I help my mother stand and turn to find Luca leaning against the desk, his right hand pressed over the wound in his left shoulder. Blood seeps between his fingers in a steady stream that has already soaked through his sleeve and begun dripping onto the stone floor. His face is pale beneath the olive of his skin but his eyes are clear, alert, locked on me with a focus that refuses to acknowledge the bullet hole in his body.
"We need to get you to a hospital." I cross to him and press my hand over his on the wound, feeling the hot slickness of his blood against my palm, the rapid pulse beating beneath the damaged muscle.
"You and your mother first." His voice is rough but steady. "Get her out of this house."
I wrap my arm around my mother's waist and Luca walks ahead of us, his gun still in his right hand, his left arm hanging useless at his side, blood leaving a trail on the marble floors as he clears our path to the entrance.
He saved my life tonight. Took a bullet for us. Came for me when Luna called and moved heaven and violence to reach me before Enzo could carry out his threats.
He saved me, but now when I look at him I feel a sense of numbness. Like what we shared wasn’t real. Trust is a tricky beast. Once it’s broken, it’s so hard to put it back together. Right now, my heart says it’s impossible.
Fifteen
Luca
The hospital smells like antiseptic and false promises, the sharp chemical sting of industrial cleaner burning the inside of my nostrils with every breath while fluorescent lights hum overhead in a frequency designed to keep patients awake and visitors on edge.
The second the nurses finish stitching me and cleaning my shoulder, I find Ilona.
I step into the examination room where they have her waiting to be checked over. Rafael got us to the hospital in record time. But it didn't take long for the adrenaline to wear off Ilona and the reality of this whole situation to harden a wall around her.
By the time we hit the emergency room and all the medical staff swarmed around us, Ilona had closed herself off. I was taken one way, while she was taken another.
I close the door behind me. It is small, painted in that shade of institutional beige that exists nowhere in nature. Equipment crowds every surface, whining with the low electronic hum of machines that reduce life to numbers and blinking green lights.
Ilona sits on the examination table in a hospital gown that swallows her frame, the paper crinkling beneath her every time she shifts position.
Her hair falls loose around her face, uncombed and tangled from the hours since the estate. The dark strands catch the harsh overhead light and throw shadows across cheekbones that look sharper than they did this morning.
A bruise blooms across her left forearm where one of Enzo's guards gripped her, the purple already deepening against her beautiful skin, and every time my gaze catches on that mark, the rage I swallowed at the estate crawls back up my throat with teeth.
She angles away from me and that's when I see the bruise blooming across her cheekbone, deeper and darker than the one on her arm. The mark of a fist where his guard attacked her. If I had her father in front of me, I wouldn’t let anyone stop me from putting a bullet in him. In fact, when I leave here, I’m going to take exceptional pleasure in torturing the fuck out of him at Club Genesis.
I mentally set my darker thoughts aside.
I cross the room and wrap my hand around hers where it rests on the starched sheet. She lets me hold it, but her fingers lie limp against my palm, offering nothing back.
No squeeze. No warmth. No reflexive curl of her fingers against mine the way they've done every night for the past three weeks when I reach for her in the dark. Her hand is a dead weight in my grip, the physical equivalent of a door closed quietly and deliberately in my face.
Her eyes stay fixed on the far wall where a faded poster illustrates the stages of fetal development in cheerful primary colors, as if growing a human being can be contained in a laminated chart. She stares through it rather than at it, focused on a distance I can't cross because the bridge between us burned hours ago and I'm the one who lit the match.
“Sorry for the wait. It must be a full moon with how crazy busy we are tonight.” The technician enters with a warm smile and a tube of gel. We go through the same routine we shared two weeks ago when checking for a heartbeat. The gel is cold against Ilona's belly, the same involuntary gasp escaping her lips. I watch the screen fill with gray and white static that shifts and swirls like storm clouds searching for shape.
The heartbeat fills the room first. Fast and fierce and completely indifferent to the wreckage her parents have made of everything outside these walls. The relief hits me like a blow to the sternum, buckling something I've been holding rigid since Luna's phone call sent me racing across the city with murder on my mind and terror clawing at the walls of my chest. The baby is fine and continuing to grow despite everything her parents have put her through in the last twelve hours.
Fuck, my chest hurts. I rub at the pain.
"Your baby has a strong heartbeat," the technician confirms. "There are no signs of distress and your baby is growing right on schedule."
Ilona nods once, thanks her with a voice so controlled it sounds automated, and returns her gaze to the wall.
She doesn't cry with relief the way she did at the first ultrasound, when tears streamed down both our faces and she pressed myhand against her belly. That day the world narrowed to three heartbeats in a room that smelled like possibility. That woman felt like a lifetime ago. The woman on this examination table has locked every emotion behind a wall so thick I can hear my own words echoing back at me from its surface, hollow and insufficient.
The silence between us is worse than anything she could say. This is a woman deciding whether any of the pieces are worth salvaging.
The technician excuses herself. The door clicks shut behind her, and the sound leaves us alone with the electronic beep of the fetal monitor and the irritating fluorescents buzzing overhead. The antiseptic air stings my eyes or maybe that's something else entirely.
I don’t know. I’m more focused on my wife.
