Chapter 26 #2
Katie reaches for the first print while the paper is still warm.
Katie turns her face toward me. “Are you all right?”
The question is unreasonable, but I nod anyway.
“You look alarmed.”
“I was prepared for one.”
“Did your famous contingency planning fail to include spontaneous triplets?”
“It didn’t survive contact with your ovaries.”
Her wet laugh fills the dim room, and I kiss her forehead, then the corner of her eye where tears remain warm against my mouth.
I once believed family could be protected through the elimination of variables. The screen offers three variables with heart activity, attached to a woman who has defeated every attempt to control her. Joy expands through my chest until fear must move aside to accommodate it.
After the examination, Katie dresses slowly while I kneel beside her chair, move the sweater away from her lower stomach, then rest my head against the warm skin above the waistband of her trousers.
She places both hands over my hair.
“You realize they can’t hear your security briefing yet.”
“They are Dymovs. Preparation begins early.”
“They are also Albas.”
“Then at least one will ignore every instruction.”
Her stomach moves beneath my cheek when she laughs.
“What are you thinking?” Katie asks.
“That I need a larger vehicle.”
“We need three car seats. You already own vehicles designed to survive small wars.”
“The interior configuration is inefficient.”
Her fingers stroke my hair. “You are thinking about Misha.”
I close my eyes against her skin. “He would have been unbearable.”
“They should have had the chance to know him.”
No reassurance could make the loss gentler, although her willingness to name it loosens the grief around my throat.
Dr. Shah returns with printed images and a referral, her expression more serious than before.
“A triplet pregnancy is high risk,” she explains. “That doesn’t mean something is wrong today. It means we monitor more closely for problems, and you’ll see a maternal-fetal medicine specialist.”
She describes nutritional needs, warning signs, likely appointment frequency, and the possibility of activity restrictions later. I ask about emergency contacts, travel, medication, safe exercise, nausea that prevents eating, then whether the practice releases records through an outside portal.
Dr. Shah answers patiently, explaining that multiples increase the chance of medical problems without making risk a certainty.
Hydration and rest both matter, while severe pain, heavy bleeding, fainting, or an inability to retain fluids require urgent care.
The specialist will discuss genetic screening and a monitoring schedule.
I remember each answer without pretending it gives me an order I can issue to the future.
Katie interrupts before question twenty.
“I want the specialist options before anybody schedules one for me.”
Dr. Shah nods. “Certainly.”
“All decisions come through Katie,” I say. The words still scrape against instinct, though I don’t alter them. “Security concerns come through me.”
“Medical concerns come through both of you,” the doctor replies. “The final decisions belong to the patient.”
I dislike being corrected, but I like that Katie hears the correction without needing to demand it.
“Understood.”
Dr. Shah writes the specialist’s emergency number on the folder herself, and Katie photographs it before handing the folder to me, making her own copy rather than trusting mine.
A month ago, the choice would have irritated me, but today it eases a pressure I hadn’t admitted because protection no longer depends on one phone remaining unbroken.
We leave with a folder whose thickness suggests pregnancy requires licensing. Boris waits near the elevators, his attention moving between every person in the corridor.
Katie hands him the ultrasound strip, and he looks at the three labeled sacs until his usually unreadable face empties.
“Three?”
“Your employer is an overachiever,” Katie says.
Boris studies me. “Congratulations.”
The elevator ride ends in the private parking level, where two Dymov vehicles wait near the secured exit. Across the concrete aisle, a gray sedan idles beside a support pillar with a blue compact occupying the space behind it.
Boris touches his earpiece. “We have two possible tails.”
The guards move around Katie as I reach for her, but she watches the parked cars instead of retreating.
Repeatedly, the driver in the blue compact looks toward us. So obvious a performance draws the focus of three guards. By contrast, the man in the gray sedan never turns his head. Above the exit, his eyes remain fixed on the convex security mirror where our group appears in miniature.
Katie notices the same detail.
“Blue wants you to see him,” she tells Boris. “Gray is watching the mirror.”
Boris changes direction without looking at either vehicle, sending one guard toward the pedestrian door while another circles behind the gray sedan.
The blue compact pulls away first, tires squealing toward the ramp. A decoy.
The gray driver reaches for his ignition too late. Our rear car blocks him while Boris opens the driver’s door.
I move Katie into the armored vehicle while her pulse beats rapidly beneath my thumb, yet her eyes remain fixed on the captured man.
“He followed us from the clinic,” she says.
“The appointment was arranged through a protected line.”
Someone knew the time, just as someone knew the casino procedure, and Boris confirms it by pulling a camera from beneath the gray driver’s seat.
The captured man denies knowing us, but his camera disagrees as Boris scrolls past images of the clinic doors, the elevator lobby, then close photographs of every license plate in our convoy.
“Keep him alive,” I tell Boris.
Katie hears the implication beneath the instruction, and although her fingers close around the folder, she doesn’t argue in the parking level; her restraint concerns me more than anger would.
When I look at Katie, three ultrasound images rest inside the folder against her chest.
“The safe-house stairs are now a security threat,” I say.
She blinks. “The house doesn’t have stairs.”
“Then my precautions are already working.”