“Agreed,” I nod, lifting Sophie into the helicopter before climbing in myself. Duncan’s eyes narrow as he looks behind me.
“That would be Xenia, then.”
“What’s left of her,” I say grimly. The seats are crowded by the time the chopper rises, nose dipping slightly before it gains speed, heading toward the brilliant neon smear of Tokyo. I can still hear the explosions behind us, and as I look back, there’s a section of the hillside that’s broken loose, surging over what’s left of the Matsumori empire.
On a MacTavish jet, heading home…
“How?” I say, making sure that Sophie’s buckled in as the jet takes off. “I was spending every second trying to think of how I was going to draw this fecker out for the ten hours it would take ye to get here.”
“Thank Georges,” Da nods to him. Georges isn’t puffed up with pride. He’s miserable, slumped in his seat. “I’m thinking you’ll need hours to explain, but first, ye got the blocker off all the MacTavish phones that Xenia placed, trying to stop us all from reaching each other.”
“What? Thank me!” Uncle Lachlan says indignantly, “I got the name out of Taylor in less than two hours.” He looks at Da. “Ye still owe me that fifty pounds, brother.”
“Thank Martha,” Logan interrupts. “Taylor tried to capture your ma again,” he explains to Sophie. “Did ye know your ma could shoot? She took him down like a bag of bricks and we got the information about Xenia - and may she rot in hell - out of him.”
“No,Igot it out of him,” Uncle Lachlan says again.
“The point is, we had a team of three jets and every MacTavish within a fifty-mile radius deployed within the hour,” Da says. “We were already landing when ye were on your way to the meeting.”
“I still think Mason’s idea was a thing of beauty,” Logan says. “Set strategic charges, explode the hilltop, bring it down on the compound. That did a lot of the work.”
“Yes, well your over-enthusiastic application of the C4 also triggered that second landslide,” Mason said sourly. “You know, sending a million tons of dirt and rock right where the helicopterswouldhave been if we didn’t take off in time?”
The explanations and intermittent bickering continue as I put Sophie on my lap, covering her with a blanket. “Are ye all right?”
“I’m still…” she shakes her head. “It’s going to take a while before this all sorts into some kind of order in my head. But they all came, didn’t they?”
This is the largest executive jet we have in the MacTavish fleet, and it’s still filled to bursting with a multitude of MacTavi.
“Aye, love.”
“This is probably a weird time to tell you this,” she whispers. “But first, I love you. I love you so much. I always have. Since the first time I saw you.”
“Butterfly, I love ye right back. More than I thought possible.” I kiss her fiercely. “More than I can say.”
“Also,” she leans in close enough that her lips touch my ear. “We’re pregnant.”
Chapter Thirty
Sophie…
"We have to go," Michael announces the moment the jet’s wheels touch the tarmac.
Everyone looks up, startled, including his father whose mouth is half open to ask another question. Still, no one objects, and Michael drags me up out of my chair as the flight attendant hastens to open the jet door.
No one had objected on the jet when Michael abandoned the recap of the battle with the rest of the family to take me to the back, putting me in the shower. Even on a luxury private jet, no shower is big enough for two people, particularly when one of them is giant-sized like my husband. He washed the blood, dirt, and smoke off me with gentle hands, wrapping me in a thick towel before hastily washing himself. This new, gentle kind of care from him made tears come to my eyes.
Now that we’ve landed though, his ability to act like a stern, dignified future Chieftain is gone.
I at least attempt to maintain some semblance of good manners and call out, “Goodbye, good night! Thank you!" I'm not quite sure what the appropriate phrase is for, “Thank you, entire horde of MacTavi for flying across the world to mount a full military offensive against a heavily armed Japanese yakuza!”
Maybe there's a handbook somewhere on this. I should ask Michael.
My husband bypasses our security, helping me into the front seat of his Maserati and fastening the seatbelt with a certain kind of reverence I've not seen before taking the wheel.
“You know that Torin and Kyle are quietly dying inside right now,” I tell him. He shrugs, taking my hand and putting it on his thigh as he peels out of the private airfield where his family keeps their fleet. His security SUV chasing after us.
“You’re pregnant.” He kept saying that for the entire flight home, not loud enough for anyone to hear, but I could see his lips move, shaping the words, testing them out to make them reality.
