“How long?” he asks, crouching beside me.
“How long what?”
“How long have you been feeling sick?”
“This is the first time.”
He studies me with that unnerving focus. “When was your last period?”
The question catches me off guard. I try to remember, can’t quite pin it down. Six weeks? Seven?
Oh. I’ve always been a bit inconsistent, but that’s a long time even for me.
“I need to get a test,” I say.
“I’ll send someone.”
“It’s fine, I can go into town and grab one.”
“I’m not letting you go to a pharmacy where someone might recognize you and start rumors before we know for certain.” He stands, already pulling out his phone. “Felix will handle it discreetly.”
An hour later, I’m staring at two pink lines that confirm what I already suspected.
I’m pregnant.
Terror and joy war in my chest. I’m twenty-five. We’ve been married less than a year. This wasn’t planned, wasn’t discussed, wasn’t something I’d let myself imagine despite the fact that we weren’t exactly careful.
Dimitri appears in the doorway. “Well?”
I hold up the test, can’t form words.
He crosses to me in three strides, takes the plastic stick with surprising gentleness. Stares at those two lines like they’re a code he’s trying to crack.
“You’re pregnant,” he says finally.
“Yes.”
“With my child.”
“That’s generally how it works.”
He sets the test down carefully, then pulls me into his arms with an intensity that steals my breath. His face buries in my neck, and I feel him shaking.
“Dimitri?”
“Fuck,” he admits, voice muffled. “I have no idea how to be a father. How to raise a child in this world. How to keep them safe when I can barely keep you safe.”
“We’ll figure it out.”
“What if I fail? What if I’m just like—” He stops, but I know who he means. The father he never talks about, the childhood that shaped him into the man who needs control because chaos meant danger.
“You won’t be,” I say with certainty I didn’t know I possessed. “You’ll be better.We’llbe better.”
He pulls back enough to look at me, and I see fear naked in his eyes. Dimitri Rudenko, who faces down rivals and violence without flinching, is terrified of a pregnancy test.
“I want this,” I tell him. “I want this baby. I want the future we’re going to build, but I need to know you want it too, not just because it’s happening but because you actually want it.”
“I want it.” The words come out rough. “I want you, this baby, the family we’re going to have. I want all of it so badly it terrifies me.”
