Page 16 of A Surprise Baby for the Russian

If my old man thinks he can send his low-level goons to take shots at what’s mine, and thinks I’ll bleed out and take his shit, he’s fucking wrong. There’s a bullet hole in my flesh, but the man who put it there is dead. Nobody fires a weapon near my wife and lives to boast about it. Nobody.

When we finally pull into the driveway of the new house, she parks, cuts the ignition, and sits there. Her hands stay locked onto the steering wheel for a long moment. Then, she lets out a massive exhale, and I see her fingers begin to shake violently against the leather grip now that the survival adrenaline has finally bottomed out.

I reach across the console with my left hand and cover both of hers on the wheel, my large palm enveloping her trembling fingers.

She doesn’t pull away. And I don’t let go.

We’re barely through the door of the new house when the adrenaline that’s kept me going really starts to tank. I sit at the kitchen table, the room spinning slightly as the pain in my shoulder continues its unrelenting throb, threatening to put me on the floor. I don’t have time to bleed, and I damn sure don’t have time to faint. I need my mind sharp. I need to set some shit on fire. I direct Raya to the first aid cupboard and get her to bring me the kit I have stashed in there.

With my functional left hand, I rip open the tactical trauma kit she’d placed on the table, pull out a pre-loaded auto-injector of a high-potency non-narcotic anesthetic, and slam it straight through the fabric into my thigh. I don’t flinch. I breathe through the sting, waiting sixty seconds for the medication to hit my bloodstream and mute the screaming in my bone. It won’t heal me, but it will dull the edge enough to keep me conscious. As the haze clears and my focus snaps back in, cold and lethal, I reach for my burner phone. I have calls to make.

***

Later, she changes the dressing. I sit at the kitchen table while she works behind me, and I look straight ahead, counting the tiles on the wall because I need something to do with my concentration that isn’t the fact that her hands feel soft on my skin.

She tapes the last piece and steps back. “Done.”

“Thank you.”

She goes around to the other side of the table and sits down, and for a minute we look at each other across it.

“You should have told me,” she says.

“I needed to get us clear first.”

“You were losing blood.”

“Not too much, though.”

“You could have—” She stops to compose herself. “If you’d passed out at the wheel—”

“I wasn’t going to pass out.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I do, actually. It’s not the first time I’ve been shot.”

She looks at me in surprise, and I can see her weighing up whether to ask about it, but she doesn’t. “Right. Well. Make it the last.”

“I’ll do my best, rodnaya.”

She sighs and pushes her chair back. “I’ll make us some tea.” As she walks past, she pats my good shoulder, and I think, my father’s thugs and gunshot wounds aside, today’s been a pretty good day.

Chapter 8 - Raya

I’ve now been kidnapped twice, which means, in my opinion, I can officially call myself a professional kidnappee, if that’s even a word. Which also means I get to vent my opinions on the whole experience. And that opinion is: yes, it’s terrible. I obviously would not recommend it, but it is also, and I say this as someone who has lived it, extremely boring for large stretches of time. Nobody tells you that part. There is no dramatic soundtrack for the bit where you have seen everything on TV, read everything available, more than once, and are now lying on a couch in a strange house counting the ceiling tiles because there is genuinely nothing else to do.

Yakov’s arm is useless. He won’t say it, because he’s a man and that’s what they do the world over, unless, of course, they’re dying from a simple cold, in which case everyone knows about it. He would rather pretend he’s fine with one functional arm indefinitely than admit to any kind of limitation. How is it that he is so like my own brothers? Ugh. It is painfully obvious from the way he moves carefully, compensating, attempting things and abandoning them. I change his dressing twice a day. His first aid kit—like the one at the last house—is a whole cupboard, packed to the brim for a gunshot wound kind of situation. Not disconcerting in the slightest.

I’ve been dying to ask about his tattoo since I saw the edge of it on—what do you call it? Kidnap day? The first day we were together? The day we met and married? That day, either way. I wait till I’m doing his dressing before breakfast. He’s sitting at the kitchen table, shirtless—getting anything on over the sling is more trouble than it’s worth—and I’m working behind him. The cross on the inside of his forearm is right there, so I ask.

“That’s a nice cross.”

“Mm.”

“Not what I’d have guessed.”

“No? What would you have guessed?”