I crouch down to his level. I look at his face, which is thoroughly fucked up from hitting the road. There’s a chance he wouldn’tsurvive it—that dent in the side of his skull doesn’t look good. But I’ve seen hospitals bring men back from the dead, so what do I know?
“Please,” he begs.
“No.”
I make it quick. It’s more than he deserves, and I’m aware of this, and I do it this way because there’s a woman waiting for me in my car who doesn’t need to hear more of what she has already heard enough of this morning.
I go back to the SUV. As I get in, Igor gets out to handle the body for me.
Molly quietly asks, “It’s done?”
“He will never touch you or anyone else ever again.”
She breathes a little deeper, but that’s the only reaction. “I can’t believe it was Andrei.”
“I hope he’s the only one.”
She blinks over at me. “You think Fedor has more than one spy?”
“I can’t afford to think anything else.”
“Oh.” Another deep breath, this time to steady herself. “I hadn’t thought—I didn’t think he’d be able to get to more than one guy.”
“There’s no way to know whether Vladimir was one of his. Andrei clearly was. There could be more.” I’m aware that Molly knows certain details of my past. But I don’t know how much she knows. “It’s what I have done before. Which Fedor knows. So, it would track that he’d have more than one man on the inside. He might call it poetic justice.”
“I thought he only just got out of prison.”
“He did. But men like Fedor move fast. And they likely had help before they ever left prison.” I don’t want her spinning out on these facts. “Tell me exactly what happened this morning. Every detail you remember.”
She tells it with the flat precision of someone who has run out of adrenaline and is now in the territory beyond it, where the events are recited rather than felt because the feeling part is going to require more resources than are currently available.
The longer she talks, the more time Igor has to dismantle the body, so I ask questions when I can. I listen to all of it and keep my face calm. She deserves a soft place to land when the details make her crumble.
But she doesn’t crumble. Instead, she rambles. She pushed a man out of a moving car while she’s recovering from a concussion. She did it because he threatened her babies. It wasn’t any deeper than that, and it wasn’t an accident. She tried to kill him for the threat, and she isn’t sorry.
I’m proud of her in a way that is almost incapacitating. The rest of me is terrified.
Her luck will run out. That’s the thought I can’t dislodge, sitting cold in the back of everything else while she talks. Her intelligence is real, and her composure is extraordinary, and she has resources that most people in her situation would not have.
But resources run out, composure has limits, and intelligence cannot stop a bullet. She improvised and was successful because the men sent for her were not expecting improvisation. They expected a scared, concussed, pregnant woman to be compliant. Not fierce.
The next men will expect her.
There will be next men. That is the nature of this world. There is no version of my life in which there are not next men. There always are in my world, and I was fine with that until the consequences became hers.
Igor gets back in the car, evidence gone. “We’re ready to move.”
I drive and think about Fedor’s compound in the Hudson Valley, which I have had under surveillance for two days. The floor plan is etched into my brain. I know the timing of the guard rotations, the weaknesses in the fence. The code to the safe room.
When we get home, Molly stretches and quietly says, “I need a long shower and soup. Too much soup. Do you mind?—”
“The chicken and rice, or do you want pho?”
She smiles. “You remembered.”
“I remember everything about you, Molly. When will you stop doubting me?”
Her sigh is filled with all the things she’s too tired to say. She comes to me, and I hold her while she relaxes into it. “I’m sorry I yelled at you in the hospital.”
