Page 96 of The Arrangement

Without another word, the nurse was gone.

Anton leaned back into his chair with a heavy sigh.

“She’s pregnant?”

“We don’t know. It’s just a possibility.”

“You work fast,” Ivan mused quietly.

“I didn’t intend to.”

“That’s how it usually happens.”

Despite the seriousness of everything, Anton found himself chuckling. Unfortunately, even the sound of it was cold. A slow rage was beginning to build in his blood, turning him raw and red from the inside out. A strange calm seemed to overtake his previous panic, settling deep in his gut like a poison ready to kill.

And he found that he was ready for exactly that.

“If she is, are you sure—”

“Do not finish that question, Ivan. I’m warning you. You’re mighty fucking lucky you even got that much out before you sported a newly broken jaw.”

“Well …” The lawyer coughed, looking about as uncomfortable as he could possibly get. “It’s just that bodyguard of hers. You told me, so I have to ask. As your friend, I have to. Anton, that wasn’t very long before you, okay?”

It’d be a damned lie if Anton didn’t admit he had considered that for a brief moment when Viviana said her being pregnant was a possibility. It also took him thirty seconds to do the math when she said four weeks late for her shot and a couple of days late for her cycle. He also knew she’d had it last month, considering he had to go out at the crack of dawn to pick up the stuff she needed. Which in and of itself was embarrassing for her and him enough. That would be the last goddamn time he ever picked out tampons. There were some things men shouldn’t have to be subjected to and that was one of them.

“I’m able to count just like you can. Your fancy schools didn’t do anything more for your common sense than a lack of higher education did for mine.”

“Ouch. That higher education keeps you out of jail, asshole.”

“S’mine if she is,” Anton mumbled, rubbing a hand over his face and ignoring Ivan’s comment. “I know it is.”

“Good enough for me.”

Anton stood, turning up the cuffs of his dress shirt until they rolled around his elbows on either side. The one side of his shirt was soaked a morbid reddish brown. A sting started to hum in his neck and arm where he himself was injured.

“Let’s go.”

“Huh?” Ivan glanced up.

“We’ve got some Cosa Nostra to speak to.”

• • •

Lucille Carducci wouldn’t meet Anton’s gaze.

“You’ve got a lot of fucking nerve coming here,” he ground out.

The man at her side leaned into the wall, crossing his arms and keeping his mouth shut. That was a better choice for his health, in Anton’s honest opinion. He wasn’t above laying a beat down on somebody inside a hospital. It just meant they were that much closer to getting help when he was done.

“After what your husband did, you’d think you’d know better.”

Lucille looked up through her wet mascara lashes, tears streaking down her cheeks. “That, Mr. Avdonin, is exactly why I’m here.” Ivan was ten feet away, keeping watch for intruders while they spoke in a private hallway that had dimmed lights and practically no activity at all. “After all, the feds will be around, no doubt. They very well might stop to wonder why his wife is here if he is the one involved, and in the morning …”

“In the morning, what?”

“Perhaps they won’t look to you when I’m at the hospital again, yes?”

Air cut through his teeth like a hiss. “If you knew—”