Chapter 37 Aleksei
ALEKSEI
I just found out that I’m going to have a son.
I’m standing outside the surgical doors with my hands covered in the phantom memory of hers, and that is the first clear thought I can form:
A son. I never asked. Not once.
Not because I didn’t want to know. Because I thought asking would be too much.
Too intimate. Too presumptuous for a man she had every reason to mistrust. So, I never asked whether the baby was a boy or a girl.
I never asked what names she liked. I never asked when the first kick happened or whether she was sick in the mornings or if she ever lay awake at night with one hand over her stomach and thought about the future.
I told myself restraint was respect. Now it feels like cowardice.
Because she had to tell me the truth on a gurney, crying, thinking she was about to die.
Our child. My son. And she is in there.
That thought keeps circling back and hitting the same place in my chest like a hammer.
She is in there.
The doors closed on her and I told her I loved her too late, and now I am standing in a white corridor full of fluorescent light and stale coffee and pretending I am not one sentence away from tearing the building apart with my bare hands.
No one comes too close.
Not the nurses. Not the security at the far end of the hall. Not even my own men, though Sergei has arrived and taken up position by the window like he knows better than to speak unless I ask.
Good. If anyone offers me comfort, I may put them through the wall.
The first hour is the worst.
Because it is still recent enough that my body expects her voice around the next corner. Still fresh enough that I can hear her saying our baby in my ear and feel the way her fingers clutched mine like if she let go, she’d disappear.
I sit once. Stand again thirty seconds later.
I walk the corridor. Stop. Go back to the same place in front of the doors as if my being there matters to the outcome.
My mother is brought down in a wheelchair against my explicit instructions, pale and furious at being managed. One look at my face and she says nothing foolish like it will be alright. She just reaches for my hand once.
“A boy,” I say. “My kid. And I almost lost him before I had him.”
My voice sounds strange in my own ears.
She looks at me with an expression I cannot read at all the way through. Grief, maybe. Relief. Love. Fear.
“I knew it.”
I don’t know which part she means. The child. The war. The lie. The fact that some part of me must have known long before tonight and simply refused to say it aloud because making it real would have required changing everything.
Two hours pass. Then three.
I call no one except once, to have every kitchen in the house stripped and tested. Every tea tin, every jar, every staff member questioned. The food she touched. The water.
By hour four, I have replayed the last twenty-four hours so many times I can no longer tell which memory is real and which one my guilt has sharpened into something worse.
She was in my house. She ate under my roof. And someone still reached her. If I find out this came from inside my walls, there will be no negotiation left in me.
The doctor finally appears after what feels like a lifetime and a sentence all at once.
I know from his face that the news is mixed.
That is the worst kind.
He walks toward us with the chart held too tightly in one hand. I stand before he fully reaches me.
“Tell me.”
“The surgery is over,” he says.
I hold very still.
“We delivered the baby.”
For one split second, all the tension in me collapses inward so hard it almost feels like relief.
Delivered. My son. Alive.
Then I see the rest of it still sitting in the doctor’s face. “What’s wrong?”
He glances once at my mother, then back at me. “The baby is alive. He’s in neonatal care now. He came early, but he’s breathing with support and responding.”
Alive. Alive.
I seize onto that word and refuse to let go. “And Zatanna?”
The doctor’s mouth tightens. “She’s stable for now. We controlled the bleeding. But there is concerning news.”
My entire body goes cold. “Say it clearly.”
He nods once. Professional. Careful. Afraid enough not to waste my time. “We found signs during surgery that support what toxicology suspected. There are markers consistent with poisoning.”
My mother inhales sharply beside me.
I don’t move. I don’t blink.
I just feel something inside me harden into a shape I recognize too well. “Be sure,” I say.
“We will be when the final labs arrive,” he says. “But at this point, yes. We are treating this as poisoning.”
The corridor goes silent.
No machine noises. No footsteps. Nothing.
Just that word sitting there between us.
“She’ll recover?” I ask.
The doctor does not answer fast enough.
Rage flashes so hot it nearly blinds me.
“She will recover,” I say, because suddenly this is not a question he gets to fumble.
He clears his throat. “We are doing everything we can. The next twelve hours matter. The toxin stressed her body badly and triggered the labor. We need the lab confirmation to target treatment more precisely.”
I stare at him until he looks like he regrets every career choice that led him into my line of sight.
Then I nod once. “Do whatever it takes.”
“Yes, sir.” He leaves before I can say anything else.
Mother is the first one to speak. “How could she have been poisoned?” Her voice is quiet, but it cuts straight through the corridor.
I look at her. For once, I don’t have an answer.
Because I don’t know.
Not yet. But I will.
“I’m going to find out,” I say. The words come out flat. Absolute.
My mother studies my face for a second, then nods once. She knows that tone. Knows there is no comfort left in me now, only purpose.
I wait until the doctor reappears at the far end of the hall and pull him aside before he can disappear into another room. “I want every possible test run,” I say. “Not broad guesses. I want the toxin identified.”
He glances toward the chart in his hands, then back at me. “We’ve already sent the initial bloods. Toxicology is working the panel now.”
“That’s not enough.”
“We’re doing a full screen. But depending on the substance, it can take a few hours to narrow it down properly.”
A few hours. A few hours while she lies in recovery. A few hours while whoever did this is still breathing.
I step closer. Not enough to touch him. Enough that he understands exactly how serious I am. “Then take the hours. Use all of them. But when you come back to me, I want certainty.”
He nods quickly. “Yes, sir.” Only then do I let him leave.
A nurse eventually tells me I can see her.
Recovery looks nothing like peace.
The room is dimmer, quieter, too warm. Machines hum softly in corners.
There’s an oxygen monitor clipped to her finger, an IV at her arm, her skin too pale against the white pillow.
Her hair is brushed back, but the bruising at her temple is still there, ugly and real.
One more mark I wasn’t there soon enough to prevent.
She’s awake when I walk in.
Not fully alert. Tired in that bone-deep way that comes after too much pain and too little blood. But awake enough that her eyes find mine immediately.
I stop beside the bed.
For a second, neither of us says anything.
Then she asks, voice rough, “The baby?”
“Alive,” I say at once. “He’s in neonatal care. Early, but alive.”
Her eyes close. One tear slips free anyway.
I sit down and take her hand. She holds on weakly, but she holds on.
“A boy,” I add quietly.
A faint, tired smile touches her mouth. “You know.”
“Yes.”
“I was going to tell you before it came to this,” she says.
I look at her. “When?”
She lets out a breath that might have been a laugh if she had more strength for it. “Eventually.”
“That’s not a real answer.”
“No,” she admits. “It isn’t.”
The room goes still again.
She’s looking at me differently now. Not the panic from before surgery. Not the fear. Something softer, more uncertain. Like now that death didn’t take the choice from us, she has to face all the things she said when she thought it might.
I brush my thumb once over the back of her hand. “You scared me,” I say.
Her lashes lower. “You scared me, too.”
Fair.
A silence stretches, and then she says, very quietly, “What you said before…”
I feel the shift in my own body instantly. I stand before I can stop myself. The chair scrapes softly against the floor.
She blinks at me. “Aleksei?”
I turn away, because the truth is I don’t know what to do with tenderness when it stops being a crisis and starts becoming a life.
Because if she is about to tell me she didn’t mean it, I don’t want to watch her do it from six inches away.
Because everything in me is hanging by threads, and I am suddenly not sure which words will save me and which ones will finish the job.
So I take one step toward the door. And then she says it.
“I love you too.”
I stop. The words hit the middle of my back like a bullet.
For one second, I can’t move at all.
Then I turn around slowly.
She’s watching me from the bed, pale and tired and still wearing the marks of everything that’s happened, and there is nothing uncertain in her face now. Fear, yes. Exhaustion. But not uncertainty.
“You heard me,” she says softly.
I go back to the bed.
I lean down, one hand braced carefully beside her shoulder, the other coming up to cup her face as gently as if she might break. “Say it again.”
Her eyes shine. And because she is cruel in exactly the right ways, she whispers, “Bossy.”
A real laugh escapes me. Small, wrecked, helplessly relieved.
Then she says it again. “I love you.”
I kiss her before she can say anything else.
Not hard. Not hungry. Just slow and deliberate and full of everything I was about to walk out of the room rather than risk hearing wrong.
When I pull back, I rest my forehead against hers for one unguarded second. “You nearly waited too long to tell me,” I murmur.
She breathes out a faint laugh. “You literally turned to leave.”
“I was having a moment.”
“You’re very dramatic.”
“Yes.”
Her fingers curl weakly around mine again. Then, quieter, “You still said it first.”
That is true. And I don’t regret it.
Not even now, with poison in her blood and our son in an incubator and a war still waiting outside the room.
Maybe especially now.
I press a kiss to her forehead. “Get stronger.”
She blinks. “That sounded like an order.”
“It was.”
Her mouth curves slightly. Good. There. That. I need her with enough life in her to look annoyed with me. I settle back into the chair and don’t let go of her hand.
Outside this room, I will find whoever did this.
Inside it, for the first time since the doctors used the word poison, I let myself hold onto something else too.
She loves me.
And this time, she said it when she intends to live.