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“You didn’t flinch,” he says, almost praising. From Valentin Yuri, it has the cadence of an apology.

“I’m not as weak as you think I am.”

A short, surprised laugh moves through the room and dies fast, because there’s no real space for it tonight. The brothers are already turning back to the table, to the maps, to the tumbler and its new career in disinformation, and the talk goes quick and technical and half in Russian—signal logs, last known pings, Miron’s name, Iosif already mobile—and I stand there at the edge of it with a fresh seam in my neck, watching the machine of this family build itself a war.

And then Trifon looks up at me, and his voice goes kind, and kind is somehow worse.

“You did well tonight. Better than well.” He straightens. “And now we know what this is. The tracker means this was never about you, Meera—you were a bridge. This is about our family. Which means you’ve done your part, and you’re owed something for it.” A nod, decisive, a king dispensing settlement. “We can put protection on you, your mother, your brother. Whatever you need. And you can go home, back to your real life. Go back to your classroom. Return to your normal, with our gratitude, and none of this ever touches you again.”

A bridge.

That’s exactly what Leonid had called himself, back when we’d slotted together on the Ferris wheel.

Trifon passes the title and this clemency onto me like a gift, and I understand that he means it as one. I should be thrilled to have normalcy back within reach. My lesson plans and my dying Civic and my Friday merlot, my small life with no surface area, retrofitted now with invisible bodyguards. The door out, held open, by people with every reason to want fewer civilians in the blast radius. Three weeks ago—God, three days ago, even—this offer might be heaven.

But I didn’t know then what I know now.

I look around the room. At the maps with his name on them somewhere. At the tumbler. At these people who are about to decide everything that matters to me without including me in the conversation. Because they don’t believe it’ll impact me. That my life is tied to Leonid’s, in whatever way.

“Right. Except… I’m about to be your family, too.”

It just pours past my lips of its own volition. The implication of my words is overt, undeniable. Trifon stills, as if he’s been turned to stone. Darya’s teacup pauses halfway, where she blinks rapidly over the rim, like her system is malfunctioning.

In for a penny, in for a pound.

“I’m pregnant,” I announce clearly, not mincing my words. My hand finds my stomach, like I can get whatever’s growing inside it will chime in. “And yes, it is your brother’s.”

You could hear a pin drop.

I add, “I found out two days ago. He doesn’t know. I was telling him when—before he picked a fight, before all hell broke loose, so he doesn’t know. But normal is gone. Normal isn’t an option anymore. Our lives are intertwined. I’m not going home to wait for a phone call. I’m in this room until he’s in it too. So whatever you’re planning, plan around me, because the last thing that man did before they took him was put everything he had between me and a door, and I am not—” my voice cracks, finally, on the last of it, “—I am not going to fail him. He fought for me, even with you. I can fight for him, too. And I don’t need your permission.”

Nobody speaks. Valentin is looking at Trifon. Trifon is looking at me with an expression I can’t read and don’t bother to.

It’s Darya who shocks me the most, her lips curling into an impish, rosy grin. She takes my chin in two fingers, tilts my face like she’s appraising a painting that’s been hung in bad light, and whatever she finds there makes the corner of her mouth curve.

“Well, Leonid’s Meera, I believe I’ll like you,” she says. “You’re far more interesting than you look.”

I choke on a giggle despite myself, thoroughly taken aback. “Yeah. I’ve been thinking that about myself a lot lately.”

Chapter 21 - Leonid

“Is that the best you’ve got, you fucking pussy?” I spit out another glob of blood right onto Ray’s shoes.

I’m goading him, and I probably shouldn’t be. It’s the Yuri in me that can’t help it. His face is puce and he pants miserably, his lungs practically wheezing from the exertion. For such a soft looking fuck, he sure can pack a hard punch. Just not hard enough to break me.

Whoever’s on the other end of the leash on Ray is scrambling to wrench whatever information they can out of me. Too fucking bad for them.

His knuckles are just as badly, if not worse, fucked up as my face. Sick, saccharine satisfaction laces through the blood in my mouth, just watching him shake out his hand. Ray bends over with a dull groan to grab for his bottle, sweating on the floor beside his abandoned chair.

Idly, I wonder if he’s always this drunk, or he needed the liquid courage to beat me to a pulp. “Fuck you.”

My tongue drags across my blood-stained teeth. I know I have to wait him out. Every minute I keep breathing is another minute I hand my brothers to get their asses here. They’re coming, I know without a shadow of a doubt. It isn’t some wishful hope I’m keeping alive in my heart. This is something I know in my soul. Family means something so different to us than it does to this piece of shit.

Ray drinks sloppily, swiping the back of his hand across that wet mustache. And then he comes back. Not for the first time, he demands, “What have you been poisoning the well with?”

Clearly, someone’s pissed over the strategy to plant false intel to see who it could be traced back to did have some success. Good to know.

He drops back a step and circles me like a lion around his prey. “Tell me. Which of it was real?”