Page 285 of Slashed Bonds

The first chord of vengeance has started its symphony, but we have to make sure our girl gets to witness the crescendo to the final peak of this grand performance.

CHAPTER 45

Waiting To Catch Up

~MORRIGAN~

“The tattoo got me pregnant?”

I gasp it. At the ceiling, at the IV pole, at the woman in the chair by the window with her wine-red hair coming down out of its knot, because I’ve been awake for forty minutes and this is the first sentence anyone’s said that’s made the last two hours line up.

“Now, Mommy.”

Nikolai pouts. The full pout, the one with the bottom lip, from six inches away, because he’s on the hospital bed with me. On it. A six-foot-three goalie with his pads still on from the waist down, wedged onto a mattress built for one Omega, with my hand in his and his hip against mine like the bed owes him the space.

“Don’t insult my sperm like that.”

“The level of confidence this fucker carries,” Viper says, from the door she’s leaning on, in the most nonchalant voice a human being has ever produced, “to believe it’s his kid, needs to be investigated.”

The room goes.

All of us. In a heartbeat, the laugh coming out of me so hard the monitor on my finger complains, Maddie bent double at the foot of the bed, Killian with his glove over his face in the chair by the sink, and Cassian, by the window with his arms crossed, letting out a breath through his nose that on him is a belly laugh.

“Well, damn.” Killian, from behind the glove. “If Viper’s getting judgmental, we’re fucked as father figures.”

“I feel we’re already fucked,” Cassian says, “if this kid is Nikolai’s.”

“Admit it.” Nikolai, in glee, squeezing my hand. “You’re fucking jealous.”

And here we go. Two men who share a bed about to share a fist over which of them did this to me, while I lie here with a needle in my arm and a thing in my stomach the size of a lentil.

I don’t intervene. I don’t have the legs for it. I look past both of them to the woman in the chair and I make a face that says please, and Val looks back at me, and then she says it.

“I miscarried and lost my only child when I was at the peak of my life.”

The room stops.

Not the way a room stops when someone’s dropped something. The other way. The way a sheet of ice stops when the whistle goes and every body on it has to find a place to put the momentum it was carrying. Nikolai’s hand goes still in mine. Killian’s glove comes down. Cassian uncrosses his arms.

All eyes are on her.

We’re in a private room. Lessard’s clinic, two towns over, the one with the panels she ran while I slept before Ashford, and I understand now why Dox called her at nine on the night of the party and why Val knew the way here without a map. White walls. A window onto a parking lot with a line of bare trees along it. A machine beside the bed that’s been beeping in time with me for forty minutes, and a screen Lessard turned toward me an hour ago with a gray smear on it that she called five weeks, give or take, too early for a heartbeat, come back in ten days in the voice she uses for everything.

Five weeks. A shower. A grave. I’d been in a stall doing that math and the math was right.

I’d come up out of the dark in a van with a hook in the ceiling, with Val’s hand on my forehead and Viper’s on my wrist and Dox driving like a man who’d driven away from worse, and the first thing I’d said was the game, and Viper had said is not your problem, and I’d gone back under.

Then Lessard. In a room with the lights too bright, with gel on my stomach and a wand, looking at a screen I couldn’t see from the angle she’d put me at, saying nothing for a long time. Then turning it. Then the gray smear, and the words, flat, a woman reading a label.

“Five weeks. Give or take. Too early for a heartbeat. Come back in ten days.”

“You said permanent.”

“I said what was on your chart.” She’d wiped the wand. “Your chart was written by people who were paid to write it. I ran my own panels before Ashford and I saw a system that had been flattened, not burned. I didn’t tell you, because telling a woman she might be fertile when she’s spent five years grieving that she isn’t is a cruelty if you’re wrong.” She’d looked at me over her glasses. “I wasn’t wrong. Don’t lift anything. Eat. Come back in ten days.”

Built to maintain, not heal. She’d said that about the drugs. She’d never said it about me.

Seven of us in a room built for three. Val in the chair. Viper on the door. Maddie at the foot of the bed with her hands wrapped around the rail and her Blackridge black still on. Killian by the sink. Cassian by the window. And a goalie on the mattress who climbed up before anyone could stop him and hasn’t been asked to leave because nobody in this room is brave enough.