The door closes with a soft click that sounds like a coffin lid.
I sink onto the couch, hands shaking. Everything is falling apart—my family, my career, the clinic that was supposed to help people. And now someone's dead because I thought I could be more than I was.
Then I feel it—a flutter, soft but unmistakable. The baby moving, our child making itself known in the middle of destruction. The joy that should accompany this moment is poisoned by fear as another cramp twists through me, sharper, longer.
"Oh," I breathe, hand flying to my stomach.
Zane's there instantly, hands hovering like he's afraid to touch. "What's wrong?"
"The baby moved." I grab his hand, press it against the small swell, but the moment has passed. "It moved, Zane."
His face transforms—wonder breaking through the tactical mask—but then another cramp hits, and I can't hide the gasp.
"Lena?"
"Just stress," I lie, but we both know what stress does to pregnancies. The wetness I feel could be normal discharge or something worse—I'm too terrified to check.
Tommy clears his throat. "There's something else."
We both look at him, and I see guilt written in the set of his shoulders.
"Zane's been covering your clinic's losses since you two got serious. Every patient who couldn't pay, every supply cost that donations didn't cover—he's been paying your suppliers directly. You're not running a charity, Lena. You're running his charity."
The words land like individual blows. I knew Zane supported the clinic, knew he'd visited, even helped sometimes. But I thought the donations were keeping us afloat, thought my grantapplications and fundraising meant something. Instead, I've been playing pretend independence while his money kept my dream alive.
"How much?" I whisper.
"Twenty thousand in the last month alone," Tommy says quietly. "More before that."
Another cramp, this one sharp enough to steal breath. The baby moves again—or maybe that's just my body preparing to reject this pregnancy like everyone's rejecting me.
"We're killing our baby with this war," I whisper, the truth of it breaking something essential. "Everything we touch, everything we are—it's poison. And now it's poisoning them too."
Zane kneels in front of me, hands cradling my face with surprising gentleness for someone built for violence. "We're going to survive this. All three of us."
But I see the truth in his eyes—he doesn't know how. None of us do.
The baby flutters again, caught between life and death, love and war, parents who might destroy it before it ever takes its first breath.
And somewhere across the city, my brother is preparing for war while my body prepares for loss, and I don't know which betrayal hurts worse—his or my own body's.
The wetness between my thighs increases. I excuse myself to the bathroom, lock the door, and finally check.
Clear discharge, no blood. Not yet.
But the cramps continue, my body's warning that love might not be enough to sustain life when everything around us promises death.
I press my hand to my stomach, feeling for movement that's already stopped, and make a promise I don't know how to keep:
We'll survive this, baby. Somehow. Even if it costs everything else.
But in the mirror, I see the truth—I'm already losing everything. The only question is whether I'll lose this baby too.
Chapter thirty-four
Betrayals and Breaking
Zane
