33. Sofia
SOFIA
The appointment had slipped two days past when Maxim first promised it, a shipment crisis eating the time he'd meant to spend sitting beside me in a waiting room with too many outdated magazines and a fish tank nobody had cleaned in weeks.
In the end that worked out better than either of us could have planned, though neither of us knew it yet walking in that morning.
I told him I didn't mind going alone. He argued for exactly ninety seconds before Kirill called about a delayed container and pulled his attention somewhere I couldn't follow, and I let myself feel almost relieved watching him go, some instinct I didn't examine too closely already deciding I needed this hour to belong to nobody but me.
Doctor Aldrich had a manner so calm it bordered on unsettling, a small gray man with careful hands and the kind of discretion that had apparently kept him in the family's good graces for decades.
He drew blood without asking a single question I didn't want to answer, told me the results would take less time than the paperwork, and left me alone in a room that smelled like antiseptic and old coffee for what felt like the longest twenty minutes of my life.
When he came back in, he didn't make me wait for it.
"You're pregnant, Miss Reyes. Congratulations." He said it the way he probably said everything, level and unhurried, like the words weighed exactly the same as any other diagnosis he delivered on a given morning. "Based on your dates, I'd put you at roughly six weeks."
I heard the words land, and then I heard almost nothing else he said after that, his voice fading into a low, steady hum while something inside my chest split cleanly in half.
One half of me wanted to laugh, and did, a short, startled sound that had no business escaping a woman sitting on crinkling paper in a doctor's office. The other half went cold and still and afraid in a way I hadn't felt since the night Doyle's men came through that gate with guns drawn.
"Miss Reyes?"
"Sorry. I'm sorry, I just." I pressed a hand flat against my stomach, an instinct I hadn't decided to have, and found myself smiling at nothing, at the ceiling, at the absurd fluorescent light humming overhead. "That's a lot to hear at once."
"Take your time. There's no rush on my end.
" He gave me a moment before he spoke again.
"It usually is." He offered a folder of information I barely registered taking, his voice gentling into something almost fatherly.
"You'll want to follow up with an obstetrician soon.
I can recommend someone equally discreet, if that matters to you. "
"It matters."
"I assumed as much." He studied me a moment longer than the appointment strictly required, something knowing in his expression that told me he understood exactly whose child this was and exactly how complicated that made everything else in my life.
"Take care of yourself, Miss Reyes. Whatever else is happening around you. "
I drove home with the windows down despite the chill, needing the cold air on my face to keep from dissolving completely before I made it back to an apartment I barely lived in anymore.
My hands stayed steady on the wheel the whole way, which surprised me more than almost anything else that morning.
A baby was growing inside me. Maxim's baby, inside a body I'd spent four years training to fight, not to hold something this fragile.
Joy came first, sharp and overwhelming, a flood of feeling I hadn't let myself imagine wanting until it was suddenly real.
I thought of Maxim's face the morning he'd finally connected the pieces Kirill handed him, that stunned, unguarded hope breaking across features I'd never once seen unguarded before I met him.
I thought of a small dark-haired child with his father's steady eyes, growing up in a house with a hidden safe and a brass key and men who'd do anything to keep the people they loved safe.
I let myself hold that picture longer than I probably should have, greedy for it, before I made myself set it down.
Then the terror came right behind it, just as loud, drowning out everything gentle before I'd even finished picturing it.
I was carrying a child inside a case that could end with its father in federal prison or its mother in a body bag, possibly both, possibly before the child ever drew a single breath outside my own body.
Doyle had already named me specifically in a threat that had cost him a man at that gate, zip-tied and locked away inside Maxim's compound instead of dead, and he didn't strike me as the kind of man who let that go unanswered.
Callahan had all but promised to leak my identity the moment I stopped being useful to him.
I had built an entire life on lies stacked on top of lies, and now there was a third life tangled inside that structure who'd never agreed to any of it, who couldn't run, couldn't fight, couldn't do anything but exist inside whatever mess I made of the next several months.
I sat in my car outside the apartment for a long time before I found the will to go inside, hands resting on a stomach that didn't look any different yet but already felt like the single most important thing I had ever been responsible for protecting.
I had to tell Maxim. I knew that with total certainty even through the fear, knew it the way I knew my own name.
I also knew, with the same certainty, that telling him now would put all three of us at greater risk, not less.
If Doyle found out Sofia Reyes was carrying Maxim Kuznetsov's child, that message he'd sent about making an example of me would read entirely differently.
If Callahan found out, he'd have new leverage sharp enough to cut through whatever resistance I had left in me, a child instead of a career to threaten me with.
And if Maxim found out before the threat against me was neutralized, I could already picture exactly what he would do.
He would lock me inside that compound with armed men at every door and never let me out of his sight again, which sounded almost tempting until I remembered that hiding hadn't saved his father, or mine, and it wouldn't save either of us this time.
I needed Doyle handled first. I needed Callahan's ledger evidence delivered and this whole case closed before I handed anyone, Doyle, Callahan, or plain bad luck, a weapon with my child's name already written on it.
A few more weeks was all I needed, a narrow window between now and whenever this case finally broke, small enough to survive inside and large enough to finish what I'd started without anyone else learning what I now had to lose.
I made the decision sitting in that car with my hands still shaking, and I hated it, and I made it anyway, because it was the only way I could think of to love both of them, the man and the child neither of us had planned on, without one of them paying for the other.
The apartment felt smaller that night than it ever had, boxes still stacked against the wall, the paint smell finally faded into something closer to just dust. I sat on the couch with my phone in my hand, scrolling through nothing, rehearsing conversations I wasn't ready to have with a man who deserved to hear this news standing upright and steady, not delivered over dinner with a threat still hanging over both our heads.
My phone rang a little after nine, Callahan's name lighting up the screen, and something in my stomach dropped before I'd even answered it.
"Reyes."
"You've had the Meridian information for a week now. I want to know why the DA still doesn't have it on his desk."
"I'm building a case that holds up in court, not a rumor that gets laughed out of a grand jury. I need more than a wire transfer connecting your family to Doyle's front company before I hand you something you can actually use."
"That's not your call to make."
"It's mine until this case closes. I'm the one risking my life to gather it." My voice came out sharper than I intended, adrenaline and exhaustion burning through whatever patience I had left for him tonight of all nights. "You want this case closed clean, you let me finish building it clean."
Silence stretched over the line, the kind Callahan used deliberately, letting a person sit inside their own nerves until they filled the quiet with something he could use.
"I don't think you understand where we are anymore," he said finally, his voice gone flat and cold in a way I hadn't heard from him before, even in that car with Nina beside me.
"The DA's office is done waiting on a source who might be compromised.
I'm done vouching for you every time someone upstairs asks why this case is still open after everything it's cost."
"I'm not compromised."
"You're sleeping with the target and hiding evidence about your own handler's family from the people you report to.
From where I'm sitting, that's compromised in every direction that matters.
" He let that land before continuing, each word arriving slower than the last, deliberate, designed to cut.
"Seventy-two hours, Reyes. Or I send in people who won't be careful. "
"What does that mean?"
"It means a blind tactical raid on that terminal with no one inside to keep it from turning into a bloodbath.
It means agents who don't know which of Kuznetsov's men might actually be worth keeping alive, and who won't care to find out under fire.
It means every asset you've spent months building disappears in one afternoon, along with anyone standing too close when it happens. "
"You'd get people killed to make a deadline."
"I'd get people killed because you've run out of time to prevent it.
There's a difference, and I'd think carefully about which side of that line you actually want to stand on before this call ends.
" His voice hadn't risen once through any of it, and somehow that made it land harder than shouting ever could have.
"Seventy-two hours. Get me something real, or watch what happens when I stop protecting you from what comes next. "
He hung up before I could answer, the dial tone filling the silence he'd left behind, and I sat there with the phone still pressed to my ear for several seconds after the call had already ended, unable to make my hand move to set it down.
I almost laughed at that, the same short, startled sound from the doctor's office earlier that day, except this time nothing about it felt like joy trying to escape. It felt like the floor tilting under a life I'd only just started letting myself want.
I had three days to hand Callahan something that would end this case cleanly, or watch a raid tear through that terminal with no way to steer it away from the men, and the one man among them I'd come to love inside a life I was never supposed to keep.
I set the phone down carefully on the couch cushion beside me, both hands shaking too hard to trust with anything more delicate, and sat there a long time in the dark, the streetlight outside cutting one thin line of gold across the floor.
I didn't cry right away. I sat with it first, the terror and the joy and the impossible math of protecting two lives that both needed things the other couldn't survive, running the numbers over and over until none of them added up to anything except more time I didn't have.
When the crying finally came, it came quietly, one hand pressed against my stomach the entire time, like I could somehow shield what was growing there from everything I'd just learned was coming for both of us.