CHAPTER 301

CHAPTER 301
ALEXANDER

Dr. Rogers finally took his gloves off. The soft snap of latex cut through the quiet room, mixing with the steady, rhythmic beep of the monitors before he spoke.

"I did what I could." He said it plainly, no dramatics.

"Like I said, during her captivity we don't know the full extent of the trauma her mind and body took, or exactly how that's going to affect her pregnancy going forward. What I can tell you is we've stopped the hemorrhage. Her vitals are stabilizing. The pregnancy, as of right now, is still viable."

Still viable.

I turned the words over in my head, and somehow they felt colder every time.

Still viable

Clinical. Detached. Almost painfully small for something that had just become my entire fucking world.

Our baby. A child I hadn't even known existed an hour ago, reduced to two words on a medical chart.

Like it was a statistic. A number.
A heartbeat that either crossed some invisible threshold or didn't.

I knew why Rogers spoke that way. He had to. Precision was part of his job. He couldn't give me promises he couldn't keep just because I needed to hear them.
But fuck, hearing it still hurt.

“Viable.” I repeated the word quietly, staring at him. “That's it? That's what we're calling my baby? Not safe. Not okay. Not going to be fine.” My throat tightened. “Just... viable?”

“I know it's not the word you want.”

“No. It's not.”

“But it's the word I can stand behind.”

His voice remained calm, even as everything inside me was coming apart.

“I'm not going to tell you she's fine when I don't know that. I'm not going to tell you the pregnancy is safe when it isn't out of danger yet. Viable means your baby is still fighting, Alexander. It means there is still a heartbeat. It means there is still something here for us to protect.”

I stared at him. “And that's all you can give me?”

“Tonight?” He nodded once. “It's all I can promise you honestly.”

That shut me up. Because I hated the answer. But I couldn't fault him for it.

I looked back at Alina.

Her chest rose faintly beneath the blankets.

Once.

Twice.

My gaze dropped to her stomach. Our baby.
My chest tightened. “Fine.”

I reached down and carefully rested my hand over hers.“Stay viable, then.”

My thumb brushed over her knuckles.
“Both of you.That's an order.”

A faint, humorless breath escaped me.
“Your father is apparently going to be an extremely fucking unreasonable man.”

I looked at her face. “So you two better get used to me.”

"Her breathing isn't labored," he continued, glancing up at me with something close to reassurance.

"That's a good sign. Given everything her body's been through, we've given her a sedative to keep her under for now. It'll manage the pain, keep her heart rate steady, and give her system a chance to recover without the added stress of consciousness. Right now her body needs rest more than it needs to be awake."

He checked the IV line, adjusted the flow rate slightly, and kept the same clinical steadiness.

"She'll likely stay sedated through the night, possibly into the morning. Given the blood loss and the prolonged stress her system's been under, that's exactly what it needs."

He glanced at the monitor, then back to me.

"Boss, you need to rest too. You've lost a significant amount of blood yourself.
We'll monitor her closely — pulse, temperature, any further bleeding, every thirty minutes for the first several hours. If she stays stable, we'll space the checks out after that."

"Then we monitor her every fucking minute." My eyes never left her face. "Thirty minutes is your schedule. It doesn't mean your team stops watching her in between. If her breathing changes, if her color changes, if her fingers so much as twitch wrong, I want eyes on her every single second — and I want to be the first person told. Not the second. Not the fifth."

I tightened my grip around her hand, careful of the IV taped beneath her skin.

"And don't tell me to rest, because that isn't happening. I'm not closing my eyes tonight, tomorrow, or any night after this one until I know she's out of danger. So if you're building toward some version of this conversation where I go lie down and trust someone else to notice if something's wrong — save your breath. I will be sitting in this exact place, watching her breathe, for as long as it takes."

Rogers opened his mouth, and I cut him off before a single word got out.

"I could have lost her tonight. Both of them." My voice dropped, rough, shaking with everything I'd been holding back since that door came down.

"If Santos had been half a second faster with that knife against her throat. If I'd been half a second slower reaching her. Half a fucking second, Rogers — that's all it would have taken for tonight to end completely differently." I looked up at him, and whatever he saw in my face made him go still.

"I am not going to be the reason she's alone for even a second more, while her body's still fighting this hard to hold onto both of them. So don't ask me to sleep. Ask me anything else. Not that."

I bent down and pressed a kiss to the skin just beside her ear, careful of the bruising along her jaw. "I won't leave her alone."

Rogers watched me for a moment, something unreadable passing behind his eyes before he spoke again.

"Okay." Measured, professional, no more argument in it. "But Mrs. Dimitri needs complete bed rest for at least a week, until I can examine her again and confirm she's stable enough to move around. No walking more than necessary. No stress. Nothing that elevates her heart rate or puts strain on her body. The pregnancy is holding for now, but it's fragile. Any additional trauma — physical or otherwise — could change that."

Bed rest. For a week. Of course. Because surviving a kidnapping, nearly bleeding out, and scaring the entire household half to death apparently wasn’t enough for one night.

Now we had to convince my wife that lying still for seven straight days was a medical necessity—and not some personal insult designed specifically to ruin her life.

As if Alina had ever listened to a single thing I’d told her since the day I met her.

I’d told her to stay down at the orphanage.
She hadn’t. And she’d been taken.

That one moment of her not listening was the entire reason we were sitting in this room right now—machines beeping, her too pale and too still against sheets that smelled like antiseptic instead of her.

So no. There was no version of history where Alina followed instructions. There was only the version where I gave one, and she did exactly whatever the hell she wanted instead, and I spent the aftermath cleaning up the consequences with my own hands.

Fuck. I almost laughed at the idea of enforcing a week of bed rest.
God, I wanted to hear it.

I wanted her mouthy and impossible. Rolling her eyes at me from this bed, telling me I was being ridiculous, that she felt fine, that a week of bed rest sounded like something I'd invented purely to torture her for sport.

I wanted her calling me an overprotective bastard, the way she always did whenever I so much as looked at her the wrong way after a bad day. I wanted every single ounce of that stubborn, sarcastic, infuriating defiance that had made me fall for her in the first place, aimed straight back at me like a weapon I'd happily let her use.
Anything. Anything except this silence,

Rogers' gaze dropped to my leg. "Now let me look at that." He nodded toward the half-finished work Alexis had been doing.

"She's doing a solid job cleaning it, but I want to see the wound myself."

"Wow. A solid job. High praise from the man with an actual medical degree." She glanced at him sideways, deadpan.

"I'll add it to my resume, right under 'has personally sewn Alexander Dimitri back together more times than his own tailor has fitted him for a suit.'"
She dabbed at the wound, unbothered by his hovering.

"You want to double-check my work, be my guest. I'm sure the bullet hole looks very different through a doctor's eyes than it does through mine, seeing as I've only patched up, what, a dozen of these? Give or take."

Rogers pulled on a fresh pair of gloves with a practiced snap and leaned in, examining the wound carefully while Alexis held the light steady.

"Bullet went straight through," he said after a moment, clinical. "Clean entry and exit, no fragmentation that I can see. You're lucky it missed the major vessels—And for the record, it does look good. Clean work. You could've have a real career in this..."

Alexis huffed, half-offended, half-pleased despite herself. "I have a real career. It's called Keeping Alexander Alive, Incorporated. Unpaid position, terrible hours, worse benefits... At this point, stitching up Alexander is practically a hobby."

She waved him off with the needle.
"I've got the stubborn bastard. You go make sure my sister-in-law and her tiny passenger stay alive."

Rogers held her gaze a second, then gave a short nod and stood, stripping off his gloves.

"All right. Keep it clean and dry. If the swelling increases or he spikes a fever, call me immediately."

He gathered the last of his supplies, murmured something to the nurse about follow-up bloodwork in the morning, and paused at the door before leaving.

"Alexander." I looked up. His expression had shifted into something almost gentle, entirely unlike the clipped urgency he'd carried through the last hour.

"For what it's worth — she fought hard tonight. Her body did everything it could to protect that pregnancy under conditions that would have broken most people completely. That matters. It's not a guarantee of anything, but it matters."

He left without waiting for a response. The door eased shut behind him, leaving just the nurse moving quietly around the monitors, and me sitting in the chair I'd refused to leave, staring at my wife's still, pale face like I could will her awake through sheer force of need.

The nurse finished her checks a few minutes later, adjusting the blanket around Alina's shoulders with the kind of careful, practiced tenderness that told me she'd done this before — for people whose stories hadn't ended nearly as well.

"I'll be right outside," she said quietly. "Call if anything changes. Her breathing, her color, a fever. Anything at all."

"I will."

She left too. Then it was just the two of us, finally, the room gone quiet except for the soft, steady beep of the monitor and Alina's shallow breathing beneath it.

I climbed further onto the bed beside her, mindful of every line and wire, and pulled her carefully against my chest — needing the contact more than I needed almost anything else right now, needing to feel her heartbeat against my palm as proof that everything Rogers had just told me was real.

That she'd made it through. That whatever came next, we'd get the chance to face it together.

"I've got you." My voice cracked against her hair, raw from a night that had asked more of me than any single night ever should. "And I'm not going anywhere. Not tonight. Not any night after this one."

I lay there a long while, listening to the small, steady sound of her breathing, feeling the faint, stubborn flutter of her pulse beneath my hand, and let myself believe — just for a moment, just enough to survive the rest of the night — that the worst of it was finally, truly behind us.

That whatever came next, we'd face it the way we'd faced everything else.

Together. Both of us. All three of us, now.