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His tone is deadly. Sharp. “When?”
“Taken. From the OBGYN office. Now.”
More silence, and then, “Is she pregnant?”
I hear a gravelly, “Fuck,” that tells me my brother is with Elio.
“Yes. And she’s been taken. The doctor’s had his throat slit.”
“Where was Pavel?”
“Outside the clinic room.” I can’t even be angry with him. I’d told him to wait outside the door. That I would be there soon.
Fuck. I can feel the spiral. The threat of insanity. Madness.
I harden myself.
Ilya speaks, “Elio has eyes on Artyom. He’s arrived here in Oregon early this morning.”
“Why the fuck didn’t he say something?”
“He just checked in. We were busy eliminating the Yakuza this morning, brother. Stay calm. We will get her back.”
I don’t know if my training will serve me in this. My calm is being plucked apart, thread by thread.
I whisper, “She is my life.”
It’s the first moment that my cool composure cracks. It’s just going to keep cracking every minute that stretches between now and whenever I have her in my arms again.
Because I won’t face a world where there is no more Ruby. Where I never touch her again. Never kiss her. Never hear the sound of our baby cry…
“Please,” I pray, for the first time in my life. “Please let her be okay. Let her come home to me.”
To the devil, I am nearly ready to bargain my soul…
Forty-Five
Ruby
Nausea swirls in my belly, and my head pounds as I peel my dry tongue from the roof of my dry mouth. I need water.
I start to move, to push up from the bed where I’ve spent a hellish night, when I realize that I’m not in a bed. There is no soft blanket covering me. The fabric beneath me is that of a hard, worn carpet. When I rub my face, I feel the imprint of it—the filth of it—a pattern on my cheek.
It’s not night, like I’d thought. It’s daylight, if the beam spearing through the seventies floral curtains is anything to go by.
I wrinkle my nose at the scent of stale cigarettes and—vomit? The stench wafts in the air, stirred up by the crank of an AC unit.
Where am I?
What happened?
There is a black spot in my memory, a blank black spot where nothing exists.
Sitting against the wall, I try to listen beyond the room with the bed. But I hear nothing. I see nothing, really.
I can’t seem to get over the hump of why, if there is a bed, I’ve been dumped on the floor like this.
I start to push up, but a sharp pain bursts in my brain. Little black spots of fuzz drift across my vision. I swallow hard through another sharp blade of agony that feels as though it’s cleaving my brain in two. Clamping my teeth into my bottom lip, I do my best to silence the cry. I don’t know where I am or what happened, but I suspect I’m not in a safe space. No one who meant for me to be safe would have dumped me like this on the floor.
