CHAPTER 300

CHAPTER 300
ALEXANDER

Baby?

The word barely registered before a high, vicious ringing filled my ears, drowning out everything else in the room. 

I stared at Alina. Her face was frighteningly pale against the pillow, blood staining the sheets beneath her, doctors moving around her with frantic, practiced urgency. Their voices blurred together into noise. All I could hear was that one word, looping over and over.

Baby.

She was pregnant. My wife was carrying our child, and we hadn't even known. Fuck. She would've told me the second she suspected — would've come running to me with those wide, worried eyes, probably convinced I was going to lose my mind over it. 

She would've been nervous, maybe scared, stumbling over the words while I teased her until she finally smiled. I could see it so clearly it hurt. I would've picked her up. 

Spun her around this room like an idiot. Kissed her until she complained she couldn't breathe, and told her she'd just given me the best news of my entire life.

Instead, this was how I found out. Not on some quiet morning with coffee going cold beside us, not with her sitting close, nervous and smiling, guiding my hand to a stomach still flat, still hiding our secret. 

Not with laughter, not with tears of happiness — but here, in blood, in chaos, with doctors fighting to keep her alive, the truth buried inside a sentence some other man had to say for her because she couldn't say it herself.

My chest seized. Our baby. A child I hadn't known existed, hadn't held, hadn't met, hadn't even had the chance to imagine until thirty seconds ago. I didn't know whether to laugh, cry, scream, or tear the entire room apart with my bare hands.

My fingers tightened around hers. "How—" My voice cracked. I swallowed hard and tried again. "How far along is she?"

"Too early to say for certain, not with her this unstable." Rogers didn't slow down, didn't look up.

"Judging by the bleeding pattern, I'd guess early. Possibly very early — she may not have even known herself yet."

She may not have even known herself.

Something in my chest cracked wide open at that. A part of her, a part of us, existing for however many weeks without either of us aware — growing quietly in the middle of everything that had gone wrong these last few days. 

The running, the fighting, the terror, the blood loss, all of it happening around something neither of us had gotten the chance to protect, because we didn't even know it needed protecting.

Alexis's hand closed around my arm, gripping hard enough that I should have felt it. I barely did.

"Alexander." Her voice was thick, careful, like she was holding herself together through sheer force of will. 

"Look at me." I couldn't. My eyes stayed fixed on Alina. 

"They're going to be okay," she said firmly. "Do you hear me? Your stubborn wife, and that tiny Dimitri she's carrying." Her voice cracked slightly before she forced a crooked smile. 

"I'm going to be an aunt, and I refuse to let either of them ruin my plans by dying on me. I have very specific aunt duties lined up, and neither of them gets to cancel them."

Tiny Dimitri. 

Our baby. A real, living piece of both of us — a little person who might have Alina's eyes, my temper, her sarcasm, my stubbornness. 

God help us all if they inherited every single one. The thought hit hard enough that I had to close my eyes, and for one impossible second I could almost picture it — small fingers wrapped around mine, Alina laughing somewhere nearby, a tiny voice calling me Dad. My throat tightened until breathing hurt.

I was going to be a father. The realization didn't feel real yet. It felt too enormous, too beautiful, too fucking terrifying, all three at once with nowhere for any of it to go.

I opened my eyes again, every ounce of me riveted to Rogers's hands as he worked over her, the monitor beside the bed spitting out numbers I didn't fully understand. Every time one changed, a nurse moved faster. Every time Rogers's expression tightened, my heart stopped along with it.

"Why is she bleeding?"  My eyes locked on Rogers. "Tell me what's wrong with my wife. And tell me what's happening to my baby."

Rogers kept his voice level, clinical — the tone of a man trying to deliver hard information as gently as the situation allowed. 

"During those hours in captivity, her body was under extreme stress. We don't know everything Santos did to her, but we know enough. She was dehydrated, exhausted, exposed to the cold, and subjected to significant physical and psychological trauma. Any combination of that can trigger complications this early in a pregnancy." My stomach turned over. He kept going, grim now.

"She was on a cold concrete floor, likely without adequate warmth or fluids for hours. Her body was already struggling to maintain itself, and pregnancy places additional demands on it. If she was struck, or restrained forcefully, or suffered any trauma to her abdomen, that could have made everything worse."

He paused, watching my face carefully before continuing. 

"Right now we can't tell you which factor caused the bleeding. It may have been one thing, or several things happening together. What matters is that her body is under enormous strain, and we're doing everything we can to stabilize her and protect the pregnancy."

I stared at him. "And the baby?"

"In my professional opinion," he said, quieter now, "even if we stop the hemorrhage and stabilize the pregnancy tonight, we won't know for days — maybe longer — whether the trauma caused damage we can't see yet. Stress like that doesn't just endanger a pregnancy in the moment. It can affect development going forward, depending on how far along she is and how her body processes the cortisol overload she's likely still riding through right now." 

He held my eyes, steady, direct despite the weight of what he was saying. 

"I'm telling you this because I don't want to give you false comfort the second we get her stable. Stopping the bleeding buys time. It doesn't guarantee an outcome. What she needs now, beyond anything I can do in this room, is calm. Safety. Rest, once she's conscious. The less stress her body has to process from here forward, the better a chance this pregnancy has of continuing safely."

I barely registered Alexis's hands still working on my leg. The pain was there, sharp and relentless, but it had gone meaningless, distant, nothing compared to the fear sitting like a physical weight on my chest. My eyes never left Alina.

"They're going to be okay." My voice came out rough, almost pleading. "Right?"

Rogers paused, finally looking up at me. For a second he said nothing at all. Then his gaze held mine. "I'm doing everything I can for both of them."

Fuck. That wasn't an answer. That was the kind of sentence doctors gave you when they couldn't promise you anything, and I understood that even through the panic clawing up my throat.

My chest tightened around a different kind of pain entirely. If I'd been faster. If I hadn't wasted those precious minutes on Arthur, sitting there listening to him negotiate while she bled somewhere I couldn't reach. 

If I'd gotten to her before Santos ever had the chance to hurt her — maybe she'd be awake right now, telling me I was overreacting, laughing about how I'd torn apart half the city looking for her. 

Maybe we'd have gotten this news differently. Together. Happy. Planning names, arguing over whose eyes the baby would inherit, imagining every small detail of a life we hadn't even had the chance to start building yet.

We hadn't gotten any of that. Santos had stolen it before either of us even knew there was something worth stealing.

And now, because I hadn't reached her soon enough, because I'd been too fucking late by however many minutes it had cost, I was sitting beside my wife watching doctors fight for the life of a child I hadn't even had the chance to meet. 

Our child. A child I hadn't held, hadn't met, hadn't done anything except learn existed in the middle of nearly losing them both. And somehow the thought of losing someone I'd never even had the chance to know hurt like I'd already loved them my entire life.

I pressed my forehead against hers. 

"Please." My voice broke completely. "Please, God — don't take my wife. Don't take our baby." For the first time in my life, I wasn't asking for mercy for myself. I was begging for theirs.

I gripped the edge of the bed so hard my knuckles went white,  "Save them." My voice came out low and fractured, barely holding together. 

"Both of them. Do you understand me? Whatever it takes. Whatever it costs. Bring every doctor in this fucking city if you have to. You save my wife, and you save my baby."

Rogers's hands never stopped moving, but his jaw tightened. "Boss, you need to understand something. If her condition deteriorates and we reach a point where—"

"I'm not negotiating." The words cut clean through the room. I leaned forward, voice dropping into something colder than I'd used all night. 

"You don't get to decide one of them is expendable. Not my wife. Not my child."

"Boss—"

"No." My grip tightened around Alina's hand until it ached. "You fight for both of them until there is nothing left to fight with. You use every resource you have. You call whoever you need to call. You wake every specialist in this country if that's what it takes." Rogers held my stare without flinching, and something in that steadied me half a degree.

"And if you think for one second I'm going to accept hearing that you 'did everything you could' while you still had something left to give—" My voice broke, but I forced the rest of it out anyway. "You'll answer to me."

Rogers went completely still for half a second. 

"You are the best doctor money can buy, and I am telling you right now — you earn every dollar I've ever paid you in the next hour, or God help me, you will not survive what happens after."

His eyes met mine, and whatever he saw there wiped the last trace of hesitation clean off his face. "Understood," he said, voice tight.

"Alexander." Alexis's hand closed around my arm again, firm, grounding, her voice low and steady despite the fear underneath it. 

"Let him work. Scaring him half to death isn't going to make his hands any steadier, and right now steady hands are the only thing keeping her alive."

I forced myself back, chest heaving, everything in me still screaming to grab Rogers by the collar and shake the promise out of him directly instead of just trusting he meant it. 

"Save them." Quieter now, the fury draining into something that sounded almost like begging. "Just — save them both."

Rogers held my gaze one more second. "I am going to do everything humanly possible for both of them, boss. You have my word."

My vision blurred, hot and sudden, and I let Alexis pull me back against the pillows with no fight left in me at all.

I had almost lost her tonight. I might still lose both of them.

I turned my face into her neck, closed my eyes, and breathed her in — dirt and blood and antiseptic and, somewhere underneath all of it, still unmistakably her.

I couldn't lose her now. I had already lost her once tonight, if only for a handful of hours that felt like a lifetime.

Never again.