Page 98 of Freed
Understanding slams into his expression. Then something darker. Fear. Real fear. But I catch his wrist before he can move. His eyes lock on mine.
“I can’t lose this baby.”
The words come out cracked and desperate, and saying them aloud like that makes everything too real. The blood. The pain. The possibility opening beneath me like a grave. For one terrible heartbeat, Lorenzo just stares at me.
Then his hand closes over mine, hard and warm and shaking. “You won’t.”
He says it like an order. Like he can command fate itself if he glares hard enough. He stands and shouts for the doctor so loudly the windows seem to vibrate.
The next minutes dissolve into fragments.
Lorenzo carrying me back to the bed with impossible care.
Fresh sheets yanked loose.
Voices in the hall.
The pain rising and falling in sickening waves.
His hand at the back of my neck, his voice in my ear, low and fierce and uselessly comforting.
“Stay with me.”
“Breathe.”
“Look at me, Elizabeth.”
I do, because I can’t bear to look at the blood.
By the time the doctor arrives, I’m shaking so badly my teeth chatter between breaths. She’s silver-haired and unsmiling, witha leather bag in one hand and the kind of authority that makes everyone else in the room move aside without question.
“Out,” she snaps at the men hovering near the door.
Lorenzo doesn’t budge. “I’m staying.”
She gives him one cold look. “Then be quiet and do exactly as I say.”
For once in his life, he obeys.
The examination feels endless. I grip the blanket in both fists and stare at the ceiling while the doctor asks clipped questions.
“When did the bleeding start?”
“What have you eaten?”
“Have you fallen? Been struck? Taken anything?”
Taken anything. The question lodges in my chest, but I’m too frightened to understand why. Finally, she straightens and listens low against my belly with her Doppler. The room goes silent.
Then a rapid, fragile sound fills the air.
A heartbeat. My heartbeat stutters in response and Lorenzo goes motionless beside the bed. The doctor’s expression remains stern, but it softens by a fraction.
“The baby is alive,” she says.
A sob breaks out of me.
She sets the instrument aside. “You are bleeding, and you need rest. But no, you are not losing this baby today.”
