Chapter 24 #2
I have kept the circle small my whole life for exactly one reason, so the things that matter most cannot be used against me.
And the thing that matters most, the thing I didn’t even know existed until an enemy told me, was being kept from me by the one person inside the circle, while traveling out through a dead girl to the one person I’d least want to hold it.
I turn around. Cindy is staring at me. She heard one half of the call, my half, which was almost nothing, but she’s reading my face again, and whatever is happening on it now is enough.
“Sevastian.” Careful. Frightened in a new way. “What? What did he say?”
“You’re pregnant.” I watch the words hit her, watch her go white, watch the confirmation cross her face before she can stop it, and that’s my answer.
“You’re carrying my child. I just learned it from Gleb Morozov, on the telephone, because your friend told it to him under torture before he cut her apart, before he left her in the desert for me to find. ”
She doesn’t deny it. There’s nothing to deny. She just stares at me, one hand drifting toward her stomach in a gesture I’ve apparently been watching her make for weeks without understanding it, and the silence between us fills up with everything that can’t be taken back.
And then the cold thing in me, the thing that has run this organization through every crisis of the last decade, the thing that does not feel so much as solve, takes the wheel completely.
It’s the only part of me still working, so it does the only thing it knows how to do.
It assesses the asset. It secures the asset.
“You don’t leave these walls again.” My voice has gone flat.
Final. I hear myself from a long way off.
“Not the grounds, not the gate, not for any reason. You don’t stand near a window.
You don’t take a meeting I haven’t cleared.
There will be a man within sight of you at every hour of the day.
The thing you’re carrying is now the single most valuable object in this war.
Morozov knows it exists, which means it gets secured the way I secure anything he wants this badly.
Completely. Without exception. Your feelings about it are not a factor I’m able to weigh anymore. ”
I watch what I’m doing to her even as I do it.
I watch the woman who just lost her best friend hear herself, and the child she hasn’t even decided how to feel about, turned in the space of one breath into a possession to be locked down.
I see how it looks. I do it anyway. The alternative is to feel the thing I’m holding off.
If I feel it I stop functioning, and if I stop functioning she dies too.
She finds her voice. It comes out low, shaking, completely certain.
“This.” She laughs, a terrible wet broken sound, with no humor anywhere in it. “This. Right here. What you’re doing right now. This is why I didn’t tell you.”
And I have no answer.
That stops me, standing there in the wreckage of the worst day either of us has ever had. For the entire length of whatever this is between us, every time we’ve gone to war with each other, I’ve had the better of the argument, or at least an equal share of it.
Not now. Now she’s looking at me having predicted me exactly, having known to the letter what I’d become the instant I found out, having kept the most precious secret of her life from me for the specific reason that I would do this with it.
She was right. She read me weeks ago and protected herself accordingly.
I have just proven her correct in front of her own eyes, on the day her friend died for the secret she was right to keep.
She was wrong to hide a child from its father. I know that. Some part of me will hold that against her for a long time, the deceit, the fact that my enemy knew before I did.
But she was also right about what I’d do. We are both standing here knowing it. There’s no version of me that can open my mouth and make that untrue.
So I don’t try.
I leave the room instead. I give the orders that turn her cage from a figure of speech into a fact, men on the doors, eyes on the windows, the gate sealed. I tell myself it’s protection. I tell myself a dozen things on the way down the stairs, not one of which touches the real thing.
Which is this. I have just lost something I didn’t know I had, gained something I don’t know how to hold, driven the only person I’ve ever wanted into the far corner of a room she now hates, all in the same ten minutes.
All of it my doing. Exactly the way it has always been my doing, with everyone I have ever made the mistake of loving.
Upstairs, behind a door I’ve ordered watched, she’s alone with her grief, with her secret that isn’t a secret anymore, with a man posted outside who’ll note it if she so much as crosses to the bathroom.
Downstairs, I am alone in a different way, which is the only way I’ve ever really known.
Crystal is in the desert in pieces.
There’s a child.
And the woman I’d burn the world for is sitting twenty feet above my head, certain past arguing that I’m exactly the disaster she always feared, holding a grievance as real as the one I’m holding against her, neither of us with the first idea how to set it down.
I always knew it would come to something like this. I just didn’t think it would be the desert that brought it, the same desert that started all of it, handing everything back to me in ruins.
God help her. She let me in.
She should have known better. They all should have. I tell every one of them, in the end, in one language or another. I’m the thing in the dark their mothers warned them about.
She just had to learn it the way they all learn it.
Late.