Chapter 36 Zatanna
ZATANNA
I am starving.
Not delicate, elegant hunger. Not I could eat a little something.
Actual, feral, pregnant hunger.
I push up on one elbow, squint toward the nightstand, then remember the jar on the dresser.
The tamarind strips. His mother’s weird pregnancy magic.
Aleksei is still catching his breath when I ease out from under his arm, pull on his shirt from the floor, and head toward the jar.
I reach for them.
“What are you doing?” Aleksei asks, voice rough with sleep and sex and irritation at being moved away from.
I pry the lid open. “Eating.”
He lifts his head enough to watch me shove one into my mouth. “Now?”
I glare at him while chewing. “Do not judge me. I just burned calories.”
That gets a laugh out of him. A real one, low and tired.
I point the jar at him. “Also, these are amazing.”
“I gathered.”
I eat another one, then another, and settle back against the pillows with the jar in my lap while he watches me like I’m the strangest creature he’s ever brought to bed.
“Pregnancy is very undignified,” I tell him.
“So I’m learning.”
I offer him one.
He takes it, suspicious, then immediately makes a face.
I laugh so hard I almost choke.
“That’s disgusting.”
“No,” I say, still laughing, “you’re weak.”
He takes the jar from me, sets it aside, and pulls me back against him anyway, one arm heavy around my waist. I can still feel his laughter in his chest.
“You are impossible,” he murmurs.
“And yet,” I say sleepily.
“And yet.”
The room quiets. The house quiets. At some point I must drift off, because the next thing I know I’m waking up in the dark with a hard, deep pain wrapping around my stomach.
I freeze. Then it hits again. Sharper this time.
Not the normal ache. Not the weight, or the pressure, or the little kicks that have become part of the background of my life.
This is different.
My breath catches.
Aleksei is awake immediately. “What is it?”
I press a hand to my belly and try to breathe through it. “I… I don’t know.”
He’s upright in a second, lamp on, eyes locked on my face. “Zatanna.”
Another pain grips me and I fold forward with a sound I cannot stop.
That’s enough for him.
He is out of bed, pulling on trousers, grabbing his phone, barking orders before I can tell him not to panic because I am already panicking enough for both of us.
“Car now. Call the doctor. Tell them we’re coming in.”
I can barely process the rest. He dresses me himself because my hands are shaking too badly to manage buttons. He gets my shoes on. He gets the blanket around my shoulders. He carries me downstairs before I can protest.
The ride to the hospital is a blur of streetlights and pain and his hand crushing mine in the backseat.
“Look at me,” he says each time I start to spiral. “Stay with me.”
“I’m here,” I say through gritted teeth.
“Good.” His voice is too calm. That scares me more than if he yelled.
By the time we get to the hospital, I’m crying without really noticing. The lights are too bright. Everything smells like antiseptic and metal and bad news.
“Aleksei,” I gasp, another cramp tearing through me so hard I can’t breathe through the end of his name.
“I know,” he says, voice low and sharp at once. “I’ve got you.”
He storms through the emergency entrance with me in his arms, and the entire room changes the second people see his face. Nurses move. A doctor appears. Someone reaches for a wheelchair and he snaps, “No,” without even looking at them.
“She’s eight months pregnant,” he says. “Severe abdominal pain. Now.”
They get me onto a bed. Hands everywhere. Questions. When did it start? Any bleeding? Any dizziness? Did I eat anything unusual? Can you rate the pain? Is the baby moving?
I answer what I can.
Aleksei answers the rest.
I don’t remember when they separate him from me. One moment he’s there, one hand wrapped around mine, and the next I’m being wheeled through double doors under harsh lights while nurses talk over me.
They hook me to monitors. Press cold gel to my stomach. Someone checks dilation. Another nurse takes blood. I hear the baby’s heartbeat first, fast and frantic, and then my own starts to race harder because no one in the room looks reassured by it.
The first doctor frowns at the screen.
The second one asks again, “Did she eat anything outside the house tonight?”
I close my eyes and try to think. Nothing weird. Nothing dangerous. A third wave of pain hits me and I cry out before I can stop myself.
The doctor looks at the nurse. “Page OB and toxicology.”
Toxicology. The word cuts through the pain like ice.
I turn my head sharply. “What?”
No one answers me immediately, which is answer enough.
The doctor finally looks down at me, too calm. “We need to rule a few things out.”
My whole body goes cold. Rule things out. That means they already think it’s possible. That means this might not just be labor. That means something is wrong with me, not just the baby, and the room has changed from worried to urgent in a way I can feel even through the pain.
When Aleksei gets back into the room, he looks like he’s one bad sentence away from dragging the entire hospital apart with his hands.
“What’s happening?” he says.
The obstetrician doesn’t waste time. “She’s having contractions, but they’re too intense for what we’re seeing clinically. Her blood pressure is unstable, and some of her symptoms don’t fit straightforward preterm labor.”
Aleksei goes still. “Say it clearly.”
The doctor glances at the chart, then at him. “We think she may have ingested something.”
The room goes silent. I feel it before I see it.
Aleksei’s face changes. Not fear. Something colder. Deadlier. “Poisoned?” he asks.
The word doesn’t sound real.
The doctor is careful. “We don’t know yet. But there are enough red flags that we’re treating it as a possibility while we stabilize her.”
My stomach drops so fast I almost throw up. Poisoned.
The pain is still ripping through me, but now there’s something worse underneath it. Betrayal. Violation. The knowledge that this wasn’t random, wasn’t bad timing, wasn’t my body simply failing me.
Someone did this. Someone put something inside me.
Inside us.
Aleksei moves to the bedside at once and takes my hand, and for the first time since I’ve known him, he looks like he might actually kill someone with his bare hands before the night is over.
His thumb brushes my knuckles once. Too gently for the look on his face. “Stay with me,” he says.
It’s not a request.
I nod, because speaking feels too hard around the next wave of pain.
They start another IV. More blood. More monitors. A nurse injects something meant to slow the contractions and another hangs a bag of fluids that drips too slowly for how urgent this all feels.
One doctor checks the baby again. “Heart rate’s still good,” she says. “Still good.” The words are for the room, not me.
I cling to them anyway.
Aleksei leans closer. “Look at me.”
I do.
His grip tightens when the pain hits again, like he can somehow hold me together by force. “Breathe.”
I try. I fail. Then try again.
The doctor returns with the first labs, scans them too quickly, and her face tightens. That is the worst expression yet.
“What?” Aleksei says immediately.
She hesitates.
He steps forward. “Doctor.”
She looks between us, then says it.
“There’s evidence of a toxin.”
Everything in me goes numb except the pain. My mind rejects it completely for a second.
No. This cannot be happening. Not in his house. Not after everything. Not now.
Aleksei’s hand leaves mine. That scares me more than the doctor.
Because I know exactly what it means when he lets go.
He turns to the doctor. “Will she live?”
The bluntness shocks the room.
The doctor doesn’t flinch. “If we keep her stable and get ahead of it, yes. But she’s in danger right now.”
There it is. No soft language. No comforting lie.
My life is in danger. And the baby—
“What about him?” I whisper.
The doctor turns to me at once. “Right now, the baby still looks okay. The best thing we can do for him is stabilize you.”
I nod because I don’t know what else to do.
Aleksei bends down again, both hands braced on the mattress now, too much violence in his body to touch me safely and yet trying anyway. “Listen to me,” he says. His voice is lower now. Rough. Barely controlled. “I am not letting you die from this.”
The certainty in it should feel ridiculous. It doesn’t. It feels like the only solid thing in the room.
Another contraction tears through me and I cry out, and his hand is back in mine instantly.
The nurse starts naming medications. The OB argues with toxicology. Someone calls for a consult. The room becomes all movement again.
But through all of it, Aleksei stays where he is.
The room narrows around me.
Not all at once. In pieces.
The doctors are still talking, but their voices have started to blur at the edges. Nurses move fast around the bed. Someone is adjusting the monitors. Someone else is explaining something about fetal distress, about protecting me, about moving now, not later.
Surgery. I hear that word clearly.
Then I stop hearing anything clearly at all.
Aleksei is still there.
That is the only thing my body seems to understand.
He is still at my side, one hand locked around mine so tightly it should hurt and somehow doesn’t. His face is the last solid thing in the room. Pale with fury. Controlled by force. And underneath all of that, something I have never seen from him this openly before.
Love. Not want. Not possession. Not guilt or panic or obsession dressed up as urgency.
Love.
It is right there in his eyes, so naked and terrible that for one second, I almost forget the fear.
“Aleksei,” I whisper.
His whole focus sharpens on me. “I’m here.”
They start moving the bed. The world shifts. Ceiling lights sliding overhead. Wheels clicking. Doors opening somewhere ahead of us.
I don’t want to let go of his hand.
I think he knows that, because he walks with the bed as long as they let him, still holding on, still leaning close enough that I can feel his breath at my temple.
“You have to stay calm,” one of the nurses says.
I almost laugh. Stay calm.
As if the man I love is walking beside me like he’s trying not to murder the whole hospital.
As if I’m not being wheeled toward surgery with my baby still inside me and poison still inside my blood.
I turn my head just enough to look at him.
He sees that, too. Sees the fear. Sees the question I can’t quite ask.
Am I going to live? Is the baby? Did we run out of time?
“Aleksei.”
“I’m here.” His voice is rough already. Barely holding.
I shake my head once, breath catching. “No, listen to me.”
His face changes. “Zatanna—”
“Please.”
That stops him.
The bed keeps moving, the lights keep passing over us, but for one second everything between us goes still.
I look at him and know I have no choice left. If I die with this lie in my mouth, I will damn us both with it. Tears blur my vision.
“You have to take care of my baby,” I whisper.
His jaw tightens. “I will.”
“No.” I drag in air that doesn’t feel like enough. “Not mine. Yours. Your son.”
The words hang there. He goes absolutely still.
I can feel the shock leave him vertical.
I keep going because if I stop now, I won’t finish. “Our baby,” I say, voice breaking. “Aleksei, please. If something happens to me, you take care of our child.”
The world drops out from under his face. For one terrible second, he looks like a man who has forgotten how to breathe. Then all of it hits him at once. The restaurant. The timeline. The lie. The reason I ran. The child.
His child. His hand tightens around mine so hard it almost hurts. “Zatanna—”
I’m crying openly now. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I just thought if you knew, you’d force me to stay, and I couldn’t, I couldn’t do it then, but now—” My voice fractures. “Please don’t let my baby be alone.”
His whole expression changes. Not anger.
Something deeper. More devastating.
He leans over me, one hand braced on the moving bed, the other still locked around mine, and for the first time since I’ve known him, he looks completely undone.
“Our child,” he says, like he has to hear the words out loud to survive them.
I nod, sobbing now, beyond pride, beyond fear, beyond anything except this one unbearable need to make him understand before I’m gone. “Yes.”
His face crumples for half a second, then sets again with something terrible and absolute. “No,” he says. The force of it cuts through everything.
“No, what?” I whisper.
“No to any of this ending here.” His forehead almost touches mine. “You are not dying. Do you understand me?”
I want to believe him. God, I want to.
He cups my face with shaking fingers and says, lower now, like a vow made straight into my skin, “You are going to live. Our child is going to live. And when you wake up, we are going to finish this conversation properly.”
The certainty in his voice is the only thing keeping me from shattering completely. They start to pull the bed farther away.
A nurse says, “Sir, you have to let go now.”
He doesn’t. Not immediately.
He bends so close his lips brush my ear, and I hear the words in the place between fear and darkness where they will stay forever.
“I love you,” he says. “And I love our child. You hear me?”
A sob catches in my throat. I nod the best I can.
Only then does he let them take me.
The last thing I see before the doors swing shut is his face.
And the last thing I hear is his voice, raw and shaking and full of me.
“I love you.”