Chapter 15 – Noa
The world filters back to me in pieces—sound first, then sensation. A rhythmic beeping. The faint hiss of air-conditioning. The crisp scent of antiseptic, clean and clinical. My body has turned to stone.
Then, warmth.
Not from the blankets tucked around me, but from a presence, unmistakable to me, teetering just beyond my reach. I pry my eyes open, lashes fluttering, and the room comes into focus.
Matías is right in my line of sight. He’s seated beside my bed, his posture rigid, his elbows braced against his knees.
His hands are steepled together, fingers pressed to his lips, a picture of troubled repose.
His dark eyes lock onto mine the second I stir, pinning me in place before my mind can catch up.
The moment my gaze fully meets his, he’s on his feet.
I try to push myself upright, but my body protests. Soreness hums beneath my skin, and my throat is dry as dust. “What happened?” I croak, my voice barely above a whisper.
His features are burdened with undiluted concern, pinching and puckering them. “You tell me,” he grunts.
Before I can answer, the door swings open, and a middle-aged doctor steps inside, already flipping through the chart in his hands.
His expression is impassive, detached, betraying nothing but efficiency as halts at my bedside.
His gaze flicks over me briefly before returning to the notes in front of him.
"Se?ora Castillo," he announces, his tone brisk, almost distracted. "Congratulations. You’re pregnant."
The world tilts sideways, and my stomach drops so violently it feels like I might be sick all over again.
I can hear my own breathing too loud, too shallow, rushing in and out like the tide in a hurricane.
My lips part, but no words come. My throat closes around the syllables before they can form, choking in the space between what I know and what I thought I knew.
Pregnant.
The word pounds in my skull, over and over again, crashing like waves against brittle rock. I’m pregnant.
It doesn’t make sense. It does. I know it does, but I can’t process it. My fingers curl against the sheets, gripping them like an anchor to tether me to the moment before this one. The one before everything changed.
The air crackles like a live wire. My heart’s fallen to the freezing pit in my stomach.
I look up dazedly and find Matías isn’t breathing.
He doesn’t move. Doesn’t react. He stands perfectly still, so very still, his hands gone slack at his sides, fingers dangling lifelessly.
Then—the shift.
He steps back, and the sturdy grace of it is jarring. He looks at me like I just pulled a gun on him. Like I just put a bullet between his ribs. Yet I’m the one who feels shot, pain lingering on the periphery as shock overtakes every nerve in my body.
I don’t know what I expect him to say. I don’t know what I want him to say. But he doesn’t say anything. His face is a mask of iron; the only giveaway of his own shock is the way his throat bobs, the way his teeth grind. The way his eyes burrow into mine, like salt in an open wound.
He takes another step back, like the first just isn’t enough. The floor may as well cracking beneath me, and swallow me whole now.
It doesn’t.
His voice whips through the sterile air, a lethal, stinging force. "Say that again," he orders the doctor, though he doesn’t tear his eyes from me.
The doctor hesitates. Faced with Matías’ rankling ire, his professionalism wavers obviously. Nervously, he clears his throat. "She’s pregnant."
Matías exhales sharply, a sound that isn’t relief, nor anger—just…
something breaking inside him. He turns away, his shoulders rising and falling with each uneven breath.
His hand drags down his face, fingers digging into his jaw as if trying to ground himself, to stop something from slipping loose.
His eyes scream what we both know: there is no way it is his. Biology doesn’t work that way.
I sit up too fast, my pulse a frantic staccato. "Matías, I didn’t—"
He turns back to me, and a chill wracks through me at the frank, brutal resignation that plagues his weary face.
His eyes burn into mine, but they don’t see me.
He looks right through me, now. His head is somewhere else.
On this problem. An equation he’s solving in real-time, dissecting piece by piece.
I know he’s going to hurt me, now. I just don’t expect him to so bluntly ask: "Is it his?"
I freeze. The breath I had been about to take lodges in my throat, strangling me from the inside out. The words don’t make sense at first. They don’t register. They can’t.
"What?" The word is a whisper, barely there, a fragile thing caught in the space between us. Matías prowls closer, his presence an eclipse, swallowing the light, the air, everything.
Detached.
Dangerous.
Icy.
"Don’t fucking lie to me, Noa," he warns when my lips part, as if I’ve got one in my mouth, burning at the tip of my tongue already. As if I’ve planned this.
I shake my head, trying to catch up, trying to piece together the fractured logic that led us here. "What are you talking about?"
"Tomás was supposed to marry you," he bites out. "You were his. You said you weren’t a virgin, it makes sense."
I flinch. The past, a wound still festering, rips open at the edges.
Matías doesn’t stop.
His voice drops to a whisper, a breath away from my skin, from my soul. He takes my silence as confirmation, and I still can’t manage a single word. Even as he concludes, "And now, you’re pregnant."
Each word is a separate blow, splintering bone and reason alike.
His next breath is a warning. A promise of ruin. "So, tell me. Is. It. His?"
My heart beats forcefully within my chest. The room shrinks, squeezing the breath from my lungs as it does. I try to speak, but my throat constricts, sealing the words within.
“Please,” I gasp. My voice barely makes it past my lips, raw and trembling.
Matías scoffs and the derision is palpable.
It transforms his face in real time, and it’s all I can do to just watch his eyes go cold right in front of me.
Until he’s left looking at me like I’m a stranger.
Like I’m nothing at all to him. All the progress we’ve made reduced to a faraway fantasy now, rendered irrelevant.
A cavernous numbness spreads through my chest. I may as well be freezing to death from within, arrested in the icy disdain he regards me with now. I don’t have to guess at that. He tells me himself when he sneers, “You should’ve told me before I married you. I would’ve let you keep the bastard.”
There’s no fecund ground left within me for mortification or pride to survive.
Nothing can keep the tears that sting my eyes at bay.
The sight of him distorts, and even that isn’t mercy enough.
Not when I can see the blurry shape of his body as Matías turns and walks out, leaving, without looking back.
No hesitation. No second glance.
I know, without a shadow of a doubt, this is the beginning of the end.