Fast. A hard, heavy sound cracks through the room.
Alena’s head jerks sideways.
Then she crumples.
Just drops, like the strings holding her up were cut. One second, she’s standing there in her expensive coat and fear and calculation, and the next she’s on the floor in a heap, blood darkening at her hairline where something struck her.
I scream. The sound tears out of me before I can stop it, raw and shocked and useless.
And then I see who’s standing behind her.
Daria.Aleksei’s mother.
She’s holding a bronze statuette in one hand, the base of it red now. Her face is pale, too pale, but calm. Not startled. Not panicked. Calm.
My whole body goes cold.
For one impossible second, my brain refuses to make sense of what my eyes are seeing.
No.No.
She lowers the statuette gently onto the side table, as if setting down a teacup instead of a weapon.
Then she looks at me. And smiles. Not warmly. Not kindly.
Something quieter than cruelty. Worse than cruelty. Like she’s been waiting a very long time to stop pretending.
“Did you really think,” she asks softly, “you would get your happily ever after with my son?”
The room tilts.
I stare at her, breath coming too fast, pulse hammering against every machine attached to me.
Alena groans faintly on the floor. She’s alive.
Thank God, she’s alive.
But that hardly matters because the woman in front of me is still smiling, and suddenly everything that was soft about her, everything that felt almost safe, peels away in one sickening instant.
“I…” My mouth is dry. “Daria, what are you doing?”
She tilts her head. “Correcting a problem.”
My hand goes instinctively to my stomach, even though the baby is no longer there to protect. The motion is automatic anyway. Some last reflex of fear.
Her eyes follow it. A flicker. Satisfaction, maybe. Grief. Possession.
I can’t tell.
“That child,” she says, “should never have existed.” The words hit harder than the attack did.
Something inside me goes white with horror. “You poisoned me.”
She doesn’t answer right away. Which is answer enough.
I hear myself whisper, “Why?”
That finally seems to interest her. The question. The simplicity of it.
