Back to the door.
The math is already mathing. My brain, my stupid, relentless, architectural-assessment brain that cannot stop taking inventory even when the building is actively collapsing around it, is counting backward without permission. Nine weeks. Nine weeks since the last time Elio and I... since the two days before the compound. Two days of barely leaving his bed. Multiple times, no protection, because my periods had only just come back after months of stress and all those days of starvation and I wasn't thinking about consequences because I was too busy thinking about the way his hands felt and the way his voice sounded when he said my name and...
Nine weeks.
Fuck.
My fingers dig into the washcloth. The tests press against my palm, still warm from my grip, and I'm looking at the bathroom door and I already know. I know the way you know something in your body before your brain signs off on it, the way a building tells you where the fractures are before you ever pull back the plaster. The evidence has been there for weeks. I just wasn't reading it.
My stomach rolls again, and this time it means business. The nausea crests hard and fast and I barely get Elena's tests back into the washcloth and the washcloth back into the drawer before I'm on my feet and moving, hand over my mouth, the bathroom tiles cold under my knees as I make it to the toilet just in time.
I throw up. Not much. There's not much to throw up when you've been eating like a woman performing meals instead of having them. But my body heaves, and my eyes water, and my hands grip the porcelain as I kneel there on the bathroom floor of a dead woman's room and think about two lines. Two lines.
When it passes, I sit back on my heels. Wipe my mouth with the back of my hand. My reflection in the chrome flush handle is distorted and pale. I don't look at it for long, my eyes finding the bathroom cabinet instead.
It's small, white, mounted above the sink. I open it knowing what's on the middle shelf already. An unopened pregnancy test.
The tile is cold through my leggings when I sit down afterward and wait.
Three minutes. The box said three minutes. I count them out because that's what I do, that's what my brain does when I try not to spiral.
One Mississippi. Two Mississippi.
I try to tell myself I'm being an idiot, there's no chance in hell that after everything I went through—the drugged water,the starvation, the beatings—this pregnancy would stick, but all signs point to a different direction. And when three minutes later I look at the stick, two blue lines tell me what I already knew.
It's positive.
The word positive, when you think about it, is a pretty fucked-up name for a result that has just rearranged every molecule of my future.
The first thing that pops into my head is how Elena must have felt when she found out she was pregnant. Did she sit on the floor in the bathroom, trying to come to terms with what this all meant before wrapping the tests in a washcloth and putting them in the drawer? Did she try to look for the door in her cage, or were the lines just another lock instead of a way out?
I am not Elena.
I am not alone the way she was alone. I am not without options, without a single thing left in my hands except the knowledge that the compound put something inside me I never asked for and can never undo. Whatever else is true about my life right now, and the list of "whatever else" is so long it could wallpaper this entire estate... I am not that.
I can do this. I can bring this baby into the world and love it with all my heart, keep him or her safe. This tiny, impossible, not-even-a-baby-yet thing has survived three weeks of captivity, starvation, beatings, drugged water, a near-assault, a rescue, and whatever the hell my body has been doing since.
I get up and walk back into the bedroom looking out the window as my hand travels to my stomach. It's flat, nothing there that anyone could see. But something is there nonetheless, something that shouldn't have survived and did, something made from a man who could play piano and break necks with the same hands, and a woman who restored cathedrals and fell in love with a monster.
Elio is the father. If you had asked me a couple of weeks ago, I'd have been shocked but equally elated at the prospect of carrying his child.
But right now? I'm having a hard time reconciling the Elio I fell for with the one who murdered an innocent man with ice in his eyes.
Then the sun moves behind a cloud.
This child will be Cicero's grandchild. Born into the Marchetti dynasty the same way Elio was born into it. Not chosen but claimed. I think about Cicero's silver hair, his fake smile and his cold eyes. About the way Elio flinches when he talks about his childhood. Not with his face but with his hands, the way his fingers tighten around whatever he's holding like he's bracing for impact from a blow that landed twenty years ago and never stopped. I think about the fortress and the guards and the cameras and the beautiful prison with its temperature-controlled rooms, about the Carrara marble floors that have been scrubbed of blood more than once. I think about growing up inside these walls. Learning to walk on these floors. Learning what love looks like from a man who says he doesn't believe in love.
I think about the courtyard.
I can't stop. I try and I can't. Matt on his knees on the flagstones, his shoulders curved forward in that way I know so well, the way he sat on the grass in the garden, the way he leaned into doorframes, except now his hands are behind his back and Valente is holding him by the hair as morning light paints everything gold. Gold on stone. Gold on Matt's hair. Gold on Elio's arm as it moves in one clean arc, the blade catching the light for a fraction of a second before it doesn't matter anymore because Matt's whole body jerks forward, while Elio stands over him and doesn't look away. Doesn't flinch. Doesn't move. Just watches, the way you watch something you expected to happen.
What if my child was playing in the garden one morning and saw something like that happen?
What if my child became like that? Cold and indifferent to taking another life.
The nausea surges, and this time it's not the pregnancy. This time it's pure, clean terror, the kind that starts in the belly and radiates outward until my fingers tingle and my vision narrows and my heart slams so hard against my ribs that the baby, the cluster of cells, the nine-week-old accident, the thing I am already protecting with a ferocity that scares me, must be able to feel it.
And underneath all of it, underneath the fear and the math and the image of Cicero's hands on a grandchild he will treat as currency, there's something else.
