Page 247 of Mile High Ruin

“He admitted enough.”

Marek looks toward the warehouse again, fury rearranging itself into something more dangerous. “Where is he?”

“Dead.”

That silence is different. Heavier.

Anton’s jaw works once, the only visible sign that Iosef’s betrayal has reached somewhere personal. Eleven years is a long time to stand beside a man and not know he has been waiting for the right moment to destroy you.

Marek looks at me, then at the blood on my shirt. “Did he shoot you?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“It matters if you’re bleeding out.”

“I’m not.”

“You look like hell.”

“You should see him.”

Sloane makes a small sound, and all three of us turn to her. She tries to straighten, but her knees soften instead, and I catch her before she can slide down the pillar.

Her hand grips my shirt. “Uh, guys,” she says, and her voice is shaky enough to stop everything else cold. “I think my water just broke.”

For half a second, the whole yard becomes impossibly quiet.

Marek blinks.

Anton looks down.

I look too. The fabric of her dress is dripping wet.

EPILOGUE

SLOANE

What happens after the yard comes back to me in flashes, and for a while I can’t tell which parts are real and which parts my mind has stitched together because it needed the story to make sense.

I remember the car first. I’m in Vadim’s arms in the back seat, not beside him, not across from him, but half on his lap because every time I try to move away he tightens his hold and tells me, very calmly, that if I attempt to be stubborn right now he will consider it a personal insult.

Anton is in the front, speaking into the phone in clipped, controlled sentences, telling someone to clear the private entrance, telling someone else to get obstetrics ready, neonatal ready, surgery ready, and I hear Ethan’s hospital mentioned three times before I finally believe that Vadim is taking me back there.

Marek keeps turning around from the front passenger seat, his face bruised, his mouth bloody, his expression caught somewhere between fear and anger.

“Stop looking at me like that,” I tell him through clenched teeth.

“I’m trying to decide whether you’re dying.”

“That’s not helpful.”

“You asked.”

“I didn’t ask.”

Vadim’s hand is under my stomach, supporting the weight the way he did in the hospital corridor, and even through the pain I feel the relief of it, the small decrease in pressure that makes me hate how much I need him and love that he knows without asking.

Another contraction grips me, and I curl toward him with a sound I can’t stop.