Viktor
“Nikolai, stay back!” I shout as I cautiously climb out of my car, minimally damaged despite how hard I hit Stepan’s car. I hated to put Millie in danger, but it was the only way I could subdue him without involving the cops.
Nikolai stays inside, flashing me a deeply worried and apprehensive glance as I leave the car. He begins to say something, but he stops himself.
“You know none of this had to happen like this, right Viktor?” Stepan shouts from his vantage point behind his totaled car.
“What the fuck does that even mean? Why are you doing this?” I yell back, unable to conceal the absolute betrayal in my voice.
Seeing him like this, off his face on some unknown drug while holding the mother of my baby hostage is never something I could imagine him doing in a million years. He used to be a father figure to me, and now he’s lost his fucking mind.
“Because you betrayed me first. All you had to do was marry my daughter like your father said you would,” he continues, and I can see the panic in Millie’s eyes as blood runs down her face from the crash.
I can’t believe it’s come to this.
“Stepan, that was never going to happen. That wasn’t a legitimate proposal. I have no idea what the fuck you’re talking about, and even if my father did say something, Katya is a free person. You can’t force her to marry anybody,” I reply, keeping my hand on my gun and hoping to God I don’t have to use it.
“Yes, I can. I can force her to marry whoever I want her to marry because she can’t make any goddamn choices for herself. She’s lost without a man in her life, and that man was supposed to be you,” he says, choking Millie even harder as his anger grows.
I groan. “She doesn’t want to marry me. You need to make peace with that shit and let her and I both have our own lives,” I plead with him.
I feel a malignant combination of rage and sadness at seeing the way that my closest friend has chosen to handle such a frivolous rejection. Even if he didn’t like Millie, I never could have imagined he’d come anywhere near this close to killing her.
“How the fuck else am I supposed to marry into your family? How am I supposed to become more than just an employee to you?” he replies, his own resolve fluctuating between anger and whatever his drug-addled brain has interpreted as sadness.
It’s all coming together now, and in a flash of clarity, I see much more of what Stepan has been up to behind my back. “Wait… did you let Erik into my apartment?” I ask, feeling the pit in my stomach growing hotter as I wait for his response.
How can I even expect him to tell the truth at this point? He has nothing to gain by confessing anything.
“It wasn’t supposed to be like that,” he says, and his confirmation nearly sends me into a homicidal rage by itself. He intentionally put Millie in danger before now, and I had no idea.
“What does that even mean? How could it have not turned out like that?” I shout, and Stepan begins to cower.
“I just wanted him to make it look like she was cheating on you. That was all I needed from him. I didn’t know he was going to act the way he did,” he continues.
“Well, you’re a fucking idiot then because if you knew him, you’d know he has a history of abusing women, including Millie. You set her up to damn near get killed, Stepan,” I reply, remembering the day I killed Erik with haunting clarity.
“Whatever, that prick needed to be taken out anyway. All I had to do was find a text from your bitch about her bastard child to know that it wouldn’t be hard to get rid of her,” he barks, aiming the gun at Millie’s belly.
I see red.
I would lunge at him and tear him apart at the seam with my bare hands if I could, but he’s ready and willing to kill the love of my life and my child with one shot.
Stepan presses the gun more firmly into Millie’s belly, and even as she begins to lose consciousness from being choked for too long, I can see the pure panic in her eyes.
As I deliberate my extremely limited options, the high beams of my car’s headlights turn on, blinding Stepan and putting him into some kind of trance.
It’s clear to me now that he’s developed a drug habit of some kind, which would more than explain the lengths he’s gone to in order to keep Millie away from me. I wouldn’t be shocked at all if he were skimming product from the organization this whole time.
Stepan drops Millie, and she falls to the blacktop of the road, immediately crawling toward me on her hands and knees as she fights to regain her full functionality.
I take aim and fire directly at Stepan’s head, hitting him once in the forehead and again near his jaw. He collapses in place, falling like a building that had been blown to pieces from the inside.
Millie screams, nearly climbing up my leg as she reaches me. I drop my gun so that I can fully wrap my arms around her. She’s shaking like hell, and I’m shocked that she can even hold her weight as her legs tremble.
“Did it work?” I hear as Nikolai exits the car. Clearly, he had noticed that Stepan would somehow be susceptible to light and took the opportunity to subdue him in the most unlikely of ways.
“It did. How did you know to do that?” I say with a nervous laugh, increasing my reach around Millie’s body as she wraps her arms around my neck.
Nikolai approaches us, doing his best not to look in the direction of
Stepan’s disfigured corpse. “My older brother would use drugs that made him act that way. Sometimes, I’d use a laser pointer to see if it would entrance him, and it almost always did. Stepan was acting exactly like him,” he replies.
Millie lifts her head from my chest. “I’m so sorry about hiding the pregnancy from you. I should have told you as soon as I knew, not Katya. This could have all been avoided,” she says as hot tears stream down her face. She’s fighting the urge to cry violently as she’s overtaken by the realization that she could have easily died moments ago.
“Millie, I never, ever want you to feel shame for the way you handled this. I can’t imagine how scary it must have been to discover that you were pregnant and feel like you couldn’t tell me,” I say to her, looking deep into her eyes with sincerity.
She rubs her face on my shirt to dry her tears. “I was going to tell you on the night I left, I was making dinner for us. But then Stepan came and told me that you knew about the pregnancy, that you didn’t want a baby with me and felt trapped by me,” she stammers as she attempts to calm her nerves unsuccessfully.
I hold her close again. “I’m so fucking sorry that he tried to intimidate you like that. You came so far to get away from me that I thought you did it because you didn’t want to be with me,” I reply, feeling the warmth of her face against me.
“But right now, we need to get you to a hospital. I can’t believe you’re even standing right now. It’s a goddamn miracle,” I say as I glance over her injuries. “You could be functioning on pure adrenaline right now, and once that wears off, you could be in a ton of danger from your wounds.”
Millie’s face changes from one of regret and sadness to fear. “What about the baby? Do you think the baby will be okay?” she asks, nervously feeling her belly as if she would be able to find the baby’s heartbeat herself.
“There’s only one way to find out, and we have to leave now,” I say, and I pick her up and carry her to the car, lying her down in the backseat carefully.