Chapter 9 #2
Anya’s hand lifts quickly, a quiet interruption. “I can go with her,” she volunteers, standing smoothly. “You should finish with Otets.”
Their conversation happens over my head, but I see the way Luka’s jaw tightens. He doesn’t like the idea of letting me out of his sight.
Anya’s fingers touch his forearm in a light, familiar gesture. “You hovering over her will not help,” she reminds him gently. “Let me handle this.”
There’s a brief pause, then Luka inclines his head once, the smallest concession, and looks back at me. “If you need the doctor, Anya will take you downstairs.”
“Thank you,” I manage, my voice thin.
Vega rises as I push my chair back fully. He seems torn between staying at Luka’s side and following me. A quiet sound leaves his throat, and Luka pats his shoulder once.
“Ostavaysya,” Luka instructs him softly. Stay.
The dog obeys, sinking back to the floor with a reluctant huff.
The loss of his warmth on my leg makes me feel strangely exposed as I step away from the table.
I keep my eyes on the doorway instead of Isaak’s face, even though I can feel his gaze following me as Anya guides me out into the hall.
The moment we clear the threshold, the air feels cooler.
I breathe it in greedily, one hand pressed over my stomach.
“Bathroom,” I choke out.
“Of course.” Anya slides an arm around my shoulders like she has done this a thousand times, gently steering me down the corridor. “Almost there.”
By the time we reach my suite, my body has made its decision for me.
I barely make it to the bathroom before I fall to my knees and grab the edges of the toilet.
My stomach empties in harsh, miserable waves.
Tears sting my eyes from the force of it.
My throat burns, and my entire body trembles with each heave until there is nothing left but bitter saliva and air.
Anya kneels beside me without a word, one hand gathering my hair away from my face, the other rubbing small circles between my shoulder blades. The tile feels cold under my knees. The room smells like soap and lemon, faint underneath the acid bitterness in my nose.
When the last wave passes, I sag back on my heels, panting. I flush the toilet and reach for the edge of the sink to pull myself up.
“Easy,” Anya murmurs. She helps me stand and guides me to the counter. I cling to it while she turns on the faucet and wets a washcloth, then presses it into my hand. I wipe my mouth and cheeks, avoiding my reflection.
“That came on fast,” Anya observes, her tone gentle but thoughtful. “Did you feel sick last night?”
“A little off,” I admit, dabbing the cloth against my lips. “I thought it was the plane. Or stress. Or everything.”
She studies me in the mirror, her eyes moving over my face in a way that reminds me she grew up in a house where reading people accurately could mean the difference between living and not. “How long have you felt like this?”
“I don’t know.” I close my eyes briefly. “The last week? My stomach has been weird. Food smells terrible sometimes. I wake up feeling… off.”
One eyebrow arches, and realization rises in her expression. “Sage,” she begins slowly, “when was your last period?”
The question hits like a slap. I open my eyes and stare at her. “What?”
She doesn’t look away. “Your cycle,” she clarifies. “You have been under a lot of stress. Travel, trauma. Sometimes the body reacts, but nausea like that, and the way you almost passed out at the table…”
My heartbeat starts pounding in my ears again.
I drag my mind backward over the last month, flipping through days like pages in a book that got dropped in water.
Everything blurs. Hospital corridors. Smoke from the café.
Luka’s cabin. His mouth against my skin. The way time lost all shape after that.
“I… I’m on the pill,” I protest. My voice sounds thin even to me. “I have been for years. It keeps my cycle regular. I never expected to… I mean, I wasn’t planning on…”
Luka’s hands on my hips flash through my mind, the feel of him inside me, the way we didn’t stop to talk about anything practical. Sex in a cabin while my sister is missing and my life is burning is not exactly something I planned.
Anya’s gaze softens, but she doesn’t back off. “Have you missed any doses?”
“I don’t know,” I whisper truthfully. I grip the edge of the counter tighter. “Maybe. After the fire, everything blurred. Some nights I could barely remember if I brushed my teeth, let alone if I took a pill. I haven’t been with anyone in so long until…”
Until Luka.
Heat crawls up my neck despite the nausea. My fingers tighten on the sink until my knuckles ache.
Anya’s reflection holds mine without wavering. “How late are you?”
“I…” My brain scrambles again, counting backward through chaos. Hope’s seizure. The hospital. Ray’s first call. The cabin. The attack. “Two weeks, maybe. I thought it was stress. It’s been late before.”
She lets out a slow breath. Not judgmental, just assessing. “With everything happening, stress is a reasonable explanation,” she acknowledges. “But we cannot ignore the other possibility.”
The room tilts slightly. “I’m not…” The word dies on my tongue. I can’t bring myself to finish the sentence.
Pregnant. The idea feels too big to fit in the same head that has been fully occupied by survival and ransom demands. Another life inside mine when I can barely keep myself upright. When my sister is somewhere in a room I can’t reach.
“My God,” I breathe. “I can’t be. Not now. Not like this.”
Anya steps closer, resting a hand lightly on my forearm. Her touch is warm and calming. “I am not here to lecture you,” she reminds me quietly. “I am here because you are alone in a situation no one should face by themselves. You can trust me with this, Sage.”
My throat tightens. “If Luka finds out…” I don’t manage the rest.
He’ll rearrange my life again, except this time there will be another piece on his board with our shared blood.
“We do not know anything yet,” Anya counters gently. “And even if you are, we will figure out what that means, step by step. But guessing in your head will make you sick with fear. We can get you an answer.”
“How?” I ask because my practical brain needs something to hold onto. “I can’t exactly walk into a pharmacy.”
A hint of a smile touches her mouth. “This house contains more than guards and fancy art. We have a clinic on the lower level. Fully stocked with a doctor on call. It is easier to treat wounded men at home than explain bullet wounds at the hospital.”
“Of course you do,” I breathe, the words half laugh, half disbelief.
“I can bring a test up here myself,” she continues. “No one needs to know. Not Luka. Not Nikolay. Not Otets. Just you and me until you decide otherwise.”
Tears sting my eyes for the second time this morning, but for a different reason. Gratitude mixes with terror, thick and messy. “You would do that?”
“Of course,” she answers without hesitation. “You are under my brother’s protection and also my guest, and you are my friend whether you know how to accept that or not. It is simple.”
It doesn’t feel simple, but I nod anyway, because the alternative is sitting here in this bathroom thinking I might be pregnant with Luka Barinov’s child without doing anything about it.
“Okay,” I whisper. “Please.”
She squeezes my arm once. “Sit on the bed and drink some water. I will be right back.”
When she leaves the bathroom, the silence that follows feels heavier than before. I rinse my mouth, splash more water on my face, and move back into the bedroom. The bed looks huge and untouched. I perch on the edge and wrap my arms around my middle, rocking slightly without meaning to.
My phone presses against my hip, and the reminder hits like a cold hand. Hope. I pull it out with shaking fingers and check the screen again. No new messages.
As if I summoned him with the thought, a new notification slides across the top. Unknown number, even though I know exactly who it is. My lungs forget how to work as I unlock the phone with my thumb.
A video thumbnail fills the message thread.
No text yet. Just the image of a door and a piece of a concrete wall.
My heart stutters hard enough that my vision blurs.
I tap it with a finger that barely feels connected to the rest of me.
The video opens to a small room with bare cinderblock walls painted a dirty off-white.
The lighting is harsh and fluorescent. There are no windows.
A metal cot sits against one wall, with a thin mattress and a gray blanket.
Hope sits on the edge of the cot. Her head tilts toward the door, her eyes tracking something I can’t see off-screen.
For a moment, she looks straight into the camera, and I feel like she’s looking directly at me.
A sound escapes her mouth, too soft to make out.
The video doesn’t include audio loud enough to hear words, or maybe they muted it on purpose.
She coughs once, her shoulders jerking. Then she curls in on herself, her arms wrapping around her ribs, shivering slightly.
The video cuts off, and the screen jumps back to the message thread. Text bubbles appear one after another.
Still alive.
If you want that to continue, you stay exactly where you are.
Tell no one.
Do nothing until I contact you again.
My vision blurs, and I clutch the phone so hard my fingers hurt.
Seattle doesn’t mean safety. It means I’m even more trapped.
I’m in the heart of a Bratva fortress with a man who could storm any building in this city, and I can’t tell him about the one room that matters because my sister is locked inside it.
My stomach lurches again, but there’s nothing left to throw up. My thumb hovers over the keyboard, itching to type something, anything. Anger burns under the fear, strong enough that I want to demand he release Hope right now, even though I know it would only make things worse.