Page 78 of Marrying the Pakhan

38

HARPER

“Can I sleep in here tonight?” Ginger asks, already in the doorway of my room in her pajamas, arms wrapped around the dragon book like a shield. “I keep thinking about the bad men.”

“Of course, baby. Come here.”

She climbs in beside me, curling close, and I pull the blanket up over both of us, tucking her hair back from her face the way I have every night since Mia died.

“Are we safe here?” she asks, small and direct, the question she’s clearly been sitting with all evening before finally letting it out.

“We’re safe here. This house has lots of people watching over us, remember? Viktor made sure of that.”

“Will you stay awake until I fall asleep?”

“I’ll stay right here the whole time.”

“Read me the part where the dragon isn’t scared anymore,” she says. “The end part.”

I find the page and read it slow, doing the voices even though I’m tired, because some nights the voices matter more than the sleep does. Ginger’s eyes grow heavy halfway through, her breathing evening out against my shoulder, one hand still fisted loosely in the blanket.

“He’s not scared anymore,” I read, “because he learned that even dragons need somebody brave enough to stay close.”

She’s asleep before I finish the sentence. I set the book on the nightstand, turn off the lamp, and lie there a while longer in the dark, listening to her breathe, feeling the baby shift low in my stomach, thinking that despite everything, tonight feels almost peaceful.

I don’t know how long I’ve been asleep when the hand closes over my mouth.

I wake fighting before I’m even fully conscious, thrashing against a grip too strong to break, a man’s weight pinning me flat against the mattress, his forearm pressed hard across my collarbone.

He shifts his weight off my stomach at the last second, and somewhere beside me I hear Ginger scream, sharp and terrified, cut short by another man’s hand.

“Ginger!” The word comes out muffled against the hand over my mouth, barely a sound at all.

I twist, trying to see her, one arm curling instinctively toward my stomach even as he pins my wrists, but the man on top of me is too heavy, pinning my wrists with one hand while the other keeps my mouth sealed shut.

My mind screams at my body to fight harder, and my body simply can’t, outmatched in every possible way, terrified for the baby as much as for myself.

I see him lift her, one arm locked around her small body, and she’s fighting too, small fists useless against him, her legs kicking uselessly at his shins, and the man carrying her turns toward the door and, almost casually, pulls a gun and points it directly at her face.

“Stop moving,” he tells her, voice flat, bored, like he’s done this before. “Or I use this. Understand?”

Ginger goes still, eyes huge, tears streaming silently now instead of screaming, her whole small body gone rigid with a fear no six-year-old should ever have to understand, and he carries her out the door like that, gun still raised, and I scream against the hand covering my mouth, thrashing so hard the man holding me has to use his full weight to keep me down.

Then, all at once, he releases me, and he’s gone too, out the door after the other one, footsteps receding fast down the hallway, and I’m alone in a bed that still smells like Ginger’s shampoo, gasping, shaking so hard my teeth are chattering.

Gunshots crack somewhere outside, three in quick succession, then more, scattered, distant and close at once, echoing through walls that were supposed to keep exactly this from happening.

I don’t remember deciding to move. I’m just suddenly on my feet, legs unsteady, one hand braced against my stomach, stumbling toward the door.

I open it to find the guard who’s been posted outside my room every night since we arrived lying flat on the floor, unmoving, a dark stain spreading beneath him that I don’t let myself look at directly.

The hallway beyond him is chaos. Smoke, somewhere, acrid and thin, stinging my eyes before I even register where it’s coming from.

Another body further down, one of the men I’d started to recognize by face over these last two weeks, sprawled at an angle that tells me everything I don’t want to know.

Shouting, more gunfire, further away now, moving further from the house with every passing second, punctuated by the distant roar of an engine.

A third body near the top of the stairs, a man I don’t recognize at all, someone who clearly wasn’t one of ours, and the sight of him almost steadies me, proof that whatever happened here wasn’t entirely one-sided.