Page 31 of Broomsticks and Bloodstains
“I’ll find them.” He said it with the same certainty and finality that other men saved for “See you tomorrow.”
“How?” I asked, even though I knew the answer—however he had to.
He didn’t reply. Instead, he bent and lifted me, and my legs locked around his hips without thought. He carried me across the small space like a man carrying what was his through a burning house.
He fucked me like he’d been gone a year instead of a week. As if he’d missed me like the very air in his lungs. I got it, though, because I felt the same way.
After, as I was drifting off, I heard his voice low against my throat. “You should’ve run when I told you.”
“I didn’t run at all,” I sleepily murmured.
“I know,” he answered, and the sound was pride and despair threaded together.
Somewhere in the dark, a car engine turned over and drove away. I fell asleep with my palm flat against his chest, counting beats that felt steadier than my own.
Maksim left just before dawn, a black shape peeling away from my bed with a kiss at my ankle that had my lungs forgetting their damn job.
I lay there in the quiet after he left. Slowly, the daylight broke, and sunlight slanted through the cheap blinds in tight little ladders across the floor. My stomach turned the way it had been doing for days, a slow roll that didn’t care if I’d eaten or not. Stress, I’d said. Bad coffee, I’d rationalized. Maybe it was the flu that had taken out two bartenders the night of the Halloween party.
Exhausted, I padded to the kitchen, poured a glass of water, and stared at the twelve-month paper calendar stuck to the fridge. Edges torn and curled, it was lucky the year was almost over because it was on its last leg. The little X’s I’d made through the days looked like stitches trying to hold the paper together.
Then, I frowned. I counted backward. Counted again. Counted a third time because my brain refused to process the math.
Late. Too late to be stress. Too late to be anything “ordinary.”
I counted again.
“Oh no,” I softly cried. “No, no, no, no, no.” I pressed a hand to my lower belly. Ridiculous, as if I could possibly feel anything there yet. Heat rose behind my eyes. Burning. Not tears, not exactly. Something fragile and impossible breaking inside me.
Hope for my future.
I thought of my mother’s tired eyes and worn hands. I remembered textbooks I’d once highlighted in four different colors because I believed it could organize my way into a future I didn’t get a chance at. Then in my mind, I saw piles of bills with bold red writing.
My mind raced with images of men in black coats. Of a knife glinting and then disappearing like a fish under dark water.
I thought of Maksim. The way he had looked sitting in that stupid chair across the small room, watching me like he could keep vigil against the world. I thought of his mouth when he smiled for real—rare, quick, surprised, like joy was a language he barely recognized.
The nausea came back, sharp and vicious. Closing my eyes, I breathed through it, palms on the counter, the laminate cool under my skin.
“Okay,” I whispered to the empty kitchen. It didn’t sound like me. “Okay.”
The word didn’t make anything easier. Nope. If anything, it put a freaking spotlight on it.
Because nothing was okay.
A child. His child. Our child.
There was no question about whose it was.
The blood in that alley seemed to splash across my vision before it slowly receded. Then the future rushed in—messy and terrible and heavy. If the brotherhood knew—Konstantin, Boris, Dima. God, if the Armenians knew.
But Maksim—if he knew. Not if… he would know. I had to tell him. The thought left a cold, pressing weight in my chest. It also made something fierce rise there, a wild, hot protectiveness that took me by surprise.
Once you step into my world, there is no leaving, he’d said.
Maybe he’d said that because he knew there wasn’t any leaving for him either. Maybe this was the door that swung shut behind us both—trapping us in a world that most people didn’t understand or know existed.
I slid down the cabinet until I sat on the kitchen floor, knees tucked to my chest, forehead on my arms. Then, I laughed once, a soft, broken sound, because of course this was my life. Why had I expected anything different?
