20. Elena
Elena
I wake because something is wrong. Not from pain. Pain would almost be easier. Pain would be a clear thing. A signal. A problem with edges.
This is worse. This is the sick, shapeless certainty that arrives before thought, before language, before emotion. My body knows first. My body drags me awake with that knowledge and leaves my mind stumbling behind it.
For a second, I lie completely still. Dark room. Curtains half open. A pale strip of streetlight cutting across the ceiling. The apartment quiet in the way it always is at this hour. The building around me asleep, the world unchanged.
My hand goes to my stomach, palm flattening there as if contact might tell me something useful. The curve is still there. Warm. Firm. Familiar. And yet, I know something is wrong.
I shift.
That’s when I feel it. Warmth. Too much of it.
A damp, spreading heat between my thighs that does not belong there, that my body recognizes before my brain will let itself name.
I go absolutely still.
No.
The word arrives whole and immediate.
No .
I do not move again. As if stillness might reverse it. As if denial might slow it. As if whatever has already started inside me can be persuaded to stop if I refuse to acknowledge it.
The warmth spreads, and my breath catches. Then I pull the covers back.
The sheets are dark.
At first, I don’t process what I’m seeing. My mind reaches for smaller, softer explanations.
Shadow. Bad light. Nothing.
Then my eyes adjust.
Red. Too much red. Not spotting. Not one of those little warnings women are told not to overreact to.
This is blood. Enough of it that my whole body seems to hollow out around the sight.
“Oh, God.” The words come out before I can stop them, thin and useless in the dark.
I press my hand harder against my stomach, as if pressure from the outside might keep something in place. Might hold everything together. Might matter. “Okay,” I hear myself say.
I don’t sound like myself. My voice is too high, too small.
“Okay.”
It isn’t okay. I know that immediately.
I swing my legs over the side of the bed, and more warmth follows. Fresher now, unmistakable, and panic hits me with such force that I nearly gag on it.
There is no gradual incline. No moment to gather myself. One second, I’m scared. The next, I am terrified.
My phone is on the bedside table. I grab it with hands that don’t feel attached properly, fingers slipping once against the case before I get a hold of it. Think .
Hospital.
Emergency.
Call someone.
But I’m already in my contacts. Already looking at the number. Already pressing it before I’ve fully registered that I’ve chosen it.
Emergency line. His line.
The phone rings once. Twice. Then: “Brennan.”
His voice. Low. Even. Awake immediately, despite the hour.
Something in me gives way so fast, it feels dangerous. I don’t waste a second.
“I’m bleeding.” No greeting. No explanation. Just the truth, blunt and ugly.
There’s no pause on his end. No reflexive reassurance, no softening.
“How much?”
“Enough.”
“Pain?”
“No.”
“Cramping?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. No. I…” My breath catches. “I don’t know.”
“Dizziness?”
“No.”
“How long?”
“I just woke up.”
The questions come hard and clean, each one stripping the panic down into something usable. I cling to that, to the order of it. To the fact that Cormac is acting like nothing has gone wrong that he can’t still manage.
Then there is the briefest silence. Measured. Controlled. And in that silence, I understand something instinctively, with animal clarity.
He is moving already.
“I’m on my way,” he says. No suggestion that I call anyone else, or meet him somewhere, or wait and see. Just certainty.
“Cormac—”
“Listen to me.” His voice sharpens. “Do not stand up again. Stay in bed. Keep your hips still. Keep pressure minimal. If the bleeding increases, tell me when I arrive. I’ll be there in under fifteen minutes.”
The line clicks dead. I stare at the phone. My whole body is shaking now.
Under fifteen minutes. That shouldn’t be enough to matter.
It matters, anyway.
I lower myself back onto the bed because he told me to, because following instructions feels like the only meaningful thing left. Because movement suddenly feels like recklessness, like betrayal, like something I might regret forever.
The ceiling swims above me. The room looks exactly the same as it did before I woke up. Same walls. Same lamp. Same book on the chair by the window. Same flowers on the table in the next room that I hated yesterday for being proof of his reach.
Now all I can think is that he made the apartment easier to survive in before I knew I’d need survival.
Blood . The word keeps repeating in my head. Blood means loss. Blood means danger. Blood means…
No . I don’t let the thought finish.
I press my hand to my stomach again, harder this time. “You stay,” I whisper, the words scraping my throat. “You stay.”
I don’t know whether I’m talking to the baby or myself. Maybe both.
The minutes are impossibly long. I count them, anyway.
One hundred and twenty breaths.
Then another fifty.
Then the knock comes, precise and controlled and so familiar, it almost splits me in half.
“Come in,” I call, because I can’t get up. Because he told me not to. Because now that he’s here, I don’t want him delayed by something as stupid as a locked door.
The door opens immediately. He is already moving when he comes into the bedroom, jacket still on, shirt collar open, expression set into something colder than I’ve ever seen on him before. Not detached. Focused. A different thing entirely.
“What happened,” he says.
“I woke up and—” I stop, because my voice is breaking. Because he can see the blood. Because there’s no point.
He’s beside the bed in two strides. “Stay still.”
The tone cuts through everything. No room for argument. Pure command.
I obey before I’ve even thought about it. He pulls the sheet back enough to assess. Nothing more. One quick, efficient look, and his jaw tightens once. “Movement?”
I swallow hard. “I haven’t felt anything.”
His eyes lift to mine, and this is the first moment he shows strain. Not in what he says, but in how absolutely still he becomes before he moves again.
He takes out his phone and calls emergency services with the same clipped authority he uses on everyone when he’s already decided what will happen next. “Nineteen weeks. Active bleeding. No reported severe pain. High-risk pregnancy. Stable presentation but urgent transport required.”
He never loses that iron control. I listen to his voice the way drowning people must listen to life-saving instructions.
He ends the call and looks at me. “Look at me.”
I do. His hand closes around my wrist. Firmly enough that I stop shaking for one second just because the contact gives my body something else to register.
“Stay with me,” he says.
“I am.”
That comes out as a lie, and he knows it, but he lets it stand. “Good.”
He releases my wrist only to move around the room with terrifying efficiency. Bag. Charger. Folder. Coat. Shoes. Medication list. In less than a minute, he has collected everything I might need, and the fact that he knows where all of it is should bother me more than it does.
Because right now, it only feels like rescue.
* * *
By the time the paramedics get there, he’s already packed for me. The ambulance workers ask questions. He answers half of them before I can. I should resent that, but I don’t have enough room left in me for resentment.
When they lift me, the world tilts, and fresh panic surges so violently that I grab at the nearest thing. Cormac’s hand catches mine immediately.
“I’ve got you,” he says.
Not soft. Not soothing. A statement. An assertion.
And because he says it like fact, I believe him.
The ambulance is all bright surfaces and contained urgency. The questions come. I answer what I can. The siren starts at some point, or maybe it’s already been on. I don’t know. The whole journey feels stretched and compressed at once, each second too long and somehow flashing by.
Cormac is beside me the entire time. Not touching me now, though not because he’s distant.
Because he’s watching me too closely for that.
Tracking everything. Blood pressure. My breathing.
My face. The line of the monitor. Every tiny shift.
He speaks to the paramedics like he belongs in the center of this, and in a practical sense, he does.
They defer to him accordingly. That should alarm me.
Instead, it only steadies me. Because everyone else is moving around the crisis. He is moving through it.
“Don’t tense,” he says to me when another wave of fear tightens everything in my body.
“I’m trying,” I choke out.
“Try harder.”
I almost laugh at the absurdity of it. It comes out as a strangled breath instead.
His eyes lock on mine. “Breathe properly.”
I do. Because he told me to. Because disobeying him feels impossible in this moment. Because every instruction from him sounds like something standing between me and catastrophe.
I hate how much I need it, but I do need it. Desperately.
The hospital is bright, loud, and far too public. That is my first coherent thought when they wheel me in. Too many voices. Too many people. Curtains instead of walls. Fluorescent light flattening everything into the same exposed shape. I can feel the loss of privacy immediately.
Questions. Names. Dates. Movement. A room that isn’t really a room. A bed. A monitor. Someone drawing blood. Someone else asking me to explain the bleeding again, like saying it often enough might make it less real.
Cormac stays. When one nurse starts to direct him toward the corridor, he says something low and clipped that I don’t catch and remains exactly where he is.