Chapter 19
Birdie
I wake to an empty bed. For one disoriented second, I don’t know what’s wrong. Only that something is. The room feels too quiet, the air too still, my skin damp with a cold sweat that makes the sheets cling to me.
Then a sharp pain rips through my side.
A gasp tears out of me. I curl, one hand flying to my stomach, but the movement only makes the pain flare hotter. My breathing turns ragged. No. When I look down, there’s blood on the mattress.
My whole body goes cold. Oh no.
No, no, no.
I shove the covers back with shaking hands and try to stand. Another wave of pain knifes through me so hard my vision blurs. Sweat beads along my forehead and slides down my spine. I make it halfway upright before my knees buckle.
I hit the floor so hard a broken sound escapes me.
The bedroom door flies open.
“What in the hell was—”
“Help,” I moan. “Something’s wrong.”
Lorenzo is across the room before I finish speaking. He rounds the bed and drops to his knees beside me, all the color draining from his face when he sees the blood.
“Cara,” he says, and the word is gutted. “What is it?”
I lift my trembling hand, streaked red. “I need a doctor.”
Understanding slams into his expression. Then something darker. Fear. Real fear. But I catch his wrist before he can move. His eyes lock on mine.
“I can’t lose this baby.”
The words come out cracked and desperate, and saying them aloud like that makes everything too real. The blood. The pain. The possibility opening beneath me like a grave. For one terrible heartbeat, Lorenzo just stares at me.
Then his hand closes over mine, hard and warm and shaking. “You won’t.”
He says it like an order. Like he can command fate itself if he glares hard enough. He stands and shouts for the doctor so loudly the windows seem to vibrate.
The next minutes dissolve into fragments.
Lorenzo carrying me back to the bed with impossible care.
Fresh sheets yanked loose.
Voices in the hall.
The pain rising and falling in sickening waves.
His hand at the back of my neck, his voice in my ear, low and fierce and uselessly comforting.
“Stay with me.”
“Breathe.”
“Look at me, Elizabeth.”
I do, because I can’t bear to look at the blood.
By the time the doctor arrives, I’m shaking so badly my teeth chatter between breaths. She’s silver-haired and unsmiling, with a leather bag in one hand and the kind of authority that makes everyone else in the room move aside without question.
“Out,” she snaps at the men hovering near the door.
Lorenzo doesn’t budge. “I’m staying.”
She gives him one cold look. “Then be quiet and do exactly as I say.”
For once in his life, he obeys.
The examination feels endless. I grip the blanket in both fists and stare at the ceiling while the doctor asks clipped questions.
“When did the bleeding start?”
“What have you eaten?”
“Have you fallen? Been struck? Taken anything?”
Taken anything. The question lodges in my chest, but I’m too frightened to understand why. Finally, she straightens and listens low against my belly with her Doppler. The room goes silent.
Then a rapid, fragile sound fills the air.
A heartbeat. My heartbeat stutters in response and Lorenzo goes motionless beside the bed. The doctor’s expression remains stern, but it softens by a fraction.
“The baby is alive,” she says.
A sob breaks out of me.
She sets the instrument aside. “You are bleeding, and you need rest. But no, you are not losing this baby today.”
Today. Not the promise I want, but enough to keep me breathing.
Lorenzo closes his eyes briefly, as if the words hit him somewhere deep. When he opens them again, they are blazing.
“What caused this?”
The doctor strips off one glove. “Stress could contribute. So could dehydration. So could something ingested.” Her gaze sweeps the room with new sharpness. “What has she had to drink?”
On the bedside table sits a glass of water. I hadn’t thought about it. I drank from it in the night, half-asleep and grateful for anything to ease the dryness in my throat.
The doctor reaches for it then frowns.
“This was given to her?”
Lorenzo’s voice drops into something deadly quiet. “Why?”
She lifts the glass toward the light. The water is slightly cloudy. Not enough to notice casually. But now that she’s holding it up, I can see it—the faint haze drifting through it, wrong somehow against the clear glass. My stomach turns.
The doctor brings it to her nose and inhales once. Her whole face changes.
“What is in this?”
Lorenzo takes one step forward. “What?”
She smells it again, more carefully this time, then sets the glass down with deliberate precision, like it has become dangerous in her hand.
“This is not plain water,” she says.
A chill skates over my skin.
Lorenzo’s jaw locks. “Tell me.”
“It smells medicinal. Bitter.” Her eyes flicker to me, then back to him. “I can’t identify it by scent alone, but it smells like something that should never have been near a pregnant woman.”
My hand flies to my stomach.
The doctor’s voice sharpens. “Did you put anything in this yourself?”
“No!”
How could she think I would do this to myself?
The doctor continues, each word clipped and precise. “Whatever this is, it may have been enough to trigger cramping and bleeding. Enough to threaten the pregnancy.” She looks at Lorenzo without blinking. “If she drank this, someone may have tried to make her miscarry.”
A shudder tears through me.
Lorenzo hears it. He turns back to me at once, and whatever murder is in his face gentles by a fraction when he looks at me.
“Elizabeth.”
I shake my head. “No.”
His voice is rough. “No what?”
“No one was supposed to know.” Terror claws up my throat. “No one. Who did you tell?”
The doctor is already opening her bag again, pulling out vials, swabs, something to collect a sample. “I’m taking this for testing. She needs fluids, monitoring, and complete bed rest. And if there is anyone in this house you do not trust—”
Lorenzo laughs once. It’s the coldest sound I have ever heard.
“Doctor,” he says, eyes never leaving mine, “at this moment, I trust no one.”
Even me, I think.
The doctor’s gaze flickers between us, sharp enough to cut. She seems to understand more than either of us says out loud.
“I’ll be in contact,” she says. “And she is not to be left alone.”
Her words hang in the room for a beat after she goes.
Then it is just the two of us again.
The silence feels different now. Heavier. Not with rage, exactly. With suspicion. With grief. With something so cold it makes me want to pull the blankets over my head and disappear beneath them.
My hand trembles as I reach for his.
“You don’t think I did this to myself, do you?”
For a second, he just looks down at my fingers on his skin. Then at my face.
He doesn’t answer. That is somehow worse than if he’d accused me outright.
Hot tears fill my eyes. “Lorenzo.”
Nothing.
My throat tightens until it hurts. “Why would anyone do something like this?”
“That,” he says, his voice rough and unreadable, “is what I’m wondering.”
He slips his hand from mine and stands. The loss of his warmth is immediate and cruel.
“Rest.”
Panic spikes so fast it leaves me breathless. “Please don’t leave me. Not like this.”
His face hardens.
“And how,” he asks, every word clipped, “would you like me to leave, Miss Miller?”
The name hits like a fist to the ribs.
Miss Miller.
Not cara.
Not Elizabeth.
Not anything soft.
Just the name he uses when he wants me to feel the distance. When he wants me to know I have disappointed him. When he wants to remind me that whatever fragile thing was flickering between us is dead now.
I could call him on it. Could spit back something vicious and watch us both bleed a little more. But suddenly I’m too scared for anger.
So I just whisper, “Go.”
And he does. He turns, walks to the door, and leaves without looking back. The latch clicks shut behind him with terrible finality. The room feels enormous after that.
I curl into myself, drawing my knees up carefully, wrapping both arms around them as if I can somehow fold around the pain and keep it from reaching the small, fragile life inside me.
For a moment, all I can hear is my own breathing.
Then, very softly, I press a hand to my stomach.
“It’s going to be okay, little one,” I whisper, my voice breaking. “Mama is going to make sure.”
Saying it out loud steadies me.
I close my eyes and try not to think about the blood. About the cloudy water. About the doctor’s face when she smelled the glass. About Lorenzo’s silence when I asked if he thought I’d done this to myself. But my mind won’t stop circling the same thought.
Someone knew about the baby.
A fresh wave of fear rolls through me, colder than the first. Not fear of Lorenzo. Not even fear of Dante. Fear of whatever has been moving in the dark around me all this time. Because if someone wanted me to lose this baby, then this is bigger than Lorenzo’s jealousy. And bigger than me.
And I don’t know who to trust.
Not even the man sleeping in the room next to mine.
Especially not the man sleeping in the room next to mine.
Except he isn’t sleeping. I know it before I hear the shouting downstairs.
It’s faint at first. Just a low rumble carrying through the house.
Then another voice rises. A man’s. Cut off almost immediately by something sharper—Lorenzo, barking an order in that lethal tone of his that brooks no argument.
I go still.
Another door slams. Then footsteps. Several pairs. Fast. The house is waking up. No. Not waking. Locking down.
I push myself upright with care, ignoring the protest in my side, and strain to listen. My pulse ticks harder with every muffled sound below. A woman crying. A man saying, “I swear to God, sir—” and then Lorenzo’s voice cutting through it like a blade.
I can’t make out the words.
Maybe that’s worse. Because my imagination fills in the gaps easily enough. He believes someone in this house tried to poison me. And Lorenzo Conti, when betrayed, he becomes merciless.
I close my hand over my stomach.
“Don’t worry,” I whisper again, though I am no longer sure whether I’m speaking to the baby or myself.
Downstairs, something crashes.
I flinch.
Then the shouting stops.
A long, terrible quiet follows.