Chapter 39
Dual POV
Killian POV
The sub-zero wind howled across the porch, carrying the sting of crushed hemlock and freezing mist.
"Get up, Castaneda."
Her voice wasn't loud, but it cut through the roaring gale like an axe blade through thin ice.
"You're not dying on my aunt's deck."
I didn't argue. I pushed my palms against the wet pine planks, my limbs trembling with a violent, uncoordinated palsy that made my teeth chatter against my split lip.
My knees were numb blocks of wood, the joints screaming as I dragged two hundred and twenty-eight pounds of soaked bone and muscle off the porch.
I stumbled over the wooden threshold, my boots leaving gray streaks of melting slush on the braided rug in the entryway.
The heavy pine door closed behind me with a soft, final click.
The warmth inside the cabin hit my skin like a physical blow.
The air smelled of seasoned birch smoke, dried mint, and the clean vanilla scent that lived in the deepest chambers of my memory.
Steam began to rise immediately from the shoulders of my black thermal shirt, white plumes swirling into the orange light of the cast-iron woodstove.
I didn't step onto the clean hardwood. I didn't look toward the sofa.
I sank straight down onto my knees on the braided rug before the hearth, keeping my head bowed between my shoulders.
I felt like an infection in her sanctuary. A violent, ruined animal that had tracked blood and mud into a consecrated room.
My scarred hands rested palm-up on my thighs, the jagged cuts from the brass key stinging in the dry heat. I stared at the dark knots in the floorboards, listening to the soft, rhythmic pad of her wool socks as she moved behind me.
She was here. She was breathing the same air.
And I was terrified that if I lifted my eyes, the reality would shatter, leaving me back on the floor of my empty bedroom with her key cutting into my palm.
* * *
Nadia POV
The dry birch heat from the stove wrapped around the small living room, competing with the smell of wet wool, melting road slush, and the raw copper tang of his bleeding knuckles.
I walked to the linen press, pulled down a thick gray cotton bath towel, and picked up the steaming mug of mint tea from the pine table.
I crossed the rug, stopping three feet from where he knelt.
I set the mug on the floorboards and dropped the towel beside his knee.
Killian didn't move. He didn't reach for the warmth.
He stayed anchored to the braided rug, his massive shoulders hunched forward, dark hair dripping melting ice onto the collar of his soaked shirt.
His face was bowed toward his chest, his jaw shadowed with a week of black stubble, his breath coming in shallow, shuddering bursts that shook his entire frame.
The titan of The Pit had reduced himself to a heap of ash on my floor.
"Dry your hair," I said.
My voice was quiet, steady, stripped of the fury that had burned in the arena underpass.
Killian’s throat worked on a dry swallow, but his hands remained frozen on his thighs. "I don't deserve the towel, Nadia."
The gravel in his voice was a broken, scraped-raw ruin that scraped against my ribs.
"Stop it, Killian," I said, my chest tightening with an ache so sharp it made breathing feel dangerous. "Stop acting like a martyr on a cross. You stormed into Palmer's office, you broke Martin Cole’s jaw, you burned your draft standing—and you think that fixes what you said in that tunnel?"
His head sank lower, his forehead almost touching the wood between his knees.
"No," he whispered, the syllable wet and trembling. "Nothing fixes it. I know what I am."
"You don't know anything," I said, the words heavy as lead.
I turned to the rough-hewn console table beneath the window.
From the shallow drawer, I retrieved the small white cotton handkerchief.
I carried it back to the hearth, stepping directly into his perimeter until the hem of my oatmeal cardigan brushed the soaked fabric of his bicep.
I unfolded the cloth.
I set the white plastic digital stick flat on the low coffee table, right beneath his downcast eyes.
Beside it, I placed the printed laboratory intake sheet from the Duluth Community Health Center, stamped with this morning's clinical confirmation.
Patient: Gregory, Nadia.
Result: Positive.
Gestational Age: 7 Weeks, 3 Days.
Killian didn't move for two seconds.
Then his dark eyes drifted to the wood.
He saw the plastic casing. He saw the stark, dark pink lines burning in the rectangular window. He saw the bold black ink of the clinical confirmation stamped with the state seal.
Every muscle in his massive body locked into stone.
The violent shivering in his shoulders ceased instantly, cut off as if his heart had stopped beating inside his chest. The air in the cabin seemed to thin, turning cold and silent as a tomb.
"I was running to the tunnel on Saturday to give you that," I whispered, my voice breaking on a ragged edge of unshed tears.
Killian didn't breathe.
"I bought the test at dawn," I said, my left hand coming up, resting flat and firm over my lower abdomen beneath the thick knit of my sweater.
"I ran through the blizzard to The Pit because I thought we were an iron wall.
I thought that if you knew... if you knew we were having a baby...
we could face Cole's blackmail together. "
A single hot tear tracked down my cheek, dripping onto the sleeve of my cardigan.
"And you looked at me," I choked out, the memory tearing through my breastbone like an open-ice check, "and you called me an eight-thousand-dollar parasite."
* * *
Killian POV
The floor beneath my knees dropped out into a bottomless, roaring abyss.
My vision whited out, a blinding, high-pitched screech detonating behind my eardrums that obliterated the sound of the wind, the crackle of the woodstove, and the thump of my own pulse.
A baby.
The two dark lines burned into the plastic like hot branding irons.
Gestational Age: 7 Weeks, 3 Days.
Thirty-five days.
The night of the blizzard at the house on the bluffs. Her small body pinned under mine on the navy sheets, her fingernails in my hair, her breathless cries swallowed by my mouth while the storm shook the cedar walls.
My flesh. My blood.
Her life.
A sledgehammer slammed directly into the center of my sternum, crushing the breath from my lungs in a violent, agonizing gasp that rattled my teeth.
She had been running to tell me.
She had been carrying our child in her belly when she turned that concrete corner, breathless, cold, her coat clutched tight to her middle.
And I had kicked her into the dirt.
I had looked at the mother of my child and called her a whore who traded my family's trauma for an honors degree.
The horror that tore through my skull was an absolute, blinding agony that shredded the last remaining scrap of my humanity into ribbons.
I didn't speak. I couldn't speak.
My hands hit the braided rug.
I crawled forward on my knees across the wool, dragging my two hundred and twenty-eight pounds across the floorboards until I reached her bare feet.
I didn't grab her waist. I didn't pull her down.
With shaking, calloused fingers slick with sweat and old blood, I reached out.
My broad palms hovered for half a second, terrified that my touch would leave a bruise, before I pressed both hands flat against the lower expanse of her stomach over the soft oatmeal knit of her cardigan.
The fabric was warm.
Beneath my palms, beneath the sweater, beneath the soft curve of her belly, the truth lived.
A life.
Our baby.
A violent, jagged convulsion ripped through my shoulders.
I leaned forward, burying my face into the wool over her knees, my forehead pressing hard against her shins.
The dam inside my chest didn't break; it disintegrated.
Ragged, broken sobs tore from my throat, raw and suffocating, shaking my entire six-foot-four frame with a savage, weeping agony that vibrated straight through the floorboards.
Hot, scalding tears washed over the stubble on my jaw, soaking through the knit of her sweater, wetting her bare skin beneath.
"I'm sorry," I wept into her knees, my hands curling into the sides of her cardigan, holding onto her like a drowning man clutching the edge of a raft. "God, Nadia... I'm sorry... I'm so sorry..."
The enforcer was dead. The captain was dead.
There was only a ruined, broken father on his knees in the dirt, weeping for the miracle he had almost murdered with his pride.
"You have my soul," I choked out, my lips pressing desperate, frantic kisses against the knit over her stomach, my hands trembling against the sacred warmth of her belly.
"You have every dollar I ever make. You have every breath in my chest. I will crawl for you, Nadia.
I will spend every second of the rest of my life on my knees earning this.
Just let me protect you. Let me protect our baby. "
The cabin was silent, save for the sound of my ragged weeping and the crackle of the birch logs.
I stayed there, pressed against her shins, my hands welded to her stomach, my face buried in her sweater, waiting for the blow that would send me back into the dark.
It didn't come.
Slowly, hesitating for a single, fragile heartbeat, a small, warm hand settled onto the back of my head.
Her soft fingers slid into the wet, dark curls at my nape, her palm curving over the base of my skull with gentle, unyielding pressure, holding me anchored against her belly.
A single, hot tear splashed down from above, landing on the scarred skin of my right temple.
I leaned deeper into her touch, my arms wrapping like iron bands around her thighs, weeping into the warmth of our life as the storm outside finally lost its teeth.