Page 88 of Wicked Ruin

Neither of us speaks for a moment.

“There’s an eighty-percent chance you won’t,” he says finally.

I smile wordlessly at him and nod because that’s exactly what I needed to hear.

“And I can get everything you need,” he says. “You’ll need rest, and you’ll have to make sure you’re not exposed to people who are visibly sick.”

“Aye. It’s not unlike it was before, when I was sick.”

“Right. But this time, we’ve got the medical help you need.”

I nod, thankful, but I don't trust my voice right now. I want this. I want him. But a part of me still fears I'm not enough, and that whatever he's concocting isn't going to work.

Erin’s plan to get me healthy worked—it's because of her that I got to see Dr. Rosenberg. But look what happened with my mother and my father…

“I don't know why you stayed…”

“I wanted to.”

“But what about Valentina?”

“She left for the States this morning,” he says simply.

I nod. “But if anybody sees you here⁠—”

“Nobody's gonna see me here.”

I still can't help feeling like we’re on borrowed time, and it's only a matter of minutes or hours before somebody discovers us.

I'm the one who does the accounting. I know exactly what the aftermath looks like. I've seen it in the numbers—column after column, transfer after transfer, power made legible. The Espositos aren't a family; they're an empire, and what they're buying with this marriage isn't Declan but a fucking foothold. And even though I’ve only been working with them for the past few years, it’s clear to me. Seamus has been architecting this for years.

I've processed enough McCarthy money to know this alliance is a living, breathing, ironclad fact, with Declan's name on it and the full weight of the McCarthy family behind it.

And I'm pregnant with his baby.

I press my hand flat against my stomach.

When Erin and I were younger, we played a game pretending that the pathway behind our house was made of molten lava. Our goal was to get to the tree line without touching the ground. We’d squeal and scream as we ran, careful to make sure our feet stayed safely planted on flat stone.

Only now… this isn’t a game.

The baby changes nothing. That's the part I keep coming back to, the part that hollows me out when I let myself look at it directly. Seamus arranged this marriage, and Seamus does not rearrange things because of inconvenient feelings, unexpected pregnancies, or the fact that his cousin is currently in a flat he's not supposed to be in, with a woman he's not supposed to want. Seamus will look at the numbers the same way I do. He'll see what I see. And what he'll see is that the Esposito alliance is worth more than this.

Than us.

There is no us. That's the thing I keep forgetting and then remembering again, like a bruise I keep pressing. There is this room, this morning, this man sitting in my chair. And outside this room, there is a world that has already made its calculations and doesn't need our input.

I'm good at not thinking about the shape of what comes next. I have had a lot of practice—years of it—the kind that starts when you're young and realize the person you love has already decided what he has to be, and all you can do is love him anyway and try not to let him see it.

But I can feel it pressing in at the edges. The weight of it. The sheer stupid danger of sitting here like this, like two people who are allowed to have this, when the ground beneath us is moving and has been moving for a long time. We are on the smallest possible rock in the middle of it, close enough to touch but with no idea—none—whether the leap to safety even exists.

“Here,” he says, rising to his feet. He hands me the cup of tea, made just the way I like it. I sip it, and it's strong and hot and bracing, just creamy and sweet enough. “Delicious,” I say.

“Are you hungry?”

“God above, I'm always hungry,” I say, shaking my head. He smiles, but just then a wave of nausea roils through me. It comes on so quickly that I can't tamp it back down. Oh no.

I slosh my tea on the end table as I throw the blankets off myself and run to the bathroom.