Chapter 10 #2
"I was so scared," she says.
"I know."
"Not of the ultrasound. Of how I'd feel when I saw her."
"I know."
She takes a breath. It comes out shaky. "I thought maybe I'd see her face and freeze. That my body would do what it's been doing—the thing where it goes cold and far away, the way it did for months after—and I'd see her and I wouldn't feel anything. I was so scared that's what was going to happen."
"What happened instead?"
She looks at the dark screen. The image is gone, but I can still see it the way she can—that small profile, that floating hand.
"She's mine," Lashes says. Her voice cracks on it. "She's not his. She's mine. I love her, Nova. I love her so much."
I lean over and wrap both arms around her. She breaks against my shoulder. The kind of sobs that have been waiting months to come out.
Her hand finds my back and grips my shirt, and she cries into my collarbone while I hold the back of her head and rock her like a smaller version of herself.
"Hope," she says into my shoulder. "Her name is Hope. I'm keeping her name. I'm keeping her."
"I know, mama. I know."
"I'm going to be her mother. The best kind. The kind that shows up."
"You already are."
She cries until she's done, and then she pulls back and wipes her face with both hands and laughs once—wet and watery—at the wreck she's made of my shirt.
"Sorry."
"Don't apologize."
She lies back against the bench and rests her hand flat on her belly. Her breathing slows in the quiet kitchen. Outside in the courtyard I can hear Imani talking to Brick in Spanish.
Lashes closes her eyes. "I want her to come already," she says softly. "I want to hold her."
"When the time is right, you will."
She doesn't open her eyes. Her hand stays on her belly. She falls asleep there, sprawled on the bench with the sun cutting through the kitchen window across her face, and I cover her with the folded sheet and let her have it.
* * *
On Sunday morning, an envelope arrives.
I'm in Doom's room when it happens. We're in bed, it’s late morning, and his hand drawing absent patterns on my hip, mine flat on his chest counting his heartbeat without meaning to.
The window is cracked. The compound sounds drift in. A bike starting up at the gate. Compass' radio in the garage. Ruby's voice from the kitchen.
Then voices that don't fit.
Sharp ones. Compass first, then Python—quick, layered, a sudden weight in the way the men are speaking that wasn't there a minute ago.
Doom is out of the bed before I realize what’s happening.
He's pulling on jeans, then a shirt over his head, his Sig coming off the dresser and onto his hip in one motion.
"Stay here," he says.
"No."
He doesn't argue. He doesn't have time, and he knows me well enough by now.
I throw on shorts and one of his t-shirts and follow him out of the room.
The common room is filling up.
Boulder is inside the front door with his arms crossed.
Python's at the dining table with a pen in his hand, examining a manila envelope.
Square, smudged with dirt at one corner.
"Found it at the gate," Compass is saying from the doorway. "Wedged in the chain-link, just inside. No bike heard, no car. Somebody walked it up."
Python pulls the flap open with the pen. He's careful, not touching it directly. He shakes the contents out onto the table.
Photographs.
Five of them. Glossy and sharp.
I'm closer before I realize I'm moving.
The first photo is Doom standing at the compound gate, the day Hatchet rode up.
The angle is from a vehicle parked across the road—long lens, telephoto.
Doom's hand is on his Sig. His face is flat. You can see the dust of the road behind him.
They had a second man. While Hatchet was at the gate, someone else was watching.
The second photo is Brick getting out of the ultrasound truck this morning. In Aldama, maybe six hours ago.
The third is Boulder with Xiomara on his shoulders, crossing the courtyard at CatsAndJava. There's a date stamp in the corner. It’s four days old.
The fourth is Mei. On campus, walking to her morning class. Backpack on, earbuds in. She has no idea anyone is behind her.
The fifth is me.
Me, standing in front of the university nursing building. A couple of days ago.
I remember the outfit—black jeans, the green top with the buttons. My hair down. I'd been on the phone with Mom. I remember the call.
I remember not feeling watched.
The room has gone quiet.
I can hear my own breathing. Doom's too. The click of the screen door swinging in the kitchen, the rooster from down the street whose timing is terrible.
"There's no note," Python says.
"They don't need one," Doom answers.
His voice is low. Flat. The voice that lives in the part of him I've only seen pieces of.
He picks up the photo of me. He looks at it for a long moment. The muscle in his jaw works once. Then he sets it down on the table, deliberate, lining the edge up parallel to the others.
He turns to Boulder.
"Where's Amara?" he asks.
"I'll get her," Boulder says, already moving.
Python is still looking at the photographs spread across the table. His hand is flat against the wood. His knuckles have gone pale.
"My daughter was at CatsAndJava that day, with Boulder and Xiomara," he says quietly.
"I know," Doom answers.
Compass is staring at the photo of Mei. His face has gone the color of a man who has just realized something and isn't ready to say it out loud yet.
Doom comes to me.
He doesn't touch me at first. He stands in front of me with that stillness of his, his dark eyes scanning my face the way he scans everything—for damage, for what needs attention.
"Hey," he says quietly.
I can't make my mouth work.
"Look at me, Nova."
I look at him.
"They photographed you to scare me." He keeps his voice low, even, just for me. "That's what this is. They're letting me know they can reach you. They're not going to touch you. They want me to think they can."
"They got close enough. Don’t you think?"
"Yeah. They did."
"Doom—"
He shakes his head once. His hand comes up and cups the back of my neck. His thumb traces along my jaw.
"I'm not letting them anywhere near you," he says. "You hear me?"
"I have school."
"We'll work it out."
"I'm not stopping my life because your father is a coward."
He almost smiles.
"There's the woman I love," he murmurs.
Amara comes through the front door behind us.
She walks straight to the table without stopping. Her eyes move across the photographs in the order Python laid them out—Doom, Brick, Boulder, Mei, me.
She doesn't say a word.
She picks up the last photo. The one of me. Studies it, then she sets it down and looks up.
"Church," she says. "Twenty minutes. Everyone. I want the prospects there too."
The room moves. Boulder heads for his phone. Python starts gathering the photos back into the envelope, careful, the same way he opened it. Compass goes to find Razor.
Ruby appears in the doorway with a wooden spoon still in her hand and a look on her face that says she'd been listening for the past five minutes and is two steps ahead of all of us.
Amara stops in front of me on her way to her office.
She puts a hand on my shoulder.
"You're not going back to that apartment alone," she tells me. "Not tonight. Not until we know what they want."
"Mei—"
"Mei's coming here too. I'll send Compass for her, and she can bring some bags."
She squeezes my shoulder once and keeps walking.
I stand in the main room in a t-shirt that smells like Doom, look at the table where photographs of the people I love were just laid out by an enemy MC, and think about Hatchet's voice carrying across a compound gate.
She's doing good, you know.
He meant it.
He meant all of it.
This isn't over. It hasn't even started.