Hours seem to pass inside each minute until finally the room shifts. The doctor’s voice sharpens. Nurses reposition. Aurora bears down with a cry that rips straight through my chest.
Then it happens.
A raw, furious wail cuts through the room.
Everything stops.
My heart. My breath. The whole goddamn world.
The sound is small and raging and alive.
Our child.
Aurora goes limp against the pillows, tears slipping from the corners of her eyes. I don’t realize my own vision has blurred until I blink and see the doctor lifting a tiny, red-faced, squalling miracle into the light.
“A boy,” the doctor says.
A son.
For one suspended second, I can only stare.
Then I laugh. A broken, disbelieving sound I do not recognize as my own.
Aurora turns her head toward me, exhausted and luminous. “You were wrong,” she murmurs.
I move to her so fast the chair scrapes against the floor. “I have never been happier to be wrong in my life.”
They lay him against Aurora first, and I swear every filthy prayer I never believed in is answered in that single image. Her trembling arms curve around him. His cries quiet beneath the sound of her voice. He is impossibly small, impossibly perfect, and when she lifts her eyes to me, there is so much love in them it nearly brings me to my knees.
“Come here,” she whispers.
I do.
The nurse places him carefully in my arms, and suddenly this tiny life is against my chest, warm and furious and real. My son blinks up at me with a scrunched little face like he already disapproves of the world he has entered.
My throat locks.
I have held guns, knives, power, the throats of men who thought they could challenge me.
I have never held anything like this.
He wraps one impossibly small hand around my finger, and that is it. The last untouched part of me, the last hard place, is gone.
Aurora watches me with soft amusement. “You look stunned.”
“I am.” My voice is wrecked. “He’s perfect.”
She smiles, slow and sleepy. “He has your mouth.”
“God help him, then.”
A quiet laugh moves through the room.
When the door opens a little while later, Luca steps inside. For a beat, he says nothing. His gaze moves from Aurora to the baby to me. All the old tension, all the blood and pride and war, hangs there for a moment like the ghost of another life.
Then he steps closer.
I do not miss the way his face changes when he looks at his grandson. His jaw tightens. His eyes gleam. This is not softness. A man like Luca does not become soft.