Chapter Eight
Arkady
The drive to St. Mary’s Hospital is a blur of streetlights and guilt.
I’m still buttoning my shirt when I hit the first red light. My fingers refuse to cooperate, slipping off the buttons twice before I get them right. The fabric smells like Mirabel—citrus and skin and sex—and it makes leaving her even worse.
The phone call replays in my head, Dr. Cullen’s careful, measured voice: Mr. Laurov, if you’d like to see the child, now would be the time.
Not your child. Just the child.
Because nobody knows if Aleks is mine. Not really.
I ran through the scenarios when Rosanna first told me she was pregnant.
The timing was possible—we’d slept together exactly once, months before the wedding, both of us drunk and desperate and looking for something neither of us could name.
But possible doesn’t mean probable. Rosanna had been with other men. I knew that. She knew I knew.
It didn’t matter then. It doesn’t matter now.
What matters is that Rosanna is dead. Suicide, the doctor had said after an initial investigation. Her car careening off the road along a stretch that shouldn’t have been dangerous, going too fast to have been unintentional. And her father, the boy’s next of kin, is dead too, thanks to me.
My hands tighten on the steering wheel as I stare ahead at the road.
The light turns green, and I accelerate, weaving through late evening traffic with the kind of reckless focus that would make Stefan curse at me.
But Stefan isn’t here. Nobody is. Just me and the voice in my head listing all the ways I’ve destroyed this child’s life before it even began.
St. Mary’s looms ahead, all glass and steel and fluorescent lighting that turns night into artificial day. I park in the first spot I find, not bothering to check if it’s legal. Let them tow it. Let them fine me. I’ll buy the whole damn lot if it means getting inside faster.
The automatic doors slide open, and antiseptic hits me like a wall. Hospitals smell the same everywhere—disinfectant trying to mask decay, trying to pretend death isn’t always waiting in the wings.
The lobby is busy despite the hour. Pregnant women waddle past with partners hovering nervously at their elbows.
A man paces near the elevators, phone pressed to his ear, arguing in rapid Spanish.
A nurse pushes a wheelchair toward the exit, the elderly woman inside clutching a teddy bear with both hands.
Life continuing while mine falls apart.
I cross to the reception desk, where a tired-looking woman in scrubs barely glances up from her computer.
“I need to see Dr. Cullen,” I say.
She types something, frowns at her screen. “Do you have an appointment?”
“No. He called me. About a patient.” I lean forward, lowering my voice. “Tell him Arkady Laurov is here.”
Recognition flickers across her face. She picks up the phone, murmurs something I can’t hear, then nods. “He’ll be right down.”
“Where’s the prenatal department?”
“Third floor, but you can’t—”
I’m already moving toward the elevators. She calls after me, but I don’t stop. Can’t stop. Every second standing still is another second Aleks is alone up there, another second I’m not where I should be.
The elevator is empty when I step inside.
I hit the button for the third floor and watch the doors slide shut, sealing me in with my reflection in the polished steel.
I look like shit—hair disheveled, shirt still slightly askew, stubble gone from neat to rough.
I look exactly like what I am: a man who left his woman naked on a library floor to deal with consequences he can’t escape.
Third floor.
The doors open onto a different world. Softer lighting. Pastel walls. The antiseptic smell is weaker here, replaced by something sweeter. Baby powder, maybe. Or hope.
I step out and immediately spot Dr. Cullen coming down the hallway. He’s younger than I expected—mid-forties with graying temples and the kind of steady demeanor that probably keeps panicked fathers from losing their minds in delivery rooms.
“Mr. Laurov.” He extends his hand, and I shake it, noting the firm grip. “Thank you for coming.”
“Where is he?”
No pleasantries. No small talk. Just the question that’s been eating me alive since the phone rang.
Dr. Cullen’s expression softens with something that might be sympathy. “Follow me.”
We walk side by side down a corridor lined with windows looking into various hospital rooms. I catch glimpses of new mothers holding bundles, visitors cooing over tiny wrapped forms, nurses checking monitors with gentle competence.
Normal births. Normal families. Normal lives where babies come from love instead of wreckage.
“The mother,” Dr. Cullen says carefully, “left explicit instructions that you be contacted. She wanted you to know about the child.”
Instructions. The word sits wrong in my mouth. Rosanna planned this. Wrote it down before she got into that car. Made sure I’d be dragged into this mess even if she couldn’t face it herself.
I don’t say any of that. Just nod.
“Here we are.”
We stop at a door marked NICU—Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. Through the window, I can see rows of clear plastic bassinets, each one containing something impossibly small. Nurses move between them like guardians, checking tubes and monitors and making notes on clipboards.
Dr. Cullen swipes his ID card, and the lock clicks open. “He’s in the back row. Third from the left.”
I step inside, and the temperature drops. They keep it cool in here—better for the fragile systems of babies born too early or too sick.
My feet move without conscious thought, carrying me past the first row, then the second. And then I see him.
Third bassinet. Third from the left.
Aleksander Tulikov. The name card says it right there in neat handwriting. Not Laurov. Tulikov. Rosanna’s name, not mine. Because legally, officially, I’m nothing to this child.
But Christ, when I look at him—
He’s so fucking small. Smaller than I imagined.
Smaller than should be possible for something human.
His face is wrinkled and red, eyes squeezed shut in sleep.
One tiny hand rests near his cheek, fingers curled into a loose fist. A blue knit cap covers his head, making him look even more fragile than he already is.
My ribs feel too tight, like someone’s wrapped chains around them and pulled. The air won’t come right.
I don’t move closer. Can’t. If I touch that glass, if I acknowledge this is real, then I’ll have to deal with what comes next. The questions. The responsibility. The fact that I might be looking at my son.
Or I might be looking at a stranger’s child whose mother I failed so catastrophically that she chose death over facing me.
“Would you like to hold him?”
I turn to find Dr. Cullen standing beside me, watching my face with that same careful sympathy.
“What?”
“Hold him,” he repeats. “Skin-to-skin contact is beneficial, even at this stage. And you’re family, regardless of the paperwork.”
Family.
The word is a knife.
“No.” I shake my head abruptly. “Not yet.”
He nods like he expected that answer. “Whenever you’re ready.”
We stand there quietly, both of us watching Aleks sleep. He makes small sounds—not quite cries, just little huffs and sighs that prove he’s breathing, he’s alive, he’s here when his mother isn’t.
“Do you want a DNA test?” Dr. Cullen’s voice is neutral, clinical. Just a doctor asking a medical question. “We can take a sample from inside the baby’s cheek. It’s non-invasive. Results take about two weeks.”
Two weeks to know for certain if this child is mine. Two weeks to have it confirmed in black and white, no more doubt.
Two weeks where this kid stays in limbo while I decide if he’s worth claiming.
I look at Aleks again. Trying to see Rosanna in his features, trying to see myself.
But all I see is a baby who didn’t ask to be born into this mess.
A baby whose grandfather I killed. Whose mother killed herself because I left her with nothing—no Sergei to care for her, no family to support her, just the weight of depression and a future she couldn’t face.
I did this. Not directly—I didn’t force her to put her foot on that accelerator—but I caused the fight with Sergei that started the dominoes falling. I’m the reason this child is here, alone, with a dead mother and a question mark where a father should be.
The guilt is a living thing inside me. Worse than the guilt over Mishka, because at least with my brother, I can tell myself it was an accident. This? This is consequence. This is what happens when you play god with other people’s lives.
The only way to stop the gnawing—the only way to live with myself—is to take responsibility. To pick up the pieces I broke and try to glue them into something that resembles a life.
“No.”
The word surprises us both. Dr. Cullen’s eyebrows rise slightly. “No to the test?”
“No to the test.” I turn to face him fully. “I’ll take him home. I don’t give a fuck about the DNA, I’ll take him.”
“Mr. Laurov—”
“How long before I can have him?”
Dr. Cullen studies me for a moment. Whatever he sees in my face must satisfy him because he nods slowly.
“Give me a couple of days. I need to arrange the paperwork, make sure all the medical clearances are in order. He’s healthy—no complications aside from being slightly premature, and he’s past the danger point now. But there are procedures. Protocols.”
I nod. Don’t trust my voice right now.
“I’ll call you when everything is ready,” he adds.
One last look at Aleks through the glass. That tiny chest rising and falling. Those miniature fingers. A whole life ahead of him that I’m about to become responsible for.
What a beautiful thing.
And what a catastrophic start.