The room was quiet and very white, with the specific antiseptic brightness of a hospital that illuminated things clearly. Camila was standing at the left side of the bed with her arms wrapped around herself, and she looked at me when I came in with an expression that was not quite welcoming and not quite hostile.
Sofia was sitting up against the pillow. She had an IV in her arm and a hospital gown that was too large for her.
Her hair was loose, and the olive warmth of her skin was coming back under the fluorescent light, and she looked—
She looked at me.
Not with the expression I’d been bracing for. Not with the anger, the hard-edged composure she deployed when she was managing her own vulnerability, and I was the specific source of what she needed to manage it against. She looked at me with something that was very tired and very wary and entirely unguarded in a way that hurt more than anything else would have, because unguarded meant she was too exhausted to perform distance, and that meant I was getting the actual thing, the actual Sofia beneath all the ways she’d learned to defend herself—including from me.
She looked at me like she had been not-thinking about me for six days and had not entirely succeeded.
I moved to her bedside. I stopped two feet away because I was not going to assume anything about what she wanted right now, what she could tolerate, or what proximity meant after everything that had been said, done, and withheld between us. I put my hands at my sides, looked at her face, and didn’t say any of the things queued behind my teeth—the explanations, the apologies, the accounting I owed her for every morning departure, every strategic silence, and every moment I’d used what was between us as a lens instead of understanding that it was the point.
She looked at my face for a long moment, reading something there. Then she looked at Camila.
Camila said, with a timing that I was fairly certain was deliberate: “I’ll be right outside.” She patted Sofia’s hand once, quick and warm, and moved toward the door, and as she passed me, she said, at a volume intended only for me, “Don’t make this worse.”
The door clicked shut.
Sofia looked at her hands in her lap. The drip moved its slow, clear fluid into her arm. The monitor beside her beeped with the patient, indifferent regularity of a machine that had no stake in anything.
I sat in the chair beside her bed. Not standing over her. Not filling the room with myself the way I usually did, the way I’d been told my whole adult life I did simply by being the size I was in a space. I sat in the chair, and I leaned forward slightly, and I looked at her face in profile, and I waited, because she had earned the right to set the pace of this, and I was done taking things from Sofia Alvarez that she hadn’t decided to give.
She turned her head and looked at me directly, her eyes tired and dark. Underneath everything was the same thing I’d seen in the basement when I was lowering my gun and she was looking at me across the length of the room—something that had no strategic use, something that had been surviving in a basement for six days on the same fuel I’d been running on through forty-two hours of operational fury.
The door opened behind us.
“Sorry,” the doctor said as she stepped back in, voice calm, measured. “I just need a moment.” She glanced between us, taking in more than she commented on, then checked the chart in her hand. “I wanted to confirm your results.” A small pause. “You’re pregnant.”
Her gaze flicked to Sofia, softer now. “It’s early, but everything looks consistent so far.”
Sofia didn’t respond. Not immediately.
“Do you…understand what that means?” the doctor added, gently.
“Yes,” Sofia said.
Silence settled differently after that.
“All right,” the doctor said, professional again, but not unkind. “We’ll go over next steps shortly. Take a minute.” She gave us one last look, then stepped out, closing the door softly behind her.
The doctor’s voice lingered anyway, reaching us both from memory as much as from the room, and neither of us pretended we hadn’t heard it.
I looked at her face. She looked at mine.
“We have a lot to talk about,” I said. Quietly. The words landed somewhere between a statement and the beginning of the only negotiation that had ever mattered.
Her chin moved. Not quite a nod. The edge of one. And her hands, folded in her lap, loosened slightly from the grip they’d been holding each other in—something so small I almost missed it, something that a man who wasn’t watching very closely would have missed entirely.
I’d been watching her closely since the first night. I was done pretending otherwise.
Chapter 19 – Sofia
I hadn’t intended to leave the hospital with him.
That had been my position: that getting into Gregory Kamarov’s car meant entering a logic that operated by his rules, on his timeline, in a direction he had already chosen before I’d had any say in the matter. I’d intended to call Camila. I’d intended to ask my father to take me back to my apartment, to my things, to the silence of a space that was mine and had been mine before any of this.
And then the doctor had come back in.