Zane's jaw works like he's chewing words too sharp to swallow. "This isn't over."
"Yes," I tell him, exhausted down to my bones. "It is."
He leaves, but his presence lingers like smoke damage—pervasive and toxic.
I watch the news from my hospital bed while Izzy braids my hair, her fingers gentle against my skull. Three Iron Talon businesses destroyed within hours. Two members in critical condition. The war escalating with each breath.
"Both sides are eating themselves," Izzy says quietly. "Mi primo's shop got caught in crossfire. Everyone's terrified."
The baby moves—not the gentle flutters from before but frantic, agitated movements like they're trying to escape. I press my hand to my belly, feeling the distress through layers of skin and muscle.
"We did this," I whisper. "Our love lit this fuse."
"No, mija." Izzy's hands still in my hair. "Machismo lit this fuse. Men who think love means possession, protection means control. Tu hermano, Zane—diferentes colores, same bullshit."
She's right, but being right doesn't stop the bleeding—literal or metaphorical.
The real contractions start after midnight. Not the practice ones from before but purposeful, rhythmic clenching that makes my body feel like a fist trying to expel what it sees as danger.
Twenty weeks. The statistics roll through my mind unbidden: 10% survival rate if born now, 90% chance of severe disability if they survive at all. My medical training becomes torture, knowing exactly what's happening as my cervix softens, preparing for a delivery that will be a death sentence.
"Por favor, mijo," I whisper to my belly in Spanish, the language my mother used when I was growing inside her, before she died birthing my younger sister who lived three hours. "Stay inside. It's not safe out here yet."
Another contraction. Eight minutes apart now. The monitor shows the baby's heart rate spiking with each one—190, 195, touching 200. Too fast. Too stressed.
I should call for help. Instead, I curl on my side, hand pressed to my belly, trying to hold this life inside through will alone. The room smells like antiseptic and fear-sweat—mine—and I can taste blood from where I've bitten through my lip.
Six minutes apart. The wetness between my legs could be discharge, could be amniotic fluid, could be blood. I'm too terrified to check.
"Please," I bargain with God, the universe, my own body. "Por favor, let me keep this baby. It's the only pure thing in all this poison."
Four minutes apart. Definitely blood now—I can smell it, iron and accusation.
I reach for my phone with shaking hands. Not Zane—I can't bear his voice, his presence, his surveillance-disguised-as-love. I call Izzy.
"Mija?" Her voice, sleep-rough but immediately alert.
"I'm bleeding." The words come out broken, Spanish and English mixing. "The baby. Creo que I'm losing the baby."
"I'm coming. Don't move. I'm calling Morrison now."
The room fills with medical personnel within minutes, hands checking, measuring, medicating. Someone says call the father, but I'm already fading, pulled under by magnesium sulfate and terbutaline, drugs meant to quiet my uterus, to stop this eviction.
The last thing I hear is my grandmother's prayer in Spanish, though I'm not sure if it's Izzy's voice or my own, begging protection for the innocent, for the child who never asked to be conceived in violence, surveilled before birth, fought over like territory.
In the darkness of sedation, I dream of cameras in my womb, of Zane watching our baby form cell by cell, of Miguel setting fire to my insides, of myself—split open and empty, all my secrets spilled out for anyone to read.
But deeper than dreams, in that place where truth lives, I know: some things break too badly to birth anything whole.
And maybe that's what we are—too fractured to create life, too poisoned to nurture innocence, too watched to ever be free.
The baby's heartbeat on the monitor sounds like a countdown.
Or maybe a goodbye.
Chapter thirty-six
Almost Lost
