Chapter 33 Aleksei
ALEKSEI
By the time we reach the hospital, I am past anger.
This is something worse.
The emergency entrance clears the second they see me coming. Not because of who I am in the papers, but because of the people I bring with me and the look on my face. Nurses move faster. A doctor appears before I ask. Another is called before the first even finishes speaking.
I don’t ask for the best. I tell them.
“She’s almost eight months pregnant,” I say. “She took a hit to the head. You will check both of them.”
The doctor starts to reassure me in that careful, practiced tone medical people use when they think someone powerful needs handling.
I cut him off. “No assumptions. No delays. Scan her head. Monitor the baby. You tell me everything.”
He nods. Smart man.
They take her from my arms only when I know exactly which room she’s going to and who is touching her. The whole time, I can’t get the image out of my head. Her on that sidewalk. The groceries. The blood at her temple. The fear in her eyes before she saw me.
I should have found her sooner. I should have had men on her every day, not every few days, not discreetly, not at a distance because I told myself giving her space was some kind of mercy.
Mercy. I nearly laugh. What good did space do her when a man still got close enough to put hands on her?
One of the doctors comes back first. Head injury is minor. Bruising. Mild concussion, likely. No skull fracture.
The obstetrician takes longer. Every minute feels like punishment.
When she finally comes out and says the baby is fine, heartbeat strong, no signs of distress, I have to look away for a second.
Not because I’m emotional. But because if I don’t, I might break something from the release of it.
Fine. She’s fine. The baby is fine. That should settle me.
It doesn’t. It just leaves more room for everything else.
I spend the next hour making calls. The man from the street is being handled. My father’s people are being checked again. Every route, every camera, every leak. I want names. I want certainty. I want to know who thought touching her was something they could survive.
No one gives me an answer fast enough.
Eventually, after the doctors leave and the nurses settle into their rhythms, I go to her room.
The lights are low. Hospital rooms always look gentler in the dark than they do in the day, but I know better than to trust that illusion.
She’s asleep when I walk in. One hand over the blanket, resting protectively over the curve of her stomach. Hair pushed back from her face. The bruise at her temple is smaller now that someone cleaned the blood away, but it’s still there.
I stop beside the bed and just look at her.
She was gone for almost eight long months.
Eight months of silence, and now here she is again, sleeping in a hospital bed because I let danger stay too close while pretending distance was enough to keep her safe.
My hand moves before I decide to let it. I brush a thumb once, lightly, over the edge of her hairline, careful not to touch the bruise.
Her lashes flutter. Then her eyes open.
For a second she looks confused. Drugged with sleep. Then she focuses on me, and everything about her expression changes.
“Hey,” she says, voice soft.
“Hey.”
She watches me for a moment. Then, quieter, “You stayed.”
The words land wrong in my chest. Of course I stayed.
I pull the chair closer and sit. “You were attacked.”
“Yes,” she says dryly. “I noticed.”
That gets the smallest exhale out of me. Not a laugh. Close enough to count.
She studies my face and must see too much there, because her expression shifts. “Aleksei.”
“What.”
“Thank you.”
I look at her. “For what?”
“For saving me.” The simplicity of it nearly undoes me more than the blood did.
I shake my head once. “I should have been there before he touched you.”
Her brow pulls together slightly. “That’s not how reality works.”
“It should.”
“No,” she says softly. “It shouldn’t.”
Silence settles for a beat.
She looks tired. Pale. But steadier now. More awake. Her hand drifts over her stomach again without thinking, and my eyes follow the motion before I can stop them.
I have been trying not to think about the obvious since I saw her through that restaurant window. Since I stood outside like a man hit by his own life.
Pregnant. Almost eight months.
The math is there.
I should ask directly. Demand truth. Demand timelines. Demand whatever right a man in my position thinks he has over a question like that.
Instead, what comes out is quieter.
“How long were you planning to keep this from me?”
Her face changes instantly. She looks away first, toward the monitor, the window, anything but me. “There isn’t anything to keep from you.”
I sit back in the chair, suddenly colder. “Zatanna.”
She closes her eyes for one second. Then opens them and meets mine. “The baby isn’t yours.”
The room goes very still.
I look at her.
She looks back without blinking.
The answer comes too fast. A lie.
Maybe. Maybe not.
But I know her now, or enough of her. I know what she looks like when she wants to shut a door before someone can put a hand through it. This is that face.
Still, I don’t call it. Not yet.
I just nod. Once.
If she expects an argument, she doesn’t get one. If she expects relief, she doesn’t get that either.
Only the nod. Only the silence after it.
Her mouth tightens slightly, as if the lack of reaction unsettles her more than anger would have.
And I leave it. Because if I say what I’m actually thinking, I won’t stop there. I’ll ask dates. I’ll ask names. I’ll ask why she ran. I’ll ask why she thought she had the right to decide I would never know.
And I am too angry, too relieved, too raw from seeing her on that pavement to trust any of those questions in this room.
So, I keep my voice level and say, “You should rest.”
She keeps looking at me. Trying to read what I’m not giving her.
I stand. The chair scrapes softly against the floor. My hand goes to the bedrail for one second before I let it go.
“Aleksei,” she says.
I stop, but I don’t turn around right away. When I do, she looks smaller somehow. Not weak. Just tired enough that the fight is harder to hold.
“I meant it,” she says. “About thanking you.”
I nod once. “Sleep.”
Then I walk out before I do something stupid like go back to the bed and ask again.
Outside the room, the hallway is bright and cold and full of people who still don’t have the answers I need.
By morning, I’ve already decided.
She isn’t going back to that apartment.
She can fight me about it if she wants. She probably will. But she’s not going back.
When the doctor clears her to leave, I’m waiting outside the room with her discharge papers already signed, prescriptions filled, and two men downstairs making sure no one gets within twenty feet of the exit.
She sees me and immediately knows something is wrong. “What?”
“You’re coming with me.”
Her eyes narrow. “No.”
I almost smile. Almost. Even half-concussed, she still goes straight to defiance. “Yes.”
“No,” she repeats. “I am going home.”
I step closer, lower my voice, keep it calm because if I let the rest of it in, this turns into a fight instead of a decision. “Your attacker knew where you lived. That means whoever sent him knew where to find you. You are not going back there.”
She folds her arms carefully, protective of her belly even in the gesture. “You don’t get to decide that.”
“I do where safety is concerned.”
“That’s not how this works.”
“It is now.”
Her mouth tightens. I can see the anger, the exhaustion, the humiliation of needing help from me at all. She hates feeling cornered. I know that.
So I say the quiet part out loud.
“The baby might not be mine,” I tell her. “But there are people who want to hurt you. That is enough.”
She goes still for a second, eyes searching my face like she’s looking for sarcasm or cruelty or some angle she can fight.
There isn’t one. Only the truth.
I hold her gaze. “Come to my house. Just until this is contained.”
She laughs once, tired and bitter. “Contained. You say that like I’m a leak in a pipe.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Yes.” She looks away first, toward the window, toward the hallway, toward every exit except the one I’m giving her. “That’s the problem.”
I let the silence sit.
Eventually she asks, “For how long?”
“As long as necessary.”
“That’s not reassuring.”
“No,” I say. “It isn’t.”
She closes her eyes for one second, then opens them again. “Fine,” she says. “Temporarily.”
Good enough.
A few minutes later, we’re in the car, and the drive uptown is quiet.
She sits beside me in the backseat, one hand resting over her stomach, the other at her temple now and then when the bruising starts to ache. I don’t touch her. I want to. I don’t.
The city passes in gray blocks and wet glass, the kind of morning where Manhattan looks expensive and tired at the same time. Traffic peels away as we move farther north, into streets lined with older buildings and harder money.
My childhood house sits in a place that is too large, too private, too controlled.
It takes up the whole corner lot, set back from the street behind black iron gates and a wall of trimmed hedges that keep curious people from seeing more than the upper windows.
The stone facade is old, not showy in a new-money way.
Heavy limestone, dark-framed windows, a carved doorway that looks more like the entrance to a private club than a home.
Security cameras sit in the corners so discreetly most people never notice them.
She does.
The gates open before the car fully stops.
Inside, the front drive curves around a small courtyard fountain and ends under a covered stone portico. The house itself is quiet in that way large homes get when they are expensively maintained and not especially happy.
Zatanna looks out the window, expression unreadable.
“What?” I ask.
She glances at me. “I was just thinking your childhood must have been either very glamorous or deeply cursed.”