MasukAldric POV"My husband was tied to a chair," I said. "He was thirty-two weeks pregnant and in active labor, which I was aware of because our permanent bond transmits physical sensation. His face was gray. He had been there for several hours. There was a woman standing over him with a syringe, and Dion had his hand locked around his arm, holding him still."I paused."Whatever was in that syringe was not medical care. The woman was a doctor Dion had employed specifically for this purpose, and the purpose was clear from the context. He had threatened Caelen's life. He had threatened the pregnancy. He had spent hours in that warehouse telling my husband that our son was a trap and that I would thank him for removing it." I kept my eyes on the camera because that was where the jury was, on the other side of a screen. "He was not confused about what he was doing. He was entirely certain that it was right."The defense cross-examination was competent and unpleasant in equal measure. The att
Aldric POVThe summons arrived by courier on a Tuesday morning while Caelen was in the NICU doing Adrian's first bottle feeding of the day, both of them concentrating with the particular intensity of people who have decided that everything else in the world can wait. The envelope was formal, the kind with embossed letterhead that communicated its own gravity before you opened it, and the man who delivered it was professional enough not to react to the fact that I was wearing yesterday's clothes and had the general appearance of someone who had not slept in a continuous stretch since before the previous government.I signed for it and sat down in the small family lounge outside the NICU and read it twice.The prosecution had fast-tracked the case. Given the volume of physical evidence, the number of witnesses, and the severity of the charges, kidnapping, attempted murder, aggravated assault on a pregnant person, stalking, and criminal conspiracy, the trial date had been set for three w
Aldric POVDay 5Victoria and Richard arrived together, which was how my parents had always arrived at things that mattered, not separately and not making an entrance, but together, with the quiet solidarity of two people who had been through enough in forty years of marriage to have stopped requiring drama as a vehicle for significance.My mother had been to the hospital twice since the night of the surgery. She had sat in the waiting room, and she had held my hand, and she had not once told me that everything would be fine, which was the correct choice, because she knew as well as I did that telling people things will be fine before you have any evidence for it is a form of self-protection dressed as reassurance. What she had said instead, at two in the morning with blood on my shirt and both of us waiting for a door to open at the end of a corridor, was, "I am here," and that had been true and therefore worth saying.Now, in the recovery room, she went directly to Caelen in the way
Caelen POVThey moved me out of the ICU on the third day.It was, the nurses explained with the measured cheerfulness of people who had learned to calibrate optimism to the exact level that would not feel like an insult, a very good sign. A sign that my body was doing what it was supposed to do, which was the least my body owed me after everything it had put us both through. I did not say that. I thanked them instead, because the nurses had been kind and relentless and had woken me at intervals throughout the night to check numbers on machines that I had learned to read the way you learn to read a foreign language, clumsily, slowly, but with a growing sense that the grammar was not entirely beyond you.The regular recovery room was smaller than the ICU bay and smelled less aggressively of antiseptic, which should have been a comfort and mostly was. There was a window. Real light came through it in the mornings, grey London light that was not beautiful in any ordinary sense but that fe
Caelen POVWhen Dr. Rashid arrived mid-morning to assess the ventilator question, I felt something I had not expected to feel toward her, given what I knew she had said to Aldric in the operating room. She had pulled my husband two steps away from me and asked him to choose between me and our son. She had said it because it was the truth and because he had deserved to know it, and he had refused in the way that was entirely him, and they had both saved us. I understood that. I understood it in the particular way you understand things when the alternative would have been your death.I was alive because she had accepted no as an answer. Because she had found Dr. Osei and found a third option and fought for both of us simultaneously when the easier path would have been to make the choice she had asked Aldric to make.Her eyes met mine when she came through the door and something passed between us that did not need words, which was fortunate because words were still beyond me. She checked
Caelen POVThe first thing I was aware of was sound.Not words, not anything I could make sense of, just the low, consistent rhythm of machines and the distant murmur of voices speaking in the careful register that people use when they are trying not to disturb something fragile. The sound reached me before anything else did, before light or sensation or the understanding of where I was, and for a long moment I existed only inside it, somewhere between asleep and not asleep, not quite able to cross the distance between those two things.Then pain arrived.It came from my abdomen, deep and insistent, radiating outward in waves that did not care about anything except their own existence. I had been in pain before, through the preeclampsia diagnosis and the weeks of modified bed rest and the contractions in the warehouse that had felt like my body trying to turn itself inside out, but this was different. This was the pain of something having been done to me rather than something happenin







