Nikolai’s voice was almost inaudible.
“I did not know who you were then.”
I looked at Sofia in my arms.
Then at him.
The truth arrived with impossible cruelty.
His daughter had not chosen me by accident.
My body had not answered a stranger’s baby.
Sofia was feeding from the woman who had given birth to her brothers.
Nikolai stepped closer.
“Elena, the boy Viktor took is not only your son.”
The alarm continued to scream.
Outside the broken window, a helicopter rose above the trees.
Its side door stood open.
Viktor sat inside.
And on his lap, wrapped in a blue blanket, was a dark-haired toddler with my eyes.
Nikolai raised his gun.
I grabbed his arm.
“Don’t shoot!”
The helicopter climbed.
The child turned toward the window.
Even from that distance, I saw the small silver bracelet around his wrist.
The bracelet I had placed on Samuel before the nurses took him away.
Viktor lifted a phone and pressed it to his ear.
The phone in Nikolai’s pocket began to ring.
He answered.
Viktor’s voice came through the speaker.
“Bring Elena to the old cathedral tomorrow night,” he said. “Come alone, or the boy disappears forever.”
The call ended.
The helicopter vanished into the darkness.
I turned to Nikolai.
He looked at me, at Sofia, at the empty sky beyond the shattered glass.
Then he said the one thing more terrifying than his claim that I could never leave.
“Viktor doesn’t know there were three babies.”
