Chapter Thirty
Serena
“Excuse me.”
It’s all I manage before I push up from the table and walk, no, drift, toward the bathroom. The second the door closes behind me, whatever control I had dissolves.
My heart starts racing so violently it feels like it’s trying to punch through my ribs.
My hands tremble uncontrollably, cold and slick with sweat, and when I hold them up, they blur in front of my eyes.
The room tilts. My vision sharpens at the edges, then smears, then sharpens again, as though someone is flicking a switch inside my skull.
I grip the sink, but my legs feel unreliable, like they might give out any second. Air saws in and out of my lungs too fast, too shallow. I open my mouth wider, drag in more, and somehow end up with less. Each breath catches high in my throat and never makes it to my chest.
I tell myself it’s just panic, just another attack, just my body remembering how to be terrified, but logic feels useless when every cell in my body is screaming.
My head pounds, my stomach churns, and a sharp pulse of pressure squeezes across my abdomen.
The babies shift at the sensation, and that nearly unravels me completely.
They can feel this. They feel everything I feel.
I force myself to inhale slowly and count, like Marc taught me, but the rhythm slips and splinters. I try again, and fail again. The more I try to control it, the more my panic climbs.
I pull out my phone with shaking hands, trying to anchor myself in something familiar. I scroll through apps without seeing them, trying to distract my brain, pictures, messages, anything. But nothing works. The symptoms don’t budge.
Maybe she’s lying.
Maybe this is just another trick.
She’s manipulative enough to create a disaster and act like she’s rescuing me from it.
But the more I think about what she said, the more every piece fits together too perfectly to dismiss. The disgust my father felt toward me. The desperation in his fight with Lorenzo. The apology right before he died, the apology I convinced myself was about neglect and cruelty.
And then the realization settles like ice in my veins.
This is why my father asked for forgiveness when he thought he was going to die. Not for the emotional abandonment. Not for letting my mother weaponize her love. Not for letting me grow up with no one.
He was apologizing because he sold me.
Because he made a deal to hand me over like a product, like cargo, because his life was more valuable to him than mine.
Because he knew that Lorenzo finding out meant his death sentence was already written.
My knees nearly buckle. Tears spill before I can blink them away.
Fear crashes over me, fear for myself, fear for my children, fear of what my past really was and what my future is becoming.
Another sharp wave of pain rolls across my back. Not strong enough to panic, but strong enough to terrify.
I can’t sit here alone with this, not when everything I am, everything I have, depends on whether she told the truth.
With a trembling thumb, I tap the name I’ve been avoiding for weeks. The only man who can answer this. The only one who already knows.
Lorenzo.
He answers on the first ring.
“Yes, love.”
Just his voice nearly breaks me. Warm. Steady. Certain. The sound of home.
And for one heartbreaking second, I want to take it all back; the space I demanded, the walls I built, every mile I pushed between us.
My throat aches. “Is it true?”
The words scrape out of me like glass.
Silence, then his voice changes, lower, alert, careful. “If what is true, love?”
My vision blurs again and my chest squeezes painfully tight.
How do I ask this?
How do I say the sentence out loud without destroying whatever is left of me?
Is it true you killed my father because he sold me?
Is it true the man I defended, the man I begged you to spare, traded my life for business alliances?
Is it true I’ve been so blind it borders on pathetic?
I swallow hard. “Is it true that you killed. . .” The word sticks like poison in my throat. I can’t call him father anymore. “Thomas, because he sold me?”
The silence stretches, heavy, suffocating.
When he speaks again, his tone is unbearably gentle. “Where are you?”
I squeeze my eyes shut. “Please just tell me,” I choke out, tears spilling hot and fast again. “Please.”
Another wave of pain tears across my lower back, wrapping around my belly like a tightening vise. I sink onto the toilet lid because if I stay standing, I will fall.
“Tell me where you are, love,” he says, still impossibly calm. “I’ll answer you after that.”
“At home,” I whisper, crying so hard it hurts.
I hear the roar of an engine, his car. Of course he was already close. Of course he was waiting in the shadows like he always does. It should scare me, but the only thing I feel is relief.
“It’s true,” he says quietly. “Who told you?”
A sob bursts out of me, raw, shocked, animal. I clamp a hand over my mouth but it doesn’t stop anything.
“Oh my God,” I sob. “Why didn’t you ever tell me?”
“You didn’t want to know, love.” His voice is soft but firm, the way it gets when he’s trying to keep me from unraveling. “And while it mattered at one point, I would’ve found another way to make you forgive me.”
My stomach clenches again, sharp, crushing, and panic surges with the pain. “Am I in danger?” I gasp. “Are the babies in danger?”
“No.” His answer is instant, confident, deadly sure. “You’re not in danger. Those people can’t get to you,” he says, voice smoothing into that lethal calm I’ve only ever heard when blood is already in the water. “Or to our babies.”
Another stab of pain rips through my back and settles like fire under my ribs. I fold forward, clutching my belly, breathing like I’m drowning.
“To get to you, and our babies,” he says quietly, like he’s trying not to wake something darker in himself. “Baby, they’d have to get through me first.”
There’s a long breath, the kind that sounds like he’s picturing bodies. “And I’m not a man you get through,” he adds, voice tightening. “I’m the wall they break against.”
I want to believe him. God, I want to.
But the pain spikes again and I can’t think anymore. It’s too much. My body is folding in on itself, shaking, screaming without sound.
“Now breathe for me,” Lorenzo murmurs, the calm thread in a hurricane I can’t see through. “Please, baby. Calm down.”
I open my mouth to answer, to say yes, I’m okay, but instead a sharp, involuntary scream tears from my throat.
“Serena?” His voice spikes with panic. “Talk to me, baby. Don’t go quiet on me.”
But I can’t.
My body won’t obey.
All I can do is clutch my stomach and pray the world doesn’t fall apart before he gets here.
I feel the warm liquid before I register the pain.
At first it’s a rush of heat down my thighs, familiar, terrifying.
But then it keeps going.
Pouring.
Pooling.
My breath catches.
No.
No, no, no.
I force my eyes downward and what I see knocks the air clean from my lungs.
Red.
Pure red.
Not water.
Not amniotic fluid.
Blood.
“Oh my God, please no!” The scream tears out of me. “It’s blood, I don’t know what to do, it’s blood!”
Panic swallows every part of me.
My heart is trying to crack through my ribcage.
I can’t breathe.
I can’t think.
The dogs are barking at the door in frantic harmony with my lungs.
“Serena, tell me what’s going on,” Lorenzo demands through the phone. He’s trying to sound calm, but I can hear the panic strangling the edges of his voice.
“I think I’m losing them!” My voice fractures. “I think I’m losing them because there is so much blood!”
Another bolt of pain cuts into my spine so sharply I fold over, unable to hold myself up.
The bathroom door bangs open.
Bianca and my mother burst inside, two completely different expressions twisted into the same shape of horror.
“Dio mio, no!” Bianca cries, and I hear Lorenzo shouting something through the phone, distant, frantic, helpless.
Bianca whirls toward the hallway. “Call the nurse! She’s in her room!” she orders Leo, voice cracking. “Now!”
Footsteps thunder away, and Bianca drops down beside me, her hands trembling as she brushes hair away from my soaked face.
“Serena, darling, stay with me.” Her voice is gentle but shaking so hard it barely holds together. “You’re going to be okay. Please, stay with me.”
The blood keeps coming.
I can feel it, warm and thick and wrong, and something inside me breaks.
“I think I’m losing them,” I sob, voice barely recognizable as my own. “Please, please—”
Leo returns with the nurse sprinting behind him, already snapping on gloves. She takes one look at me, one look at the floor, and everything about her body language shifts into emergency mode.
“Ma’am, step aside, please,” she tells Bianca sharply.
Bianca obeys, but her hands hover near me like she’s fighting instinct not to hold on.
The nurse kneels and takes my phone from my limp fingers, raising it to her ear. “Mr. Moretti, she’s in distress. I’m with her. She’s not alone,” she says firmly, and for a moment, hearing someone else in control makes me want to collapse into the tile.
The nurse presses her hands to my belly, checking position, checking tension, checking God knows what, and looks up at me.
“Serena, listen to me.” Her voice is steady, professional, grounding. “An ambulance is already en route. We’re going to the hospital. You’re not alone.”
Everything blurs.
Bianca’s terrified eyes.
My mother’s pale face against the doorframe.
The dogs howling like they can feel every second of this with me.
My heart is racing so fast I can’t tell what hurts more, the pain, the terror, or the thought I will never survive losing them.
And somewhere through the chaos, through my crying, through the blood, through the impossible agony, I hear Lorenzo yelling my name into the phone like he’s trying to carve open time and space to get to me.
“Mrs. Moretti,” the doctor says, and the title hits me like a physical blow.
Mrs. Moretti.