I turn around.
Luca is already at Aurora's side, pressing his jacket to her thigh, speaking to her in low, rapid Italian. She's conscious, both hands gripping his forearm, her face the color of old ash.
I cross the distance in seconds and drop beside her, and the sight of the blood — her blood, soaking through Luca's jacket, spreading across the concrete under her — does something to my hands. They're not quite steady when I reach for her face.
"I'm okay," she says immediately. Her voice is thin, but her eyes are clear. "Axel. I'm okay."
"You're not okay."
"The baby is okay. I can tell. I'm okay."
I press my forehead to hers and stay there for exactly two seconds, feeling her breath against my face, counting it, making sure the next one comes.
"Hospital," Luca says behind me. Already standing, already moving, already the man I've known for forty years who acts first and falls apart later if at all. "Now."
The hospital waiting room has forty-seven ceiling tiles. I’m finally counting here too.
I never want to see this ceiling again.
Aurora told me that once, laughing about counting them when I was in surgery. I understood it then in a distant intellectual way. I understand it completely now, sitting in a plastic chair at two in the morning, having counted them four times, knowing the exact placement of every crack in every tile, because my hands need something to do and my brain needs somewhere to put itself that isn't the image of her on that concrete floor.
I stand up.
Sit down.
Stand up again.
"Axel." Luca's voice, from the chair beside me.
"Don't."
"Sit down."
"I can't sit down."
"You have three healing bullet wounds and torn stitches, and you've been standing and sitting and standing again for forty minutes." His hand closes around my arm, pulling me back into the chair with the particular force of a man who has been physically imposing his entire adult life and hasn't lost it. "Sit. Down."
I glare at him.
He keeps his hand on my arm. Doesn't say anything else. Just sits beside me in the fluorescent light of this waiting room and holds my arm like I'm something that might fly apart without an anchor, and I let him, because he might be right.
She said she was okay. She was conscious. She was talking.
But there was so much blood.
"She's strong," Luca says quietly. Not comfort exactly. Just fact, stated by a man who knows her. "She gets it from her mother."
"I know."
"She also gets most of the stubbornness from her mother. In case you were wondering where that came from."
Something moves through my chest that almost resembles a laugh. Almost. "And here I was, blaming you."
"I guess you can blame me just a little."
The doctor appears at the end of the corridor, and I'm on my feet before she's taken three steps toward us.
"She's fine." The words land before I've fully processed that the doctor is speaking. "Clean wound, no arterial involvement. The shoulder will need monitoring, but it's not serious. We're closing both wounds now." She looks between Luca and me. "The baby is perfectly fine. Heartbeat is strong."