Chapter 39
NORA
There are five men in my house today, and not one of them will tell me why there are five.
There were three on Tuesday. Two on the doors and one in the front room with a paperback he never turns the page of.
By Thursday there were five, the brown delivery truck that used to idle at the bottom of the drive twice a week stopped coming, and Yuri started walking the yard at intervals I could set a clock by. Nobody said a word about any of it.
I'm twenty-eight weeks pregnant with three babies. I haven't been allowed past the end of the driveway in nine days, and the people keeping me alive have all gone quiet at the same time.
I find Isaak in the rental's small back office at noon. He's got his phone face-down on the desk, Lev across from him, and the two of them stop talking when the door opens, which they have been doing for three days. I am sick of it.
"Don't," I say, before either of them can rearrange his face. "Whatever the calm voice is going to be, I don't want it. There are five men in my house. Tell me why."
"Precaution." Isaak stands, the way he stands when he's about to manage me. "Nothing's happened."
"I didn't ask if something happened. I asked why there are five men in my house." I look at Lev, because Lev doesn't bother lying, he just declines to speak. "Lev. How many were there last week."
"Three." Lev doesn't look up from the coin he's turning over in his fingers, a habit I've stopped finding funny. "Now five."
"Why five?"
"Ask your husband. It's his house." He pockets the coin and stands. "I have a call." And he's gone. Then it's just me and Isaak, a desk between us, the quiet that's been growing in this house for a week.
"Sit down," he says. "Please. You shouldn't be on your feet to fight with me."
"I'll sit down when you tell me the truth." But my back's aching and the babies are sitting on every nerve I own, so I lower myself into the chair Lev left, because being stubborn about a chair isn't the hill. "Start with the truck. The brown one. Why'd it stop coming."
He's quiet a moment. He sits back down across from me and puts both hands flat on the desk, which is the tell I've learned, the hands he shows me when he wants me calm.
"Because I don't know the man driving it," he says.
"It's a route truck, it should be the same driver every time.
Three weeks ago it became a different driver, and a man I keep on retainer who watches such things flagged it.
So the truck doesn't come to my gate anymore.
That's all it is. A driver I can't account for, handled. "
"And the five men?"
"More of the same caution. Five lets me cover the road and the slope, still keep a man on each door."
"That's the outline of something." I lean forward as far as the bump allows.
"Isaak. I have lived inside your every habit for seven months.
I know what you look like when you're being careful and I know what you look like when you're scared.
Right now you and Lev have both gone quiet in the same week.
Yuri's walking the fence like he's counting his own heartbeats, and you are looking at me with the face you use on people you're protecting from the truth. So. Try again. What's happening."
He looks at me a long moment, something moving behind his eyes, the war between the man who solves things in the dark and the man who promised me at a bolted table he wouldn't hand me the tidy version anymore.
"We're close to Brandon," he says.
The name does what it always does now, drops the temperature of the room.
"How close?"
"Lev had a lead come in. Where he's been holed up since the money dried under him.
We're moving on it." His voice stays even, deliberate.
"He's broke, Nora. The cartel cleaned out everything he had that they could reach, and he's running.
A running man with nothing left is the most dangerous shape he comes in, because he's got no plan left but the desperate one.
So yes. Five men. The truck. You inside the fence. Until we have him."
"A lead came in from where."
"It doesn't matter."
"It matters to me."
"It came in," he says, flat, final, the door closing on it, and I know that tone, it's the one nothing gets through. I file the dodge to take apart later, because there's a bigger thing in the room and I've just understood what it is.
"You're not penning me in because of a driver you can't place," I say slowly. "You're penning me in because if Brandon's desperate and out of moves, the one card he's got left to play is me."
Isaak doesn't say anything. His silence is the confirmation.
"Say it," I tell him. "You've got me locked in a rental behind five men, you won't let me past the driveway, and it's not because the neighborhood got dangerous.
It's because I'm the bait. He wants the money, the money's tangled up with me, and you all know coming for me is the obvious move.
Not one of you will say the word out loud. "
"You're not bait." His voice drops, his hands come off the desk, and he leans toward me, for once with no calm in it at all.
"You're my wife, you're carrying my children, and you are the most guarded person in the state of California right now.
Bait is something you leave out to be taken.
I have five men and a fence around this house.
I have Lev, my brother, every favor I own.
Nothing is getting past that, do you understand me, nothing. "
"I understand that's what you're trying to do.
" My voice cracks and I hate that it cracks.
"I understand you've got an army around me.
What I'm telling you is what it feels like from in here, Isaak, and you don't get to manage that part.
It feels like a cage. It feels like the exact thing I swore on my father's grave would never happen to me again, somebody deciding where I'm allowed to stand, for my own good, without asking me. "
I watch it go in, watch his shoulders drop a fraction. He knows my wound the way I know his, and I just put my finger on it on purpose. I did it because it's true, because I'm scared, because being scared makes me cruel in accurate ways.
"This isn't your father choosing for you," he says, low. "It isn't Brandon deciding your life. It's me keeping you alive long enough to be furious at me about it."
"I know that." And I do. That's the worst of it, that the cage is love and remains a cage.
"I know exactly what you're doing and why.
I'd do the same in your place. It doesn't change that I've spent nine days unable to walk to the end of my own driveway.
I can feel something coming. Nobody will look at me and tell me how close it is. "
I press the heels of my hands to my eyes. "Just stop handling me. That's all I'm asking. If we're in this, we're in it. Tell me the real size of it and let me be scared on purpose instead of scared in the dark."
He's quiet. Then he comes around the desk, slow, and he crouches in front of my chair with his hands on my knees, careful of the weight of me. He looks up at me with the walls all the way down, the way they only come down when it's just us.
"It's close," he says. "Days, not weeks.
We're going to take him before he can move.
It's going to be ugly and fast. I'm going to ask you to do exactly what the men around you say the second they say it, no arguing, no horsewoman nerve, because the only thing in this world I can't survive is you getting hurt over a thing I could have prevented by keeping you behind a fence one more week.
" His thumbs move on my knees. "That's the real size of it.
That's everything I know. I'm not handling you. I'm asking you to help me keep you."
It's the truth, finally, unmanaged, and it's worse than the dodge was. Somehow I can breathe better holding the truth than I could holding the question.
"Okay," I say. "Days, not weeks. The real version. Thank you."
"Okay." He presses his forehead to my belly, careful, and I put my hand in his hair. For a minute the two of us just stay there in a rented office while three babies turn over between us and an army walks the fence outside.
The afternoon goes long and strange after that.
I make myself useful because the alternative is climbing the walls. Dima's decided the answer to dread is a pot of something that takes four hours, and he's put me on garlic because, he says, I can do it sitting down.
"You're hovering," he tells me, not turning from the stove. "I can feel you hovering. You've got the same energy as the dogs when there's a thunderstorm coming."
"There's no storm. It's eighty degrees out."
"It's a metaphor, Nora, keep up." He stirs. "My brother told you the size of it. I can tell, because you've stopped vibrating like a struck bell and started chopping garlic like you mean it. Good. He should have told you a week ago. I told him so."
"You told Isaak he was wrong."
"I tell Isaak he's wrong professionally.
It's the only job in this family nobody else wants.
" He finally looks at me, and under the lightness his eyes are tired, the same red-rimmed tired as the morning he got out.
"He's scared, you know. I've seen my brother scared exactly twice in forty years, and both times it was about you.
So go easy on the cage. He doesn't have a setting between leave-her-alone and wall-her-in-stone. He never got taught the middle one."
"I know." I scrape the garlic into his bowl. "I'm not going to pretend the fence feels like anything but a fence. But I'm not climbing it either. That's the best he's getting from me."
"That's more than he's ever gotten from anyone." Dima takes the bowl. "Stir this. I have to go yell at Marisol about the bread."
Marisol comes by an hour later with a bag of the gas-station licorice I'm not supposed to have and sets it by my elbow without comment, pretending she doesn't know it's contraband.
For a while the rental almost feels like a house people live in instead of a house people are guarding.
Yuri comes in for water between his rounds, nineteen and trying to look older than the fear on him.
I make him sit and eat something, because somebody has to mother the child they've got walking my fence with a gun.
"You don't have to do every round," I tell him. "Lev's got four other men."
"Lev gave me the fence." He says it like it's a knighthood. "I do the fence good, he gives me more. I'm getting more." He blushes and ducks his head over the bowl. "I keep you safe, Mrs. Radulov. Is my job. The most important one he ever gave me."
"Borscht and Pelmeni keep me safe. You just feed them too many treats."
"That also is a job." He almost smiles, and then his radio crackles something low in Russian. He's up and gone, leaving the bowl half-finished. I stay at the table with the question pressing on me, and I tell myself it was nothing, a check-in, a routine word, the same as a hundred others.
It's near dark when I catch the piece I'm not meant to catch.
I'm coming down the hall toward our room.
The office door's open two inches and Lev's on the phone inside.
I'm not trying to listen, I'm just slow now, the hall quiet, and I hear him say a name I know.
Tessa. He says it flat, no inflection at all, then a string of Russian, then in English, low, the worst three words I've heard all week.
"She gave us the location."
I stop in the hall.
Tessa. My Tessa, from Ardenhope, who filmed my wedding for the memories, who asked a half-beat too pointed about my father's old things in a kitchen a lifetime ago.
Tessa gave them a location. Which means Tessa knew a location to give.
Which means Tessa has been close enough to Brandon to know where he sleeps.
The warmth I felt for her my whole life curdles in the dark hallway, goes to nausea and a slow dropping dread.
I stand there with my hand on the wall, twenty-eight weeks of belly, and I work it through one piece at a time until there's nowhere left for it to go.
The net closing around Brandon runs straight through a girl I grew up loving.
She has known where he sleeps. She has known for a while.
I don't go in. I don't let Lev know I heard. I learned that at a kitchen table months ago, that some things you carry quiet until you know what to do with them.
I go to our room and I sit on the edge of the bed in the dark. I put both hands on the bump and I feel one of them kick hard against my palm, the restless one, the one that never settles.
"I know, baby," I tell it. "I feel it too. Something's coming."
Down the hall a door opens and closes. The house has gone to that held quiet it gets at night now, men at the windows, the dogs not sleeping, my husband somewhere in it carrying a thing he finally told me the size of.
It comes this week, not next. A girl I loved handed them a door.
And out past the fence, a desperate man with nothing left to lose knows what my husband knows, that the one card still in his hand sits in a Calabasas rental with her hands on her belly, waiting for something none of us will say out loud.
I lie down on my side, the box on the floor where I can touch it, and I don't sleep. I listen to the house keep its watch, and I wait for the thing in the dark to make its move.