33. Ava
33
Ava
Nico takes me straight to the hospital with so much urgency, I might as well be on death’s door. I’m mostly just battered and bruised, and I could tough that out with just painkillers and sleep, but we’re both worried about the same thing. When I lift up my shirt to find a soft blue bruise growing on my baby bump, I nearly vomit.
I am fussed over by nurses that give Nico nasty looks and who won’t let him enter the room with me. At first, he’s very sweetly oblivious to why everyone is giving him a death glower, but between my bruised face and old bruises, I know exactly what everyone thinks.
A four foot eleven nurse steps between us as I’m led into an exam room.
“You need to wait out here,” she says to him, no-nonsense. I stop, but the hands on my arm and back steer me deeper into the room. They leave Nico on the other side of the door.
“Nico, it’s okay,” I call out, but I don’t think either of them hears me as Nico gets belligerent with her, making everything worse.
“Get the fuck out of my way, my wife and kid are in there!”
“Sir, if you don’t step back, I’m calling security.”
“Nico,” I call again, but the nurses shut the door before I can tell him to calm down.
Once I am isolated and prone on a cold exam table, in nothing but a papery hospital gown, the gentle interrogation begins while they examine me: am I safe? Do I need help? Do I have a place to go? My head throbs dully as I answer their questions, trying to seem earnest, but I’m just so exhausted from all this, and my one lifeline just got snipped away from me.
While they get ready for the ultrasound, I am showered in pamphlets and the numbers for help lines and resources. I try to be grateful for everyone’s consideration and care, but if I get one more sympathetic glance or knowing look, I might raise the night’s body count to two.
A few more nurses are called in, although it feels more like a safety measure than necessity.
“How do you know him?” one of the new nurses asks, all smiles, while fishing for another way to get rid of Nico while she hooks up the ultrasound machine. I glance at the shadow pacing behind the crack under the door, my heart tight.
“He’s my husband.”
Once I give my blessing and assure them, up and down, that he had nothing to do with it—which no one believes anyway—they reluctantly allow Nico into the room with me. His presence is the only thing staving off my panic attack. He curls his hand around mine and refuses to sit. He stands over me and watches every move the hospital staff make, silently kissing my fingertips, my knuckles, the inside of my wrist. He distracts me from all the urgency around us, the beeping machinery and monitors being gently clamped to me one at a time.
The doctor enters, with a high bun and shrewd eyes that have seen too much to be bothered anymore. The woman ignores Nico entirely, but she talks sweetly to me. With cold jelly on my stomach and the press of a wand, I watch the woman’s face, looking for the truth, some reaction in those stern eyebrows. I forget to breathe for a long minute.
“The bruising seems superficial. I don’t see any damage to the placenta, no obvious separation from the uterine wall. Which isn’t to say it won’t happen, but even if it does, sometimes the cases are minor and healable.”
Sometimes .
Nico’s hand tightens on mine.
My eyes linger on the monitor, on the fuzzy image that’s so hard to make heads or tails of, but just knowing that it’s there somewhere in all that flickering static—I can’t look away.
My arms must have caught the worst of what Thaddeus tried to do, and I don’t think I’ll see the full damage until tomorrow.
“I’m going to have you come back in three days to double check, and right away if you experience any bleeding or cramping before then. From what I can see on the ultrasound, and though it’s a little early to be sure of anything, you still have a healthy, growing baby.”
The relief makes me weepy and exhausted, and when I look at Nico, his eyes are transfixed on the screen. I see the intensity of those eyes, and I know—Nico feels just as strongly for our baby as he does for me. Insane .
He clutches me in his arms and peppers kisses against my head as the relief sets in.
But the doctor frowns over my blood pressure and says that if I carry these numbers into my third trimester, I am at risk of serious complications for me and the baby. (And there is nothing that will spike your blood pressure faster than being scolded for having high blood pressure just an hour after being in a kill-or-be-killed scenario— of course I have high blood pressure , I want to scream. I am lucky to have blood pressure at all! )
But something about those words has made Nico go very still, body tense and face pale.
“Pre-eclampsia?” he asks.
My six foot five cage fighter pulls the word pre-eclampsia out of the air like performing a magic trick. I look at him as though he’s just transformed into a different person. Nico knows the names of cars, and guns, and men on most-wanted lists. Why he has this of all things in his vocabulary makes me double take, unless he went to some night classes I don’t know about, until I remember why I have never met his mother. My heart sinks.
The doctor hums.
“We would need to see if these numbers remain high in the long term, but it is a complication that could develop at this rate, and something we need to keep a close eye on.”
Nico’s expression remains closed off for the rest of the examination, even to me, while his grip stays steady and sure on my hand. Cold gel is wiped from my belly, and one by one, the monitors unhook. I am discharged with strong orders for “bed rest and ‘taking it easy.’”
I change into my clothes, the air in the room tense.
“Ava,” Nico says suddenly, his voice ragged. I turn around and Nico steps close, his huge hand sprawling over my belly and spreading his warmth into me as I’m so cold in this room. “You don’t have to worry about anything, Ava. Nothing.” He drops to his knees in front of me. “I swear on my life, no one is ever going to touch you again. You’re going to be taken care of day and night. Anything you want in the world, baby girl, you point and ask. It’s yours. I’m going to love you until you’re sick of love.”
I smile, my heart clenching hard.
I know he’s rattled, maybe even afraid, but he won’t show it. Not when I need him to be strong.
I gaze down at him and poke a finger gently against his chest. “I want that.”
His smile is pained, his eyes glossy.
“You’ve had that for a long time now.”
Gently, Nico sweeps me up into his arms, and says we’re going home.
“Nico, I can still walk ,” I laugh, but he won’t hear it. He won’t even put me in a wheelchair. He carries me like a princess out of the hospital, ignoring the entire world that stares at us along the way, as if the only world that matters is already right there in his arms.
We drive home, and Nico obeys the speed limit every mile, asking me a dozen different questions: have I been to the doctor? Am I eating well, and the things I’m supposed to eat? Have I bought anything for the baby? Just as I start to feel guilty that some of those answers aren’t what they should be, his hand closes over mine and he says, “Good. You still left me some things to take care of.”
The shock of killing a man hasn’t really set in yet. Or maybe this is the shock. I don’t know. I haven’t really processed much about it yet, but I know it isn’t grief I will be feeling when I finally do feel something. For now, killing Thaddeus is just a dull ache in my upper arm, after I plunged the words with love into his chest dozens of times.
We pass back through the demolished gates and weave around the wreckage Nico left in his wake.
“Your poor car,” I sigh.
The custom one-of-one still sits, ruined, at the edge of the house. Someone has turned the engine off.
“The car was worthless,” Nico says, drawing my confused gaze. “Nowhere to put a car seat in that thing.”
It gets me crying all over again.
Marcel greets me when we make it back, anxiously asking over my health. We hug tightly and I thank him, over and over, for sparing Nico. He doesn’t answer, but he rubs my back and assures me that he isn’t angry with me. Even Salvatore, who has barely so much as touched me before, hugs me now. I realize, suddenly, that I am family . There is soon to be a direct blood link between me and him.
In all this chaos, I hadn’t thought to ask Nico about his rivalry with Marcel. About his position in the family. About the men he owes. After a long bath, while cleaning the blood out from under my nails, I finally dare to ask him,
“Nico. What about your position in the family? Aren’t you—”
I can’t even finish the question before he shrugs it off.
“The only position I want in this family is as your husband and the father of your kids.”