Chapter 38 Zatanna
ZATANNA
After he says it back, after the room settles and I stop feeling like my chest might split open from the strain of keeping too much in for too long, the practical part of him comes back.
He sits beside the bed with my hand still in his and asks, “Tell me exactly what you ate.”
I blink. “Now?”
“Yes.”
“You really know how to ruin a moment.”
His mouth twitches. “Answer.”
So I do.
I tell him about breakfast outside with his mother. The tamarind snacks. The tea. The toast. The grapes. Later, the hallway, the jar, the handful I took after. Water in my room. Nothing else I can think of.
He listens without interrupting, his face getting colder with each item. Not at me. At the list itself. At the places in it where something could have gone wrong.
When I’m done, he asks me to repeat the order. Then who handed me what. Then whether anyone else touched the tray.
“You think it was in the food,” I say.
“I think someone found a way.”
That is not reassuring. Then again, nothing in this situation is.
He squeezes my hand once, a gesture so absentmindedly gentle it almost hurts more than the questions. “Rest.”
“You’re leaving.”
“For an hour.”
“That sounds suspiciously specific.”
“I have people to speak to.”
Of course he does.
I want to ask him to stay anyway. I don’t. He’s already giving me a look that says he knows exactly what I’m not saying.
“When can I see the baby?” I ask instead.
Something shifts in his face. Softer. Still careful. “As soon as the doctor clears it.”
That is not an answer with a clock attached. I can tell because he knows it and I know it and neither of us says so.
I nod anyway.
He leans down, kisses my forehead, and says, “Sleep.” Then he leaves before I can make anything harder.
The room is quiet after that. Too quiet.
I lie there staring at the ceiling, one hand over the place where the baby had been and isn’t anymore, and try to picture him somewhere else in this building. Small. Breathing. Alive.
A son. Ours.
The word still does not feel fully real.
I think about what Aleksei looked like when he heard it. How still he went. How terrified. How certain.
I think about love confessed under fluorescent lights and surgical threat, and how absurd it is that the first truly honest thing between us had to happen with poison already in my blood.
Eventually the thoughts blur.
I fall asleep wondering how long it will be before I get to see my baby.
When I wake, the room is dimmer.
For one confused second, I think I hear the baby monitor from some impossible domestic future I do not have yet.
Then I realize someone is standing near the foot of my bed.
I jolt wide awake.
Alena.
She’s in a dark coat, sunglasses pushed up into her hair, looking like she stepped out of a car and into my nightmare without so much as smudging her lipstick.
Shock hits so hard I almost forget to breathe. “What are you doing here?”
Her gaze flicks to the monitors, the IV, my face. “I heard you were in here.”
I stare at her. Then I find my voice. “Please leave.”
She doesn’t move.
Instead, she steps closer and lowers her voice. “Listen to me. You’re in danger.”
I laugh once, disbelieving and raw. “No shit.”
“I’m serious.”
“So am I. Get out.”
She looks annoyed by my refusal, which is a truly infuriating expression on someone who has no right to be in my room at all. “I came as soon as I heard,” she says.
“Oh, how touching.”
She ignores that. “I never wanted to hurt him.”
My stomach turns. And then she adds, with a glance at my midsection, “Or his baby.”
For a second I just stare.
Then I scoff. “So this is about Aleksei?”
“That’s not the point,” Alena snaps, impatient now.
“Yes, it is,” I say, because suddenly I am very awake and very tired of beautiful women with expensive coats speaking to me like I’m stupid. “Everything with you is about Aleksei.”
Her jaw tightens. “You have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Then enlighten me,” I say. “Preferably while leaving.”
She takes another step, then stops, like she’s just remembered I’m in a hospital bed and might not be as easy to bully lying down. “You need to understand that if something happened to you, it was not my design.”
The wording catches. Not I didn’t do it. Not I had nothing to do with it.
If something happened to you.
I look at her more carefully.
She is not as calm as she wants to seem. “I was told you blamed me,” she says. “That Aleksei blamed me.”
I say nothing. That seems to tell her enough.
She exhales through her nose. “Convenient.”
My pulse shifts. “What does that mean?”
“It means,” Alena says, voice low and clipped, “someone is using my name, trying to frame me.”
I stare at her. For a second, I don’t say anything, because that is not what I expected her to say. I expected denial. Deflection. Something elegant and slippery that I’d have to pry apart later.
Not that. Not something so direct.
She watches my face carefully, as if trying to measure whether I’m even capable of considering this.
“You expect me to believe that?” I ask.
“No,” she says. “I expect you to be intelligent enough to at least entertain it.”
That should annoy me. It does.
But not enough to stop me from thinking.
Because the worst part is, it makes sense. Too much sense. Alena was the obvious answer. The easy one. The ex. The woman already tangled up in Aleksei’s past, with enough motive and enough bitterness to make everyone stop looking once her name surfaced.
And if someone wanted Aleksei furious and pointed in the wrong direction, they could not have picked a cleaner target.
I look at her more closely.
She’s still composed. Still dressed like she stepped out of a luxury car and into some rich-person disaster.
But there’s something off around the edges.
Tension in her jaw. A tightness in her shoulders she’s trying hard to hide.
Her eyes keep flicking toward the door, not because she’s bored, but because she’s measuring escape.
Then it hits me. She’s scared. Not of me. Of him.
Of what Aleksei might do to her if he truly believes she tried to hurt me.
That realization changes the air between us. Not enough to make me trust her. Not even close. But enough to make me understand that whatever game she usually plays, she is not fully in control of it right now.
“You really think he believes it was you,” I say slowly.
Her mouth tightens. “Of course, he does.”
There’s no vanity in it. No flattery. Just fact.
And that, more than anything, tells me she knows him well enough to be afraid.
“He should,” I say, because I’m not about to let her off that easily. “You did plenty.”
A flash of irritation crosses her face. “Yes. I manipulated. I pressed. I used what I knew. I wanted you gone from his life, not dead in a hospital bed.”
The bluntness of it makes me go still.
She sees that and presses on. “Do you think I would be standing here if I believed he had actual proof?” she asks. “Do you think I would walk into this room if I thought he was finished deciding whether to destroy me?”
The door stays closed. The room hums softly around us. Neither of us moves.
“You should leave,” I say at last.
Her expression goes flat again, the fear tucked back under that smooth exterior. “Probably.”
But she doesn’t move immediately. She studies me for one last moment, as if deciding whether to say more. Then she says, quieter now, “You need to understand something. If he thinks this was me, he won’t stop at retaliation. He’ll make it personal.”
The words should comfort me.
Instead, they don’t. Because I already know that. I saw it in his face.
“And if it wasn’t you?” I ask.
Alena’s eyes hold mine. “Then someone very clever is counting on exactly that.” The words are barely out of Alena’s mouth when something moves behind her.
Fast. A hard, heavy sound cracks through the room.
Alena’s head jerks sideways.
Then she crumples.
Just drops, like the strings holding her up were cut. One second, she’s standing there in her expensive coat and fear and calculation, and the next she’s on the floor in a heap, blood darkening at her hairline where something struck her.
I scream. The sound tears out of me before I can stop it, raw and shocked and useless.
And then I see who’s standing behind her.
Daria. Aleksei’s mother.
She’s holding a bronze statuette in one hand, the base of it red now. Her face is pale, too pale, but calm. Not startled. Not panicked. Calm.
My whole body goes cold.
For one impossible second, my brain refuses to make sense of what my eyes are seeing.
No. No.
She lowers the statuette gently onto the side table, as if setting down a teacup instead of a weapon.
Then she looks at me. And smiles. Not warmly. Not kindly.
Something quieter than cruelty. Worse than cruelty. Like she’s been waiting a very long time to stop pretending.
“Did you really think,” she asks softly, “you would get your happily ever after with my son?”
The room tilts.
I stare at her, breath coming too fast, pulse hammering against every machine attached to me.
Alena groans faintly on the floor. She’s alive.
Thank God, she’s alive.
But that hardly matters because the woman in front of me is still smiling, and suddenly everything that was soft about her, everything that felt almost safe, peels away in one sickening instant.
“I…” My mouth is dry. “Daria, what are you doing?”
She tilts her head. “Correcting a problem.”
My hand goes instinctively to my stomach, even though the baby is no longer there to protect. The motion is automatic anyway. Some last reflex of fear.
Her eyes follow it. A flicker. Satisfaction, maybe. Grief. Possession.
I can’t tell.
“That child,” she says, “should never have existed.” The words hit harder than the attack did.
Something inside me goes white with horror. “You poisoned me.”
She doesn’t answer right away. Which is answer enough.
I hear myself whisper, “Why?”
That finally seems to interest her. The question. The simplicity of it.