Chapter 24
SIENNA
I wake slowly, as if I’m coming back through water.
At first I don’t know where I am. Everything feels heavy. My mouth is dry. My body hurts in a deep, distant way that makes it hard to tell where one pain ends and another begins.
Then memory returns.
The lawn. The blood. The bright lights. The rush of hands and voices.
I turn my head and see Viktor sitting beside the bed. He looks like he hasn’t moved in hours. Shirt sleeves rolled, tie gone, face drawn with exhaustion. The sight of him pulls me all the way awake at once.
“The baby.” My voice is rough enough that I barely recognize it.
He leans forward immediately. “She’s alive.”
The relief is so strong it almost feels painful.
“She’s okay?”
He takes a second before answering, and in that second I know he’s choosing honesty over comfort. “She was taken to the NICU. Since she came early, and they want to keep a close eye on her.”
“She?” I ask.
His expression softens. “Yes. It’s a girl.”
A girl.
I stare at him, then at the ceiling, and then the tears start before I can stop them. I don’t even try. They slip into my hair and down the sides of my face while I lie there feeling wrecked and emptied out and somehow fuller at the same time.
A girl.
Viktor stays where he is. He doesn’t rush to fill the silence or tell me not to cry. He lets me take it in.
After a moment I manage, “Did you see her?”
“Yes.”
I wait.
He understands and goes on. “She cried as soon as she was out. Small voice, but loud enough to make her opinion known.”
A laugh catches in my throat and comes out broken. “That sounds like my child.”
His mouth shifts. “I thought so too.”
I look at him more closely then. The tiredness in his face. The strain he isn’t hiding. The fact that he’s still here.
“Did you hold her?”
This time he pauses for a different reason.
Then he says, quietly, “Yes.”
For some reason that gets me worse than anything else.
I picture it too easily. Him with this tiny new life in his hands, trying to be careful with something so small. The thought presses right against my heart.
“What was she like?”
He leans back a little, looking at me as if he’s trying to find the best words and doesn’t quite trust any of them. “Tiny,” he says. “Furious. Very much alive.”
I smile through the tears.
My hand drifts to my stomach under the blanket. The emptiness there feels strange. Wrong, almost. I didn’t expect that part, how quickly I would miss the weight of her inside me even while being grateful she’s out.
Viktor notices.
“She’s still yours,” he says.
I look back at him.
It’s such a simple thing, but it steadies me more than it should.
“I want to see her.”
“I know.”
“When will they let me?”
“As soon as they think you’re ready.”
That sounds too far away already, even though I know he’s trying to make it sound close.
I let my eyes close for a second, then open them again. “You stayed.”
He gives me a look like the question itself surprises him. “Of course I stayed.”
“You didn’t have to.”
“I know.”
There’s no effort in the answer. No grandness. He says it like it was never a choice.
My throat tightens all over again.
I look down and realize his hand is resting near mine on the blanket. Close enough to take if I want it. Not claiming anything. Just there.
I slide my fingers into his, and he closes his hand around mine at once.
That one small contact nearly undoes me more than the rest of it.
Maybe because it’s quiet. Maybe because after everything that happened between us, after all the hurt and confusion and terrible timing, he’s still here and still solid and still somehow the first person I wanted to see when I woke up.
“She’s really here,” I say, more to myself than to him.
“Yes.”
“A daughter.”
“Yes.”
I laugh softly. “I really thought it was a boy.”
I look at him for a long moment, my hand still in his, my body sore and heavy and nowhere near steady, but my mind suddenly clearer than it has been in days.
“Are you unhappy?” he asks me.
“No,” I say. “Quite the opposite, actually. It’s the happiest I’ve been in a long time.”
The look he gives me makes me want to hide, and at the same time bask under it like the sun. I wish I could turn back time and go back to the moment we met on the plane. I wish I had never walked away. I wish I had never listened to Anna.
My memories of cold, lonely doctor appointments would have been replaced by a loving man standing by my side, helping me through sleepless nights and tired, swollen feet.
“Can I ask you something?” I say.
“Yeah?” he says.
“How much do you trust your sister?”
He tenses at that. “Why do you ask?”
“The champagne yesterday,” I say. “I asked the caterers about it.”
His face changes. “When?”
“This morning. Before everything happened.”
He waits.
“They said it wasn’t part of the original breakfast plan. Someone from the groom’s family specially requested it.”
“Who?”
“They couldn’t remember clearly. At first, they said the groom’s aunt.”
He stays still, watching me.
“I think it was Anna,” I say quietly. “Or at least, I think she was at the venue earlier than she told everyone.”
Viktor doesn’t speak.
“She lied about that,” I continue. “And she lied about knowing me.”
His eyes cut back to mine. “Knowing you?”
I take a breath. “She was on the flight.”
The room goes very quiet.
“What?”
“I didn’t know who she was then. After I left your cabin, she stopped me near the bathroom. She told me to stay away from you.”
His face hardens. “Anna said that?”
“Yes. She said you were dangerous. That I didn’t know what kind of man you were. I was already overwhelmed, and then she said that, and I panicked.” My voice drops. “That’s why I ran when we landed.”
Viktor looks away, and I can see the realization hit him.
“She never told me,” he says.
“No. And at the wedding, she pretended she didn’t recognize me.”
He turns back to me slowly.
“I don’t know what she’s hiding,” I say. “But she is hiding something.”
For a moment, neither of us speaks.
I force myself to keep going. “There’s something else. About the baby.”
His attention locks onto me.
My heart starts pounding.
“Ethan isn’t—”
The door opens.
Maksim walks in with a clipboard and stops when he sees us. “Bad timing,” he says. “But I need to check on my patient.”
I close my mouth and feel the words fall back inside me, warm and unfinished.
Viktor looks at me for one second longer, and I know he knows. Not what I was going to say exactly, but that I was finally about to say something that mattered.
He lets go of my hand and stands.
Maksim’s eyes move between us once and give away nothing. He has seen too many hospital rooms and too many badly timed emotions to be interested in this one right now.
“I’m going to check the incision, ask you some mildly annoying questions, and then, if you behave, I’ll see about getting you to the NICU.”
That gets my attention immediately. “I can see her?”
“Possibly,” he says. “Are you feeling any better?”
I nod.
Maksim goes to work. Blood pressure. Temperature. Questions about pain, dizziness, nausea. He checks the dressing, says something to the nurse that sounds reassuring enough for me not to panic, and then finally says the words I’ve been waiting for.
“You can be wheeled down for a short visit. Short means short. Got it?”
I nod again.
He continues to ask me other questions, and I answer as best I can, still half-aware of Viktor’s presence at my side, still aware of the unfinished thing sitting between us like a held breath.
Then his phone rings. He takes it out, glances at the screen, and his face changes.
I see the name before he turns it slightly away.
Yuri.
Viktor answers at once, listens for only a few seconds, and then says, “I’m coming.”
He looks at me after he ends the call.
Not long. Just enough.
“I have to go.”
I nod, though the words make something inside me sink. “Is it bad?”
“Yes,” he says, and then, because he seems to know that answer is too bare to leave with me, he adds, “I’ll come back.”
Before I can say anything more, he leans down and presses a kiss to my forehead. It’s brief and careful and somehow more intimate than anything else we’ve done.
Then he’s gone.
The room feels different the second the door closes behind him.
Maksim pretends not to notice. He checks the dressing again, asks one of the nurses for something, then looks back at me and says, “You can go see the baby for a few minutes, but only if you promise me you’re not about to start behaving like someone who didn’t just have emergency surgery.”
“I’ll be good.”
He gives me a look. “That was not convincing.”
Still, half an hour later, a nurse helps me into a chair and wheels me down the corridor.
The NICU is warm and bright in a way that makes my throat tighten before I even see her. There’s a hush to the room, but not silence. Machines hum softly. Nurses move in practiced lines. Everything feels fragile and watchful.
Then we stop beside her incubator.
For a moment I can only stare.
She’s so small.
That’s the first thing. Smaller than I imagined, smaller than anything in me knew how to picture.
Her little cap sits low over her head, her skin looks almost too soft to belong to the world yet, and her chest rises and falls in quick tiny breaths that make me want to put my whole body around her and never let anything come near her again.
“She’s doing well,” the nurse says quietly. “Strong heart rate. Breathing support just for now. She’s telling us what she needs.”
I nod because I don’t trust my voice.
The nurse opens one of the side ports and says, “You can touch her hand.”
I slide my fingers through carefully, terrified of being too much for her, and brush the back of her tiny hand.
She curls her fingers around one of mine.
That’s it.
That’s the moment my heart leaves my body and settles somewhere outside me forever.
“Oh,” I whisper. Tears stream down my face. “Hi,” I murmur to her. “Hi, baby.”