Page 60 of Ruthless Claim

This time, when I see his name light up my phone, I know why he’s calling.

“Her water broke,” he says, and he sounds—I have never heard my brother sound like this. Not in all my years of knowing him. He sounds…frightened. “We’re on our way to Lenox Hill, Val, she’s—she says she’s fine, she keeps saying she’s fine⁠—”

I can hear Emma yell in the background that she is fine.

“She’s fine,” I tell him, already running toward my bedroom to find shoes. “Is she having contractions?”

“Yes. Seven minutes apart. The hospital said to come in at five but she wanted to wait and I—I didn’t want to wait⁠—”

“You did the right thing.” I find one shoe and start hunting for the other. “I’m coming.”

“You don’t have to—” but Emma shouts that yes, Valentina needs to come. I grin in triumph.

“I’m coming,” I repeat. I hang up before he can argue, because arguing is not what either of us needs right now.

I know him and he needs someone there who isn’t going to be swallowed alive by their own panic.

And Emma needs someone in her corner who isn’t my brother hovering three inches from her face asking questions.

I cannot find my other fucking shoe.

“Your shoe is by the door.” Cillian’s voice comes from the hallway, and I emerge from the bedroom in a state of considerable disorganization to find him in the kitchen with his coffee, already dressed.

He nods toward the front door. There’s my shoe. “What’s wrong?”

“It’s Emma,” I tell him, grabbing the errant shoe and jamming it onto my foot.

Cillian stills, his skin growing sallow. “Is she alright?” he rasps, suddenly looking worried.

I glance up at him. “She will be,” I tell him as I tie the laces of my sneakers. I don’t think high heels are appropriate in a hospital. “She’s in labor.”

Cillian blinks. “Oh.” His brow furrows for a moment before it smooths out. “Go. She needs you.”

Something about the straightforwardness of that statement makes me pause for half a second. I look at him across the kitchen and he looks back, raising an eyebrow at my stare.

“Call me,” he says.

“Okay,” I respond, and I rush toward the elevator.

The car ride to Lenox Hill is twenty-three minutes that feel like an hour, sitting in the back of a cab watching midtown go by, turning my phone over and over in my hands.

I know, rationally, that everything is fine.

Emma is healthy and the pregnancy has been textbook. She has the best doctors in the city and my brother would personally fight the laws of biology if it would help.

I know all of this.

My heart is doing something unpleasant anyway, because Emma is my person—and has been my person since she and I verbally sparred when my idiot brother kidnapped her—and she is about to go through the hardest thing her body has ever done and I cannot do any of it for her.

I hate that.

I find Leo in the corridor outside Labor and Delivery and he looks terrible.

This is important to document because my brother is a handsome man.

Right now he’s in jeans and a wrinkled shirt.

His normally carefully styled hair is undone, and he’s pacing the width of the corridor with frenetic energy.