Greg Rucka - Walking dead

I kept staring at her, still waiting for an explanation, because I was sure I hadn't heard that right. "What?"

"I'm pregnant."

The words rolled around my head for a few seconds.

"Say something."

"You what?"

"… thirteen weeks?"

"Fourteen now, I think."

I went back to her side. The way I was feeling, oddly enough, reminded me of how I'd felt in the shower when I'd returned from Batumi after Vladek Karataev had died, but without the dry heaves. I took off my glasses, rubbed my eyes. I put my glasses on again.

"Why didn't you tell me?" I asked her.

"Fears." She was looking at Miata again, not at me.

"More than one?"

She almost laughed. "Too many to count."

"I'm listening."

"We never even talked about it, not once. It was never something we'd even discussed, it had never seemed a possibility." Alena took a deep breath, let it out slowly. "I lived my life from the moment the Soviets took me out of the orphanage in Magadan until the moment I met you believing I would live a life alone. That was simply the way it was. Twenty-five years, I was alone, and that was fine, because they made me someone who was supposed to be that way. I was supposed to be alone, always, until I was dead."

She turned to meet my eyes, then, and she hadn't been lying at all. She was scared, and I could see it.

"Then I met you, and you loved me, and I will never, ever know why. And I am not alone with you, even when we are apart. I could not have allowed myself to imagine it, you see? More than I would have dreamed, if I had been allowed to dream. And to have a child with you, to be a mother?"

She laughed, not because it was funny, but because, I think, the irony was so strong it actually hurt her.

"Me? A mother?"

I thought about her with Tiasa, the care she'd shown her, the time she'd given her. The way they had talked when they thought I couldn't hear them. The way Alena had taught her, the tenderness she'd failed to hide behind not-quite-stern-enough rebukes. The way they had played.

"I think," I said, "that you could be a very good mother."

She blinked at me, her face smoothing. "I didn't think you would want it. I didn't think you would want me to have a baby."

"I don't want you to have a baby," I told her. "I want you to have our baby."

Then I put my arms around her, and I laid her down on the bed, and tried to show her just how much I meant it. She was still sleeping when I awoke the next morning, and I let her be. Miata was awake, and up, though he seemed unsteady on his feet, and I dressed and took him out of the hotel for a very short walk, just long enough for him to relieve himself. He was slower on the way back, and when we returned to the room he went straight to his blanket and curled up on it once again. I put some water in one of the bowls Alena had secured for him, and put some kibble in the other. He didn't seem to have much appetite, but he drank the water readily enough.

I got cleaned up and prepared for the day ahead, thinking that I didn't know what the day ahead would bring. I knew enough about human trafficking to know that Ukraine wasn't exactly the safest place for us to be hiding at the moment, but then again, fleeing to Canada didn't seem to be an immediate option, either.

I went to the desk, took out my laptop, and opened up the files I'd taken from Vladek's BlackBerry. He had contacts in Ukraine, it seemed, but whether or not any were in Odessa, I couldn't tell. Flipping through the address book on my screen, I saw Arzu Kaya's name again.

It had to have been he who'd pointed Vladek Karataev's friends at Alena, perhaps hoping he'd been pointing them at me. It had to have been he and not, as I'd begun to speculate, Zviadi. Zviadi had never known my name. But Arzu had dealt with David Mercer, and David Mercer had been known to live in Kobuleti.

Arzu was the only person I could think of who knew where Tiasa Lagidze had been sent. Hell, he could've held her back in Turkey, I could've been within a meter of her when I'd visited Trabzon, and I would never have even known it. But whether Tiasa was still in Trabzon or had been sold somewhere else, I was sure of one thing: Arzu was my only lead, the only chance I had left to find Tiasa Lagidze.

This morning marked two weeks, exactly, since Bakhar Lagidze's family had been slaughtered in their home. Fourteen days exactly, since Tiasa had been pulled from her bed and sold into slavery, a child bought and sold to pay for the sins of her father. I thought about Kekela and the girls she had led me to in Dubai, the abuse they had to have suffered in that foul, overheated brothel. It didn't matter who they were, who they had been, not any of them. No one deserved that.

No one.

I shut the top on the laptop, stared at the little light on the front of the machine as it began to pulse softly. Behind me, I heard Alena shifting in the bed. She was still asleep, her lips slightly parted, one arm drawn across her belly. For the moment, there was no worry on her face, just the peace of her slumber. When I'd first come to know her, her sleep had been plagued with nightmares, the subconscious upthrust of every pain she buried while awake. Over the last years they had come with less and less frequency, until, now, it seemed they were lost to history.

I was, in so many ways, a bad man. I had killed people, and I knew I was going to do it again. Sometimes, even oftentimes, it was in self-defense, or at least in situations where I could rationalize it as such after the fact. But once already in my life I had committed a murder, plain and simple, as calculatedly cold-blooded a killing as any Alena herself had performed while under the Soviet yoke or after, when she'd sold the only skills she had. I was not, by any stretch of my imagination, a good person.

Tiasa Lagidze hadn't known that the day in our little studio when she asked me to dance. She'd thought I was nice, and safe, and kind, and when she gave me a kiss on the cheek after we were done and then turned away from me, she'd forgotten one wall was all mirrors, and that I could see she was blushing.

She was alive, I was sure of it. Her worth as a commodity required it, and that was how whoever saw her now imagined her, the same way Arzu had done. Merchandise. She'd been turned into a consumer good, a color television, a stereo, a car.

From behind me, in the bed, Alena said, "Where will you look next?"

I turned. She lay exactly as she had before, only now her eyes were open. I left the desk and went to her side, sitting on the edge of the bed. Hair had fallen across her cheek, and I brushed it back behind her ear.

"I was thinking I'd go back to Trabzon," I said.

"That is logical. It is the last place you know, for certain, that she was."

"There's more than that. The man I dealt with there, I think he's the one who pointed Karataev's friends at Kobuleti."

"All the more reason to speak to him."

I brushed more of her hair back, let my fingers trail along the side of her neck. Like my own, her body had more than its share of scars, but her neck was smooth and I liked the feel of her skin. The bandage on her right tricep had come loose while she slept, falling away enough to reveal the top of the wound there. The bullet track looked like a burn.

"I don't want to leave you alone," I said.

"Pregnant does not mean incapacitated. I can take care of myself."

"You can, but I don't want you to have to, not alone. Not with Miata the way he is."

"And."

"And yes, the bun in the oven changes things, I think you'll agree."

"Yes." She rolled onto her back, looking up at me. Her expression was frank. "We could hire someone, perhaps. Some one who did what you used to do."

"I'm not leaving you with some bodyguard I don't know the first thing about."