LOGINEve's POV
I was going to drive Devin Cresswell insane. The plan had crystallized during the flight to Italy. I wasn't going to confront him directly. That would be too easy, and it would give him the chance to explain everything away with some perfectly reasonable excuse. No, I needed proof. I needed to see for myself whether Marguerite was right. So I was going to test him, push his boundaries and see how far I couEve’s POV He weighed almost nothing. He was warm and slight against my chest, his body fitting perfectly into the cradle of my arm, his downy head resting in the curve of my palm. His eyes were closed and his lashes were dark little crescents against his cheeks and his lips were pursed in a tiny pink bow. I touched his fingers with my own, and his hand closed around my index finger with a grip that was astonishingly strong for someone so small."Hello, Sebastian," I whispered, and my voice cracked on his name. "I am your mother. I have been waiting to meet you for such a long time."He did not open his eyes, but his tiny fingers tightened around mine. I sat there rocking him gently while the tears rolled down my face and dripped onto the blanket wrapped around him. Then Angela lifted Theodore from his incubator and settled him into my other arm, and I was holding both of my sons for the very first time.Theodore was lighter than his brother, more delicate, but his grip was just as fi
Eve's POVThe first thing I felt when I woke was how empty my body had become.For seven months, I had never been alone. Every morning I opened my eyes to the flutter of tiny feet against my ribs and the press of small fists against my belly. I talked to them in the shower and sang to them in the car and fell asleep with my hands wrapped around the curve of them. They were my constant companions, my secret sharers, the two little souls who had been with me through every board meeting and every crisis and every terrifying moment of the past months. Now there was nothing but a hollow ache where they had been and a surgical wound that pulled sharply every time I shifted against the pillows. My hand flew to my stomach before I could stop it, pressing against the soft swell that was still rounded but no longer full of life.The panic hit me like a wave."Where are they?" The words came out as a croak, my throat raw and scratchy from the tube they had used during surgery. I tried to sit up,
Devin’s POV The hallways were not empty. Even in the middle of the night, the hospital lived and breathed around me. A janitor pushed a mop bucket along the floor, the wheels squeaking with every rotation, his face drawn with the exhaustion of a man who had been working double shifts for longer than he cared to remember. A young couple sat in a waiting area near the emergency department, the woman crying softly while the man held her hand and stared at the wall with the hollow expression of someone who had received bad news and was still trying to process it. Two nurses stood at the end of the corridor, their heads bent together in quiet conversation, their voices too low for me to hear. One of them glanced up as I passed, and I met her eyes and held them until she looked away.Everyone was a potential threat. Everyone was a possible enemy. The network had proven that it could reach anywhere, that it could turn ordinary people into weapons with nothing more than a trigger phrase and
Devin’s POV The bassinet hit the floor with a crack that split the air like a gunshot, and the woman in the surgical scrubs was already through the secondary door before the sound finished echoing off the operating room walls. Henderson's men surged after her, their boots pounding against the linoleum in a rhythm I could feel in my chest, but I did not join them. I could not join them. Every instinct I possessed screamed at me to chase her down, to catch her and drag the truth out of her with my bare hands, but a colder and more calculating part of my brain overrode that impulse before it could translate into action.She had wanted me to chase her. The bassinet had been a prop, a decoy designed to trigger exactly the kind of pursuit that would pull me away from the operating table. If I had followed her through that door, if I had let the fury carry me into the corridor, the room would have been left with nothing but a surgical team focused on their work and a wife who could barely
The hallways were not empty. Even in the middle of the night, the hospital lived and breathed around me. A janitor pushed a mop bucket along the floor, the wheels squeaking with every rotation, his face drawn with the exhaustion of a man who had been working double shifts for longer than he cared to remember. A young couple sat in a waiting area near the emergency department, the woman crying softly while the man held her hand and stared at the wall with the hollow expression of someone who had received bad news and was still trying to process it. Two nurses stood at the end of the corridor, their heads bent together in quiet conversation, their voices too low for me to hear. One of them glanced up as I passed, and I met her eyes and held them until she looked away.Everyone was a potential threat. Everyone was a possible enemy. The network had proven that it could reach anywhere, that it could turn ordinary people into weapons with nothing more than a trigger phrase and a lifetime of
Devin's POVThe bassinet hit the floor with a crack that split the air like a gunshot, and the woman in the surgical scrubs was already through the secondary door before the sound finished echoing off the operating room walls. Henderson's men surged after her, their boots pounding against the linoleum in a rhythm I could feel in my chest, but I did not join them. I could not join them. Every instinct I possessed screamed at me to chase her down, to catch her and drag the truth out of her with my bare hands, but a colder and more calculating part of my brain overrode that impulse before it could translate into action.She had wanted me to chase her. The bassinet had been a prop, a decoy designed to trigger exactly the kind of pursuit that would pull me away from the operating table. If I had followed her through that door, if I had let the fury carry me into the corridor, the room would have been left with nothing but a surgical team focused on their work and a wife who could barely li
Eve’s POV The morning had already delivered one gut punch. I saw no reason to stop at a single blow. After Devin dropped the revelation about my father's debt to Martin, I sat at the breakfast table for a long time, staring at the cooling eggs and trying to rearrange the shattered pieces of my
Eve’s POV I woke to the smell of tea and the distant sound of someone rummaging through my kitchen cabinets. For a moment I just lay there, wrapped in the blanket Devin must have draped over me at some point during the night. The couch cushions were still warm and the pillow still smelled faint
Devin’s POV The moment Eve's voice cracked on the other end of the line, I knew that walking misdemeanor had finally done what I had been silently hoping he would do since the day Eve told me she was engaged. He had removed himself from her life in the most catastrophic way possible, and while I
Eve’s POV If I’d known I would see my stepsister’s legs wrapped around my fiancé, I would have worn high heeled shoes that would have doubled as a weapon. Instead I stood in the cottage doorway in ballet flats as the three of us were frozen in a tableau so absurd it could have been a Renaissan







