“He had you followed for weeks before you even knew his name.” Bastian’s grip tightens on my wrist where he has it cuffed against the wall. It’s not enough to hurt, but it’s plenty to make a very effective point. “There is no ‘middle of nowhere’ when it comes to my brother. There is no ‘safe distance.’ There is only how long it takes him to find you.”
His forehead drops to mine. When he speaks again, his voice cracks.
“I can’t lose you again.”
Tears well up in my eyes, hot and stinging. I rip my wrist out of his grasp and turn my face away from him. “You can’t lose something you never had in the first place,” I whisper. It’s cold and cutting, and some might even say cruel and unusual.
But it gets the result I want: He lets go and steps back.
I wonder what kind of emotion is passing over his face right now. Pain? Arrogance? Indifference? I suppose it doesn’t really matter, because he and I will only be in close proximity for as long as it takes to resolve this nightmare. Once it’s over, I’m gone.
Aleksei is a type of danger that makes sense to me.
Bastian is another kind entirely.
I feel my way into my living room slash bedroom. “I’m going for a walk,” I say again, in a voice that is unnecessarily loud and combative. “If you’re so scared for my well-being, then you can come with me.”
He releases a sigh that lasts a lifetime. “Fine,” he says at last. “One lap around the block it is.”
“Glad that’s settled.” I grab a set of clothes from my duffel—leggings, a loose sweater that’s getting tighter by the day, clean underwear—and clutch them to my chest. “Now, turn around.”
He sounds puzzled. “Why?”
“This is my bedroom now, remember? The glamorous Palais du Pullout Couch? So unless you want a front-row seat to the pregnant lady changing show, I suggest you face the wall.”
A pause. Then the shuffle of his feet on the hardwood, followed by another long-suffering exhale. “There. Nose to the wall. Happy?”
“Ecstatic.” I strip out of my sleep shirt as fast as my unwieldy body will allow, then nearly topple over when I try to step into my jeans. The advertisement for these leggings swore that the material had been engineered by NASA scientists to stretch, but it still protests against my swelling thighs in a way it definitely didn’t three months ago. I suck in my stomach and manage to wrestle them over my hips with a few hops and shakes of the booty.
“You okay over there?” Bastian rumbles.
“Thriving.” I yank the sweater over my head and smooth it down over my bump. “You can turn around now.”
The sweater rides up almost immediately, exposing a sliver of belly until I hastily tug it back down. It’s a losing battle, though. Everything is a losing battle these days. Clothes, ex-boyfriends, mob bosses—you name it, it’s kicking my ass.
“This is ridiculous,” I mutter as I yank fruitlessly at the hem again and again. “I used to fit into things. I used to have awaist. Now, I’m just expanding. In every direction at once.”
“You’re not?—”
“I’m fat, Bastian. Let’s call it like it is. I’m fat and getting fatter by the day, and none of my clothes fit anymore, and I’m pretty sure this sweater is going to surrender to the inevitable any second now and just ride up to my chin until you can see all my fatness?—”
“I beg to differ.”
His voice has dropped intothatcadence. The one that makes my knees forget their primary function. It’s low and rough, like gravel wrapped in velvet, like a shot of warm whiskey on a frigid night.
I freeze mid-tug. “Excuse me?”
We teeter-totter on a moment there. Athis-way-or-that-waykind of pause. It’s been a morning of those, a drunk man’s stumble in one direction and then the other, with nothing ever decisively pulling us across either line of no return. There’s theMaybe they’ll make itside and then there’s theNo chance in hell.Truth be told, I no longer know which one I’m rooting for. I fight and I whimper in the span of the same minute. I’m putty and I’m steel, I’m longing and I’m livid, I’m lost and I’m found, again and again.
I can only imagine what’s going through Bastian’s head.
“I said…” he repeats, “… that I beg to differ.”
I hear him moving closer. That panther’s walk, a predator’s slink in my direction. I feel my thighs tingling from knee to hip. The air between us thickens. I couldn’t step back if my life depended on it. I can only stand here, like a deer caught in headlights I can’t even see.
“You’re not fat.” His breath ghosts across my cheek. “You’re carrying my child. And you’ve never looked more?—”
“If you’re begging to differ, then I’m begging you to stop,” I whisper suddenly before he can go any further. “We can’t—won’t—shouldn’tgo there. Choices were made, Bastian. You and I both have to live with the consequences.”
