What I cannot take is another night like that one. Another sidewalk. Another scream. Another second of seeing blood on her face and knowing I should have been there first.
The guilt does not lessen. It hardens into certainty.
She does not get hurt again.
Someone came for her. Now I’m going to find out who.
And when I do, they are going to wish they’d chosen me instead.
34
ZATANNA
I wakeup in a bed that is too soft, under sheets that probably cost more than my old couch, and for one glorious second I have no idea where I am.
Then I remember.
The hospital, and the attack. Aleksei carrying me into his house like I weighed nothing. His mother, pale and kind and far too perceptive. The room in the east wing. The locked doors. The fact that I am somehow sleeping in a mafia mansion while eight months pregnant and emotionally compromised.
Wonderful.
Then the nausea hits.
Not dramatic. Worse. Slow and mean and familiar, rolling through my stomach until even breathing feels like a negotiation.
I sit up too fast, regret it immediately, and press a hand to my mouth.
Morning sickness, my ass. There is nothing “morning” about it. This thing works overtime, and didn’t stop in the first trimester, like everyone said it would.
By the time there’s a knock on the door, I’m sitting very still on the edge of the bed, trying not to die with dignity.
“Come in,” I say weakly.
Aleksei walks in carrying a tray. He’s dressed already, dark trousers, shirt open at the throat, face composed in that way that should annoy me and usually does. Today I’m too nauseous for proper annoyance.
He takes one look at me and stops. “You’re sick.”
“No, this is just my morning personality.”
He ignores that and sets the tray down on the small table by the window. “What do you need?”
I blink at him. It is too early for this level of directness. “Nothing,” I say automatically.
He gives me a look that says he has met me before and knows exactly how useless that answer is. “Zatanna.”
I close my eyes for a second. “It’ll pass.”
“Did you eat?”
That almost makes me laugh. “Do I look like someone who can eat?”
Instead of pushing, he crouches in front of the minibar fridge, opens it, then starts taking things out with surprising focus. A bottle of water. Plain crackers. Ginger ale. A bowl of green grapes from yesterday’s fruit tray.
I watch him, suspicious even through the nausea. “What are you doing?”
“Trying things.”
“That’s not how medicine works.”
