Page 95 of Keeping Ruby

Again, my brain screams ‘what happened?’ as my body tells me ‘nothing good.’ and that I need to escape.

My hand covers my wildly turning belly, jogging a thought. It’s a tiny spark of thought, but it begins the chain that leads me to answers. The answers only spark more questions. The baby—my baby. With Kirill—my husband. A doctor’s office. A security detail…

A doctor. A needle. Pain and fog.

The man appearing through the back door. The glint of a silver blade. A slash of red blood.

The closing in of a black hole until now.

I gasp, a shuddering cry I contain at the very last second with a trembling hand to trembling lips.

I’ve been taken. Again.

The bounty. That’s what that is about. Artyom’s bounty. Someone is cashing in.

What will come of me? My baby? Kirill…

I want to weep. Why does this keep happening to me?

Curling my legs into my chest, I wrap my arms around my legs and—what is that?

My heart is a wild thing in my chest as I drag my hand over the thin, hard lump that sits in line with the seam of my leggings. Confused, I push my hand down my pants to retrieve a long, thin silver blade. A scalpel.

Another spark. Another chain.

The doctor and his whispered, shaken confession. His fear for his family. He’d tried to help me even as he fed me to the wolves. He’d sacrificed himself for those he loved, and had still done his best to leave me with a means of protection—a means to see myself to safety—even though I’d been the one to bring his terrible end to his door.

I sob again for the life of a good man lost. A man who spent his life bringing new life into this world. A man with a family he loved enough to die for. A man who, in his end, had been faced with an impossible decision.

A sound pricks my ear. A thud somewhere close by.

Shoving the scalpel up my sleeve, I curl into my ball and wait. I can no longer hear anything outside the thudding of my own heart, and that terrifies me.

I keep my eyes pinned to the door on the opposite side of the room, my fear building and finally peaking, when that door opens and a man enters. No, not just any man. My brother.

My half-brother.

A man as evil and awful as my father had been.

I hate him.

I hate them, I realize. It’s the first time I think of my father, and feel nothing besides antipathy and disgust.

Artyom looks like him, I realize now. More than I first thought in the photo. It’s not so much his features, because he definitely has a bit of his mother in him, whoever she is or was. He looks like my father in the way that he moves. There is a lethal confidence in his gait, in the way he holds himself. I’d always thought it was from my father’s vast success in the dangerous business he did with dangerous countries. Now I know this lethal confidence has nothing to do with success and everything to do with a blatant disregard for human life.

“Hello little sister.” Artyom lets his sneer curl into a vicious smile as he moves to sit on the edge of the bed, facing me. “I suppose congratulations are in order.”

He knows. He knows about my baby.

The thought sends a bolt of fresh fear through me. Fear for the child who, if Artyom has his way, will surely never live.

Please, God, save us.

“Why am I here?”

“Our father made a very bad business decision not long before he died, little angel.” The hate that drips from his words is nothing short of terrifying. “You see, he had a large supply of faulty weapons he’d attained over the years, and when he hid them in a sale of other, working weapons, he never imagined the Prince of Oil he sold them to overseas would realize, that in his shipment of illegal, untraceable, working weapons, were duds.” He smirks a bitter smirk. “That betrayal has led the Prince to demand retribution. Life in payment.” He claps his hands together. “He can’t have our father’s life, because your brother-in-law already took that.” He waits—waits for my grief. When he doesn’t get it, I see a flicker of surprise.

He presses on. “He can’t have my life, of course. So, I promised him yours. And the baby you carry, well, that’s an added bonus.”

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