Page 109 of Forged By Sacrifice

I didn’t move. It was impossible for me to do so, sitting in my own pee, but my eyes flitted to the window seat, and his eyes followed my look.

“Okay. I’ll get it. Is it under the seat?”

I didn’t say anything. I didn’t move. I just sat, hugging the bear I’d had for as long as I could remember. It was tattered with the stuffing squeezed to weird angles from all the times I’d slept with him. My mom had threatened to throw him away if he got peed on one more time. She was tired of washing him.

The man moved to the window seat while I listened to my mom crying, sobbing in the other room. She was crying harder than I’d ever heard her cry before, even when Mom and Dad screamed at each other.

The man lifted the window seat, easily finding the music box. He removed it from the space and came back to me with a smile on his face. The smile made me angry. Angry that he was smiling while my mom was sobbing. All I was able to think was, “Where is Dad? Where?”

“You did good, kid.”

My whole body shook as the man with the gun came closer to me. He reached out a hand like the bad man in the nightmares I’d had since I was little. And that was when I found my voice. I screamed. And screamed and screamed. And Mom called to me in Russian, and it made me think about what Mom would see if she came into the room. She’d see me sitting in pee.

I stopped screaming.

“It’s okay,” the man said as he backed away slowly. “I’m going to have one of my partners come in and help you. Okay?”

I just stared, the tears starting to roll down my face.

When a lady finally came into the room, I had my face buried in my bear with my arms wrapped around my knees of the soft velour nightgown Dad had bought me, and that Mom would be mad I had ruined.

The lady touched my arm.

“Georgie.” Raisa’s gentle touch and panicked voice brought me abruptly back to the club. “Georgie. Shit, shit, shit. He left me holding his crap.”

I shook myself out of my memories and turned to Raisa. “What? What are you talking about?”

Raisa whispered, hardly moving, but with fear on her face. “Malik. He gave me his goody bag because I had a purse, and he didn’t have a place to keep it. He said he needed to give it to someone at the club.”

Malik’s sniffles and nose-pinching came rushing back to me. I’d thought it was odd. Out of character. Goddamn it. He’d been high. “Oh, hell,” I breathed out.

I looked at my scared sister, sitting frozen like I’d sat frozen on my bed full of pee the night the cops had invaded our apartment in New York. I thought about her getting ready to start her academic career to change the world with the clean energy she wanted to develop. She wouldn’t be able to do any of that if they arrested her for drugs. She’d be sent back to Russia—if they even let her go at all.

My brain flashed to Mac. To the last week we’d spent getting to know each other. Getting to know the visible curves of our bodies and the things inside of us that weren’t so visible. The wants and desires. The way Mac had offered to get me a ring. His words about, whether or not he liked my siblings, he wouldn’t like me less. But this just might make him like me less. Especially if I did what I thought I needed to do.

It would be over. All of it. The dream disappearing into a harsh reality.

Before I could stop myself, I leaned over to Raisa and whispered, “Have you touched it?”

Raisa shook her head.

“Okay. Slowly, use the napkin to put it in my bag,” I told her.

“What? No. No. No. We will just dump it,” Raisa said, shaking her head ever so slightly.

I risked looking back. The cops were close. Any minute, they’d be at the table. “With the cops heading toward us? That’ll make us look more guilty. Put it in my bag.”

“No.” She pouted.

“Raisa. They’ll send you home.”

Raisa looked like she was going to vomit. Like I had twenty-two years ago when they’d searched our home for a music box that had held a thumb drive with all of Dad’s business dealings.

“It’s okay, malyshka. It will all be okay. Just do what I said.”

Raisa’s eyes were huge as she grabbed the cocktail napkin, bent, and pulled something from her bag, sliding it into mine.

I saw Mac’s smiling face flicker before my eyes, and I wanted to scream and scream and scream like I had when I was six and they’d taken my parents, and my music box, and my life. Because I was giving everything up again. Political career or not, Mac couldn’t be with me now. Not only because I was from a Russian gunrunner’s family, not only because I was from a Ponzi-scheming jailbird’s family, but now because I was from a drug family—with my own drug charge on my record. If I’d been worried about being admitted to the bar before, a drug charge was sure to prevent it. Drug charges didn’t go away. How much drugs were there? Would I be charged with possession? Or distribution? I started sweating.

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