Page 117 of The Wrong Monster

Because he’s right.

And because somewhere beneath the fear and adrenaline, beneath the knowledge that Yuri now knows exactly how vulnerable I am, I’m thinking about the tiny, impossible life growing inside me.

That changes everything.

* * *

Hours later, the house is quiet. Vasily left at some point; I watched from the living area as he got into a van with one of Arthur’s men and Ariadna. Arthur is stationed at the house, in the dining room, grim and glaring whenever he catches sight of me.

Fair enough. So I snuck back up to my rooms.

I sit on the edge of my bed with the burner phone in my hand. The little device feels heavier than it should for being so cheap and plastic.

I activate it, pay for data, and start looking for the answers I couldn’t risk searching for earlier.

How pregnancy dating works. How early a urine test turns positive. What symptoms appear first. When conception could have occurred. What I should be doing now.

My lawyer brain takes over because the alternative is allowing myself to feel what this actually means and what I’m going to do about it.

For now, this is something I can research and calculate. I can make sense of it and override the panic churning just beneath the surface.

That’s what I do when something scares me: I turn it into a problem I can solve.

Only then do I call Isla, another hazard of the job: memorizing phone numbers. She answers quickly, which isn’t surprising, since it’s her day off.

“Matty?”

I close my eyes. For once, I don’t have a strategy, an argument, or a carefully constructed explanation. So I just say it:

“I’m pregnant.”

Silence.

Then a sharp inhale.

“Oh my God.”

I stare at the dark window across the room, feeling impossibly lonely. Not just so far from Isla, from my apartment, from my family, but from Vasily. A man who, I’m realizing unnervingly, has made me feel protected as much as he’s made me feel a prisoner.