All Chapters of CONTRACT OF FATE: Chapter 41 - Chapter 47

— ELENA —The clinic was exactly as Sophie had described it.A narrow building on a quiet street forty minutes east of the city, the kind of building that had been many things before it became this, you could see it in the bones of the architecture, the way the ground floor windows were slightly too large for a medical practice and slightly too small for a shop front. A building that had been repurposed by someone who understood that certain kinds of help required a certain kind of invisibility.The driver stopped in front of it without being directed.I looked at him in the rearview mirror."How did you know the address?" I asked.He met my eyes in the mirror. "I was told to bring you here.""By whom."He looked back at the road. "You will have answers soon. Not from me."I looked at the building.Then I got out.---The door was unlocked.This struck me as the kind of detail that was either reassuring or the opposite, a door left unlocked at this hour either meant I was expected or

— ALEXANDER —I sat in the back of the car with the clinic building forty feet away and the unknown number on my screen and I answered it because not answering felt like the worse option and I had run out of good ones.Silence first.Then a voice.Male. Unhurried. The accent underneath it like something deliberately managed, European in origin, smoothed at the edges by years in rooms that did not have a single country. The voice of a man who had learned to be fluent in the language of whatever room he was currently occupying."Mr. Sterling," the voice said.I went still.He knew my name. He had called my number. Neither of these things were supposed to be possible for a person I did not know and the fact of them told me something about the nature of what I was dealing with before he had said another word."Who is this," I said."Someone who knows where your wife is," the voice said. "And who would prefer that you stay in that car."I looked at the building. At the lamp in the ground f

— ELENA —The safe house was in Connecticut.Not what I had expected when I imagined the word safe, not warm, not hidden, not the specific cozy concealment of something built to comfort. It was a house that communicated function rather than feeling. Clean lines. Minimal furniture. Windows that faced a direction that gave nothing away about where exactly in Connecticut we were. A house that had been used for this purpose before and showed it in the specific, impersonal quality of spaces that were everyone's temporarily and no one's permanently.I had been here for four days.Four days of the driver bringing food that I ate mechanically at the kitchen table. Four days of a phone that could receive but not make calls, De Luca's restriction, explained without apology by a man I had still not met in person, communicated through the driver who was the only human contact I had. Four days of a pregnancy that was advancing with the relentless biological efficiency of something that did not car