“Not yet.”
She trembles harder.
I don’t waste another second. I slide one arm under her knees and lift her carefully. She winces, and I stop.
“Where does it hurt?”
“Everywhere,” she says weakly. “But my stomach. Mostly.”
That’s enough to make my blood run cold.
“We’re going back to the hospital.”
She clings to my neck. “My daughter.”
“Our daughter,” I say.
Her eyes close at that, and her face crumples. “Our daughter,” she repeats, barely audible.
I carry her toward the door. Ethan is still unconscious against the wall. I check him only long enough to know he’s breathing, then step past him.
Sienna’s fingers tighten at my collar.
“Don’t leave me,” she murmurs.
“I won’t.”
She leans into me, exhausted and shaking.
I carry her outside into the light, and this time I don’t look back.
I carry Sienna back into the hospital myself.
This time, no one stops me.
The second the staff see her condition, the doors open and people start moving fast. A nurse brings a stretcher. Another calls for a doctor. Someone recognizes her from earlier and goes pale when they see the blood on her mouth, the bruise on her cheek, the way she’s curled into me with one hand pressed over her stomach.
“She had a C-section today,” I say. “She was taken from the ward. She hit her head. She was struck in the face. Check the incision.”
That gets everyone’s attention. They take her from my arms, and for one second she panics.
Her fingers catch my sleeve. “Viktor.”
“I’m here.”
The nurse says, “Sir, we need space.”
I look at Sienna, not the nurse. “I’m not leaving.”
She nods once, weakly, and only then lets them transfer her fully onto the stretcher.
Maksim arrives in a second ambulance twenty minutes later, under guard, still alive. Ethan comes in with him, half-conscious, with a split lip and a concussion. I don’t ask much about either of them. Yuri handles it. The police will be involved now whether anyone likes it or not.
Sienna is the only reason I stay in one place.
They scan her head. They check the incision. They treat the bruising, clean her wrists, monitor her bleeding, and keep asking questions she’s too exhausted to answer. I answer what I can. When they need details she has to provide, I sit beside her and keep my hand where she can reach it.
Hours pass like that.
