Chapter 296: Worse fear

Morning came gray and slow over the water.

The ship had a small private cabin below deck, with a narrow bed, a round window, and a door that locked from the inside. Marcus had paid a great deal for that door.

Sienna was asleep on the bed with a rough wool blanket pulled up to her chin.

Viktor sat in the only chair. He had washed in a metal basin and put on a clean shirt and dark trousers that Marcus had found for him. They were a little too short in the sleeves. His hair was still damp. He had closed the cut over his eyebrow with two small strips of tape.

He was not looking at the window or at the door. He was looking at her.

He had been looking for hours. He counted her breaths the way he had on the plane, one after another, slow and shallow. Every now and then her eyelids moved, and a small line appeared between her eyebrows, and he leaned forward, ready. Then it faded, and he sat back.

Flying out would have been the best and easiest way out: a plane at the south field, an hour away, with fuel and passports and his own pilot. But the call had come before they reached the road.

They are watching the airfields, Boss. Every one. A security post stands at the south field, and two more are on the way. The Don’s men are already there. A pause on the line. It is too fast. He must have woken up and moved at once.

So they had turned toward the coast.

The sea was the safer way. Nobody checks a rusted ship at a private dock, not at dawn, not with a captain who is paid more than his boat is worth. It would take days instead of hours. It would be slow and cold and uncomfortable.

It was not safer for Sienna.

He had seen that at once. The first time the deck rolled beneath her feet, her face had gone pale. She had made it to the cabin, and she had been sick twice, quietly, into the basin, without letting him hold her hair. Then she had lain down and slept like someone who had fallen off a cliff.

The ship rocked softly. Somewhere above, a rope creaked. Viktor rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hand.

Sienna woke all at once. Her eyes opened, and she was awake, and she lay very still, staring at the ceiling. She looked like someone listening to a sound that nobody else could hear.

Then she pushed herself up on one elbow. Her face was pale. Not just tired, but drained, as if every drop of color had been wrung out of her, leaving dark smudges under her eyes. Her lips were dry. But her gaze was clear and sharp, and it went straight to Viktor.

"The files," she said.

"Sienna..."

"Where are they?"

He did not argue. He leaned down and slid his hand under the thin mattress, and pulled out the folded pages and the blue folder. They had been tucked against his chest through the garden, and the wall and the van, and they were creased and warm, and one corner was stained with blood that was not his.

He held them out. She took them with both hands.

She looked clean now. She had washed in the same basin, and she wore a gray sweater of Marcus’s that came down over her knees the white gown was gone, folded somewhere or thrown into the sea. If you had met her in a hallway, you would have thought she was only a tired girl.

But the smell of that night still clung to her. She could feel it on her skin, in her hair, behind her eyes. It was as if she could see everything. She shut her eyes for one second. Then she opened the folder and began to read.

She went through every line.

She did not skim. She read the way she had been taught to read a case, slowly, from top to bottom, with a finger moving under the words. She read the numbers first, the long columns of her blood work. Then the notes. Then the margins, where small neat handwriting ran sideways along the edges of the paper.

Viktor watched her face.

He saw her mouth tighten. He saw her breath slow. Twice she stopped and went back to the top of a page. Once she pressed her fingers hard against her temple and held them there.

Near the bottom of the third sheet, she stopped altogether.

She did not move. Her eyes were fixed on a single place on the page, and the pale blood left her face until her lips were nearly white.

He knew that look. It was the look from the lab, the one she had given the wall before she folded a sheet and hid it in her dress. It was the look of a person who had found the thing she was afraid of.

It was only a small note.

It sat in the margin beside a column of figures, in the same neat hand. Four short lines, underlined twice. She did not need to read them again. She had read them in the dim light of the lab with her heart knocking against her ribs, and every word was burned into her mind.

Subject must not become pregnant. Placental hormones, first weeks. Reaction predicted. Cardiac rhythm fails. Cure incomplete. Do not allow.

She let out a long, slow breath.

It was a strange thing. She did not feel surprised. She felt something much worse, something quiet and cold and heavy, like a stone dropping into a deep well and not hitting the bottom.

It makes sense.

She wrapped her mind around it, one piece at a time. The nausea in the mornings. The dizziness on the stairs. The way her pulse tripped and ran. The pale lining of her eyelids in the mirror. The tiredness that had nothing to do with the night.

She had counted days in the van, in the dark, with her eyes closed. She had counted again on the ship. She did not like the number.

At first she had thought it was one thing or the other. Her old heart, finally giving way. Or something else, something new and small and impossible. She had gone back and forth between them like a woman looking at two doors.

But it was not one or the other.

It was both.