And God help anyone who tries to stop me.
Chapter 15 - Gaby
The bed felt too big without him.
I'd gotten used to it over the past five days—or told myself I had. The empty space where his body should be, the silence where his breathing should fill the darkness, the cold sheets on his side that never warmed, no matter how many times I rolled into them during the night.
I missed him. The admission still felt like a betrayal of something—my pride, my principles, the woman I'd been before he'd torn my life apart. But there was no point denying it anymore. I missed Vasily Chernov with an ache that settled into my bones and refused to leave.
The morning light filtered through the curtains, painting golden stripes across the bed. I should get up. Should shower, dress, throw myself into the Athens acquisition like I'd been doing every day since he'd left. Work was the only thing that kept me from counting the hours until his return.
But my body felt wrong.
Heavy. Exhausted despite nine hours of sleep. When I sat up, a wave of nausea rolled through me, and I had to press my hand to my mouth and breathe slowly until it passed.
Stress. That's what this was. Anxiety about Vasily, about the war he was fighting in New York, about the future neither of us had defined. My body was simply manifesting what my mind refused to acknowledge.
I forced myself out of bed and into the bathroom. The nausea faded to a dull queasiness as I brushed my teeth, then surged back when I caught a whiff of the coffee Yelena had left outside my door.
Coffee. I'd been drinking coffee my entire adult life. It was practically a food group. And now the smell made me want to vomit.
I closed the bathroom door and leaned against it, breathing through my mouth.
Something was wrong.
I tried to ignore it.
Showered, dressed, made my way to the library where the Athens files waited. Yelena had replaced the coffee with tea—had she noticed my reaction?—and I sipped it carefully while reviewing the property assessments.
But concentration was impossible. My mind kept drifting to the wrongness in my body, cataloging symptoms I didn't want to examine too closely.
The nausea. The exhaustion. The way certain smells—fish from last night's dinner, the gardener's cigarette smoke drifting through an open window—made my stomach clench.
And something else. Something I'd noticed this morning while getting dressed, but had refused to think about.
My breasts were tender. Swollen. The bra that had fit perfectly last week was now uncomfortably tight.
I set down my tea and stared at the numbers on the screen without seeing them.
When was my last period?
I tried to remember. Before the kidnapping, certainly. I'd been so consumed with the Brown report, with work, with the paranoia of being watched, that I hadn't paid attention to my cycle. And then everything had happened so fast—the abduction, the island, the wedding, Vasily—
I counted backward. Once. Twice. A third time, hoping I'd made a mistake.
I was over two weeks late.
The realization hit me like a physical blow. I stood abruptly, my chair scraping against the floor, and walked to the window on unsteady legs.
No. This couldn't be happening. We'd only been together once—well, technically twice, but both times on the same night. What were the odds?
But I knew the odds. Had sat through enough health classes, read enough articles, heard enough cautionary tales. Once was all it took. And we hadn't used protection. I hadn't even thought about it, too swept up in the moment, in him, in the overwhelming need that had drowned out everything else.
Stupid. So incredibly, monumentally stupid.
I pressed my forehead against the cool glass and tried to think.
Maybe I was wrong. Stress could delay periods. So could travel, diet changes, emotional upheaval—and God knew I'd experienced all of those in the past month. The other symptoms could be explained away too. I was eating different food, sleeping in an unfamiliar place, dealing with a level of anxiety I'd never experienced before.
