KATYA’S PHONE STARTED ringing. Feeling too low to talk to anyone, she ignored it. The ringing stopped and then started again. Katya glanced at the caller i.d. and finally picked up.
Jack, her sister’s husband, was trying to reach her. Urgently.
“What’s wrong?”
“You need to turn on the news.” Usually calm and collected, Jack sounded shaken.
With a sense of dread, Katya picked up the remote from the large glass and chrome coffee table and turned to the local news station.
The announcer stood outside a broken picture window at a restaurant. The brick front of the establishment was charred, the remaining glass of the window in sharp, jagged points. Blue and red lights flashed on the announcer’s face, and the camera panned to ambulances and police cars on a familiar stretch of Brighton Beach Avenue.
The black awning hung in shreds from the front door of her husband’s nightclub. The stenciled horses on the doors were gone, the glass shattered.
“Bozhe moy!” Katya gasped and shuddered. Reflexively, she placed a hand protectively over her belly, over the baby growing inside.
“Eyewitnesses say the assailants were throwing Molotov cocktails,” the announcer said. “Three people are dead and many more injured.”
“I’m fine. So’s Becca. Shaken. But fine,” he said.
“Aleksei,” Katya whimpered.
“I don’t know where he is. I saw him with Mikhail not long before the fire.”
Jack’s tone was brusque, and she felt a surge of unease.
“The police want to talk to him. He’s not answering his phone. I don’t know where the hell he is. Do you?” Jack was angry at Aleksei. Why?
“He hasn’t called me. I don’t know where he is,” she said, fighting panic. Had the culprits grabbed him and taken him somewhere else? Someone capable of throwing Molotov cocktails in a nightclub had no scruples, could do anything to anyone.
Aleksei could be in real trouble. He could be hurt. Her heart thumped heavily in her chest. She loved him, worried for him, even if he wasn’t the man she thought she had married.
This couldn’t be a coincidence. A murder a few nights ago. A blackmail threat last night. A fire tonight. No, not a fire, an attack, and all too close to home.
“The police are looking for him.” The statement sounded like a rebuke. Did Jack blame Aleksei for the attack?
Katya herself suspected Aleksei’s involvement in a world she didn’t want to know, in activities she couldn’t condone, ones completely at odds with her values and her profession as a lawyer.
But she couldn’t turn her heart on and off like a tap. Love still flowed, whether or not he deserved it. And he would always be the father of her baby.
“Did they say why?” Katya asked. She was still willing to hear the evidence, still hoping that she could somehow try her husband and find him not guilty, still hoping that the things she had heard the other night were all a misunderstanding.
From the living room, she noticed the shiny black SUVs idling in front of her house. With dark tinted windows and gold rims, they didn’t look anything like cop cars.
A man in a trench coat with a bottle in one hand and a brick in the other strode up her front walk. Molotov cocktails.
“Ohmigod. Jack, call 9-1-1 and send them to my house.” She raced for the kitchen and the back door. She could run through the yard and make an escape.
“What? Why?”
“Just do it! Someone’s here.” She hung up the phone. She took a precious moment to disable the alarm—better not to have it go off and announce her escape.
She grabbed the knob to the back door, but something in the window caught her eye. A shadowy figure moved toward her from the side of the house. She backed away from the door. She couldn’t get out, not without whoever was out there seeing her.
Where could she hide if they entered the house? Where would she be safe if they threw a firebomb?
She threw open the basement door. Hoping the man out back didn’t glimpse her through the kitchen window, she closed the door behind her and fled down the steps. She hurried down the darkened staircase and across the finished part of the basement. With only the dimmest light shining through the high rectangular windows, she found the storage room door at the back.
Once she slipped through the door and closed it behind her, she was surrounded by thick darkness. She fumbled around, feeling her way to the back wall. She didn’t dare turn on a light that would give any seekers a clue to where she might have gone.
Finally, she found the crawl space. The rough cinder blocks scratched her skin as she hoisted herself up into the unfinished space that she used as a deep shelf.
There was nothing in here, only some old suitcases. She crawled behind the largest one. It might hide her if someone thought to peer back here. With no light, the space around her felt desolate and a little spooky.
She pulled her knees to her chest. She placed a hand over her belly and promised her baby she would do everything she could to keep them both safe.