Spider leads me down the hallway to another bedroom and closes the door behind us. He stands with his hand on the knob, facing away from me, then says quietly, “Make me understand this.”
“There’s nothing to understand.”
He turns to me. What I see in his eyes makes me take a step back.
We stare at each other in tense silence, until he says gruffly, “Three months. I searched for you for almost three fucking months.”
I can already tell this is going to be a drama-filled conversation and brace myself for the worst. I moisten my lips and say, “I know.”
Wound tight as a spring, he steps away from the door and closer to me. His intense gaze never leaves my face.
“You know? You know what I went through? How I couldn’t eat? I couldn’t sleep? I couldn’t even close my eyes without seeing the look on your face after I shot you?”
I say gently, “It was an accident.”
His voice rises. “An accident that never would’ve happened if that son of a bitch hadn’t been in the room with you.”
A vein throbs in his neck. His breathing is erratic. He’s upset, visibly so, and part of me wants to hug him.
I know if I did, it would be a disaster.
He says bitterly, “And now you think you’re in love with him. The assassin who came to kill Declan. The man who kidnapped you and took you to another country.”
“Please, Spider—”
“The man who threw you out like trash when he was finished with you.”
That feels like a punch to the stomach.
When he sees the expression on my face, he closes his eyes and mutters, “Fuck.”
I turn away, wrap my arms around myself, and take a steadying breath.
He says, “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay.”
“No, it’s not. Look at me, lass. Please.”
When I don’t turn around, he comes to stand in front of me. He looks at my posture, how I’ve got my arms around my body, and sighs heavily, dragging a hand over his hair.
“Now you’re afraid of me. That’s bloody wonderful.”
“I’m not afraid of you. But I can’t understand why you didn’t listen to me when I begged you, over and over, not to put me on that plane. To take me back to the market. I didn’t exactly mince words.”
He pauses, then says in a gravelly voice, “You know why.”
When I don’t reply, he prompts, “Don’t you, lass?”
I hesitate. Chewing my lip, I nod.
My silence makes him bolder. “Why? Say it.”
Burning with mortification, I blurt, “Please don’t make this harder for me than it already is.”
He steps closer. His voice drops. “Say it. Tell me you know what I feel. What I want. Say it, and I’ll give you his number.”
When I remain silent and he takes one more step toward me, his energy borderline threatening, I flatten a hand over his chest. Looking into his eyes, I say, “That’s enough.”
Under my palm, his heart beats like crazy.
Keeping my voice gentle though I’m angry, I say, “You’re my friend, and I care for you. I hate that you’ve put yourself through hell with guilt—”
“You don’t know the half of it.”
“—and I hate that you won’t accept that I don’t blame you for anything. That I know you didn’t mean it. And thank you, honestly, thank you for trying to find me, for spending all that time looking. I’ll never forget you did that.
“But please don’t think you can back me into a corner and make me say something I don’t want to say or do something I don’t want to do, because I’ve spent the last three months growing into a person who knows her own strength. I looked Death in the face and told him to go fuck himself. Nobody can push me around anymore.”
He stands staring at me with his jaw working and his nostrils flared.
“Please, Spider. Please can we just be friends and put this behind us?”
After a long moment, he says flatly, “Sure. We’ll be friends.”
He steps back and heads to the door. I watch him go in dismay.
“I take it this means you won’t give me Mal’s number.”
Over his shoulder he says, “I never fucking had it.”
He walks out, throwing the door open so hard it slams against the wall.
The next week is the longest of my life.
I stay with Declan and Sloane in their new place in Boston, wandering listlessly up and down the hallways, sighing, until Sloane shouts that I’m driving her crazy. I retreat to the bedroom they gave me to brood by myself.
Declan agreed to pass a message to his mysterious friend to try to get to Mal for me, but wouldn’t promise it would make it.
The message was simply, “Mouse deer never give up.”
I hear nothing back.
I spend hours at a time on the computer, poring over maps of Russia, plotting routes in every direction that would take me to a small town a two-hour flight plus a one-hour drive away from Moscow.
There are hundreds of them.
Even if I did somehow get to Russia, I could spend years trying to find the little cabin in the woods. The country is huge.
If I could only recall the word Mal said when I first woke up in the cabin. I asked him where he’d taken me, and he said a Russian word that I think was the name of his town, but my memory refuses to produce it.
I could start in Moscow, look for the tall glass building Mal’s apartment was in, but I doubt I’d recognize it. I only saw it once, in the middle of the night. And Moscow’s huge, too. I didn’t drive, so I don’t know what the building is near. And I couldn’t ask anyone, because I don’t speak the language.
And anyone who helps me get there would be risking his life.
I have nightmares every night. I can’t wake myself up from them. Or maybe I don’t want to wake up, because they’re so vivid and include Mal.
It’s always the same. His face receding through the van window as Spider sped me away from him. His anguished expression.
His beautiful, haunted eyes.
I cycle through almost all the five stages of grief, except I never make it to acceptance. I just start over at denial, spend a lot of time in anger, then bargaining, finally ending up in depression, where I wallow until I get pissed again.
I make myself sick with it. Literally sick.
At least once a day, I throw up.
Spider disappears. Declan makes a vague reference to him needing time off, and I don’t ask for specifics.
Then nothing.
Another week passes. And another. June becomes July. Sloane asks if I want to go back to San Francisco, because they paid the rent on my apartment while I was gone, but I say no. That’s not home now.
Home is a cabin in the woods with a man who’d rather see me in the arms of his enemy than keep me with him if it meant I’d be safe.
God, how I hate him for that.
Chivalry is bullshit.
Then Fate decides to throw me a curve ball.
And man, if I thought it had been screwing with me before, this time takes the cake.
“You look like shit.”
“Thanks for that,” I say drily. “Your support is always so helpful.”
“No, I mean it,” says Sloane, watching me from across the kitchen table. “You don’t look healthy, Smalls. Your color isn’t good. You’re always barfing. And I think you’ve lost weight since you got here.”
With my fork, I poke at the pancakes on the plate in front of me. The sickly-sweet smell of maple syrup makes my stomach roll over. “It’s probably a tumor.”
Showing great forbearance, she refrains from smacking me. “It’s not a tumor.”
“Then it’s Lyme disease. Bugs have always found me tasty.”
“Can you be serious for a second? I’m really worried about you.”
When I glance up, I find her watching me with concern in her eyes. Sighing, I say, “I’m fine. Pinky swear. It’s just…you know.” I make a vague gesture to encompass the general fuckery of my life. “The situation.”
When she makes a scrunchy face, I say offhandedly, “I’m not pregnant, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“How do you know?”
“I’m on the birth control shot.”
It’s only when she narrows her eyes at me that my heart skips a beat.
Wait. How long ago did I have my last shot?
Swallowing back the acid taste of the bile rising in my throat, I start frantically calculating dates in my head.
I was with Mal for three months. It’s been three weeks since I got back.
How long before I went to Russia did I get the shot?
My brain, which has been so unhelpful to me lately, cheerfully provides the precise answer: six weeks.
It was the week before Valentine’s Day, which means that the shot would have been effective until about the beginning or middle of May.
I was with Mal until the middle of June.
It’s now the second week of July.
And I haven’t had a period yet.
Oh, fuck.
Sloane says sharply, “Riley?”
“Yep.” Avoiding her eyes, I stare at my pancakes as if the winning lottery numbers are in the syrup. Oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck.
“So you’re covered?”
“Yep. I’m due for another shot, but seeing as how I won’t be having sex with anyone but myself for the rest of my life, I might not bother.”
Shitfuckpisscrap. Fucktrumpet cumbubble!
She exhales. “We should get you to a doctor for a checkup, anyway. This isn’t normal.”
“I’m fine. I promise. It’s just depression, that’s all.”
After a moment of silence, she stands up, rounds the table, and hugs me.
“It’s gonna be okay,” she whispers. “Don’t forget that I love you.”
This bitch is trying to kill me. She’s never told me she loves me before. Not ever that I can remember in our whole lives.
My voice breaks when I say it back.
Then a hot wave of nausea hits me. I run to the kitchen sink and throw up.
Panting, eyes watering, leaning over the sink staring at the contents of my stomach, I wonder how the hell I’m going to smuggle a pregnancy test into a safe house.
As it turns out, I don’t have to. I find three unopened boxes of pregnancy tests in a drawer in Sloane’s bathroom when I’m rummaging around for a bottle of shampoo.
It only takes one of them to deliver the news.
My heart thudding, I stare at the two little pink lines in the window on the white plastic stick and whisper, “Your daddy’s a jerk, kiddo.”
Then I do the only reasonable thing left to do.
I burst into tears.
