Ten seconds.
The padlock comes off.
I push the door open, and I see her.
She’s in a chair against the far wall with both hands pressed flat against her stomach and her eyes on the door and when she sees me something happens in her face that I don’t have a word for, a collapse and a reconstruction happening simultaneously, and she stands up and she takes one step toward me and I cross the room and I have her before she takes the second.
She’s shaking.
I can feel it through my jacket, a fine constant tremor running through her whole body. She has both hands between us still pressed against her stomach, and her face is in my neck and she’s not crying, just breathing, fast and shallow, the breathing of someone who has been holding themselves together for hours on will alone.
“The baby,” she says into my collar.
“We’re going to the doctor right now,” I say. “Right now. Let’s go.”
She pulls back and looks at my face, and her eyes are scanning me the way people scan for damage when they’re too shaken to be subtle about it, and I let her look because I understand the need.
“Can you walk?” I say.
“Yes.”
“Then walk. Stay behind me. Do not stop for anything.”
She nods.
I take her hand.
We go back through the corridor with Pavel ahead and two men behind, and Elena’s hand in mine and the building making the sounds buildings make when a fight has just moved through them, settling, groaning, the orange emergency lighting still running along the base of the walls.
She doesn’t look at the men on the floor. I watch her not look at them, the deliberate forward focus of someone who has decided that seeing less is how she gets through the next five minutes. Atthe staircase, she hesitates for half a second at the first step and I tighten my hand around hers and she goes.
In the corridor on the ground floor, there are voices ahead, Marchetti voices, and Pavel holds up a fist and we stop. I push Elena back against the wall behind me and there are three seconds of silence, and then Pavel’s men go around the corner and there are two shots, close together, and then nothing.
Pavel looks back at me. Clear.
We move.
The east door is still open. Cold air hits us when we step through it, the waterfront smell, the thin winter light of late afternoon, and Elena makes a sound beside me when she sees the open sky above the fence line. Not a word, just a sound, and I understand it completely.
The car is where I left it at the cut fence. Viktor has it running. I open the rear door, Elena gets in, and I get in beside her. Viktor pulls out of the lot before I’ve told him to.
Elena is sitting with both hands still pressed against her stomach, and she’s looking at the seat in front of her, and she’s still shaking.
I put my hand over both of hers.
She looks down at my hand covering hers, and she turns her hands over, and she holds on, and I let her hold on, and I do not move my hand for the entire drive.
“Mara,” she says, after a while. Her voice is quiet, stripped of everything except the question in it.
“She’s at the Kessler facility,” I say. “She’s out of surgery. She’s stable.”
Elena closes her eyes.
Her hands tighten around mine.
I look at the road ahead and I think about a corridor full of gunfire and a padlock on a door and her face when I walked through that door. I think about Mara in a recovery room sayingbring her home, and I think about twelve weeks and both hands pressed flat against a stomach in a cold room in New Jersey for however many hours she sat in that chair alone.
I don’t let go of her hand.
