“Theirjobwas to kill my baby,” she spat out and then twisted to glare at Gregor. “Ourbaby, Gregor. So it’s no fucking comfort they did it well.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Jack saw Nick’s hands, all gore and neat movements of the needle, pause midstitch. He hadn’t known that. Of course not, why would Gregor do something that might not backfire on them all.
Then Nick started to stitch again. His hands were steadier than they had been as he dragged the thread through her skin. Anger worked well when you needed to focus. Jack had always found that too.
“It wasn’t,” Nick said. His jaw tightened, the muscles drawn taut under pale skin, and he reluctantly corrected himself. “They might have, essentially, but it wasn’t what they were there to do. Look at where they cut. It was a Cesarean. The job was to take the baby out of her, and it looks like they did it neatly enough.”
There was a crack as Hector dropped the big glass bottle. It was heavy enough that it didn’t break, but the liquid spilled over the floor and stank. Hector cursed and stooped down to pick it up.
“Tom helped me with the sheep during lambing,” he said as he righted the container. “Sometimes we had to cut them open to get the lamb out. He… he always had a steady hand with it.”
Bron shoved Jack out of the way and dragged herself halfway up into a sitting position. She curled her hand over her stomach to hold her guts in and glared at Nick.
“You’re telling me… that they cut my baby out of me. Like I was some… half-dead sheep? And I didn’t notice?”
Nick grabbed more towels and pressed them over Bron’s hands to soak up the fresh blood that oozed out of her.
“You weren’t at your best,” he said dryly.
Bron laughed. Her rusty throat worked as she swallowed her first reaction and then tried again.
“It would have still died,” she said as stoically as any wolf could fake. “It was too soon for it to be born.”
Nick hesitated as he glanced uncomfortably at Gregor. “It’s not dead,” he said. His attention dropped back to Bron’s stomach as he peeled the clothes away from her stomach to peer at the injury. “I—we—can tell that much. Not yet, at least.”
“How can you be sure?” Bron asked. Her eyes were fever bright, and she was shaking as she twisted her hand in Nick’s coat. Her fingers left stains on the fabric, but they’d blend with the rest of the blood and filth. “Do youknow? Are youcertain?”
Blood squelched between Nick’s fingers. He looked sick again, his skin greasy with sweat.
“I know.” He made a faintly revolted face. “Dead things—murderedthings—are what we do. If they killed the baby, we’d know.”
Bron let go of him and sagged back down. It was almost a fall, but Gregor caught her before she hit the ground.
“Keep me alive,” she ordered roughly. “I don’t care how much it hurts.”
“That’s what I’ve been trying to do,” Nick muttered as he plucked thread out of torn stitches to start again. It made Bron suck in a hard breath through her teeth and hold it. The tense muscles in her arms and legs trembled under the skin. “Hold as still as you can.”
Jack waited for a second and then put his hand on Bron’s arm to catch her attention.
“ItwasTom, then?” he asked.
She exhaled hard through her teeth—almost a scream—and nodded jerkily. Tears swam briefly in her eyes, but she furiously blinked them away.
“Tom, first. He was sorry, hesaidhe was sorry, over how he’d behaved. Mam….” Her voice broke and she breathed raggedly through the grief and the pain. “She felt bad for him. He’s adog, you know? Not like Danny. So she let him in and he must have put something in the tea. It made me and Mam weak and stupid. Human. I could have stillhithim, I could havefought, but I didn’t. Mam did. She fought, but… then Tom let Lachlan in. Stinking bastard. She couldn’t fight them both, and they… they….”
She stopped again. At some point she’d grabbed Gregor’s hand and her fingers were twisted around it. His tanned skin was bled white under her grip. Tears squeezed out from under her lashes and down into her ears and already-matted curls.
“Did they say anything else?” Jack asked. “Anything that might help us find them?”
The baby was gone, sliced out and stolen, but Bron panted like a woman in labor as Nick finished his work on her stomach and swabbed the raw, puckered stitches with smears of powdery, old iodine. Her face was gray, the years of tan floating on top like a film, and her eyes glazed over before she closed them.
Jack hated himself. Maybe that was part of being Numitor. He slapped her face twice with a sharp, stinging impact that made Nick curse. Bron’s eyes fluttered back open again. She glared at him.
“Bastard,” she said weakly.
“Bron, we can’t wait for you to heal,” Jack said. If she did heal. Whatever Nick claimed about his familiarity with death, Jack had killed a lot of things in his life. Bron smelled like she was dying. “What did they say?”
She squinted and licked split lips with a dry tongue. “Tom couldn’t do it, not at first. He kept cryin’, saying he’d not meant to hurt us. Don’t know what the fuck he thought he was going to do.” She trailed off for as her mouth trembled, and then she took a deep breath through her nose. “He couldn’t put the knife in me. So Lachlan did it. He cut me open and told me, told me not to worry because… because Rose had done this before. I figured he just meant the bitch had killed a lot of babies.”
