calm.
She’s wearing her favorite blue cardigan again, the color gentle against her skin, and her hair has grown long enough to brush her shoulders.
We match again, almost. Mirror images, except for the basketball strapped to my midsection.
“McLeod?” The nurse appears, clipboard in hand.
“That’s me.” I haul myself upright with all the grace of a cargo ship docking. “The one who looks like she swallowed a planet.”
Debra’s mouth curves. “A small planet.”
“Jupiter is not small, Deb.”
Her smile widens. “Well, go see your baby, Jupiter. I’m going to find out where Yanis has gone.” She stands and heads out of the reception while I make my way to the doctor’s office.
The examination room is cold in the way all examination rooms are cold, as though comfort might interfere with the clinical process. I shiver as Dr. Petrov applies the gel to my stomach, the blue substance shocking against my stretched skin.
“Let’s see how she’s doing,” he says, pressing the transducer against my belly. The screen fills with the now-familiar landscape of static and shadow, the alien geography of my daughter’s private world.
And there she is.
The whooshing rhythm of her heartbeat fills the room—steady, strong, insistent.
I hear it, and everything else falls away.
The security detail outside. Gavriil’s shadow.
The wedding plans and the war plans and the impossible collision course they’re on.
All of it dissolves into this sound, this proof that something good and real and mine is growing despite everything.
“I’m happy with everything,” Dr. Petrov says eventually, moving the wand slowly. “Weight is on track. Head circumference perfect. Heart rhythm strong.” He angles the screen toward me. “See here? She’s sucking her thumb.”
I see it. The tiny fist, the impossible smallness of fingers curled near her mouth. My throat tightens.
“Sara,” I whisper. Because that’s her name—the one Arkady and I chose, lying in bed, while he traced circles on my stomach and pretended he wasn’t terrified.
Sara Laurov. Our daughter, who has no idea she’s being born into a dynasty that runs on blood and secrets and a love story that would terrify most sane people.
“You’re doing great, Mirabel,” Dr. Petrov says, handing me paper towels to wipe the gel. “Continue with the supplements. We’ll check again in three weeks.”
I dress quickly—well, as quickly as someone shaped like an oversized avocado can dress—and head through the waiting room to the car park where Debra and Yanis are standing beside the sedan.
Debra stands close to him. Not touching, but in his orbit.
I notice the way his body angles toward her even when he’s looking elsewhere.
“All good with the baby,” I announce, climbing into the backseat.
The sedan swallows me into its leather interior—bulletproof glass, reinforced doors, the whole paranoid package disguised as a perfectly ordinary Audi.
“Sara is sucking her thumb and ignoring the outside world. Smart girl. Takes after her mother.”
Yanis catches my eye in the rearview mirror. A brief, warm acknowledgment. “Good news.”
“The best news.” I settle back, rubbing my belly where Sara kicked moments ago, like she’s impatient. “And because we’re celebrating, I vote we go baby shopping. I saw this maternity boutique called Juicy Baby on Lexington Avenue, and they have the most gorgeous crib bedding.”
Debra turns in the front seat. “You don’t have enough baby things? The nursery is already—”
“The nursery is never finished, Deb. That’s the first rule of nesting. There is always another blanket. Always another onesie. It’s biological. I can’t fight evolution.”
Yanis is already pulling into traffic, one hand on the wheel, the other resting on the center console where Debra’s fingers are dangerously close. If they think I don’t notice, they’re underestimating the observational powers of a woman whose entire hobby used to be snooping.
“Lexington Avenue,” Yanis confirms. “I’ll let the team know.”
The team. As in, the six or seven men currently following us in unmarked vehicles, dressed in civilian clothes, pretending to be regular people going about regular lives while carrying concealed weapons and maintaining surveillance on a pregnant woman who wants to buy crib sheets. My life is surreal.
The shopping district is crowded, fast-moving pedestrians weaving through focused shoppers while traffic cruises by in a busy stream.
It’s the kind of chaos that makes Arkady’s security detail go rigid, too many bodies and blind spots and variables that can’t be controlled.
But for me, it’s heaven. The noise, the color, the blessed normalcy of strangers carrying shopping bags and arguing about parking.
We spend an hour in the baby store, Debra and I filling bags with things Sara doesn’t need and won’t appreciate for years.
Organic cotton sleepers. A set of muslin swaddles printed with tiny rabbits.
Matching booties that are so small they make my chest ache.
A soft toy elephant that Debra picks up, holds against her cheek, and adds to the pile without explanation.
“I’ll go grab a few maternity dresses,” I tell Yanis and Debra as we finish up at the register, bags heavy with purchases. “There’s a boutique two stores down. Meet you at the restaurant across the road?”
Yanis’s eyes sweep the area. I can see him calculating—distances, exits, the positions of the security detail he’s been tracking on his phone all afternoon. “Fifteen minutes,” he says. “Then I’m coming to find you.”
“Twenty.”
“Fifteen.”
“Deal.”
Debra squeezes my arm as I pass. Brief contact, light pressure. The kind of touch she gives now that she’s learning her own body is safe again. I squeeze back.