Chapter 279: Back in that kitchen again..

Indigo

I was back in that kitchen again.

The knife was already inside me before I could brace for it, the pain tearing through my side exactly the way it had the first time, hot and endless and impossible to escape. Nicolai loomed over me, his face twisted into that same sinister grin, but this time, when he finally pulled away, he didn’t fall. He didn’t collapse beneath me the way I remembered.

He simply turned, unhurried, something small and impossibly precious cradled in his arms.

A baby. Our baby.

He smiled down at me, cruel and delighted, rocking the child gently as if he had every right to hold it, as if it belonged to him and not to me. I screamed. I begged, I pleaded, promising him anything, everything, if he would just put my baby down, just hand them back to me, but every time I reached for him he dissolved further into shadow, slipping just out of my grasp no matter how hard I clawed toward him.

And still I kept bleeding, the pool beneath me spreading wider with every second, my limbs growing heavier, useless, pinned to the floor by something far stronger than exhaustion. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t fight. I could only watch him disappear, over and over, taking my child with him each time, and I kept begging into the emptiness he left behind long after there was nothing left of him to hear me.

I woke crying.

The scream transformed into a sob somewhere between the dream and the waking, and I jerked upright so violently the bed shifted beneath me.

Fabian was there instantly, his hands hovering near me, careful and uncertain. I almost flinched away from him on instinct, my body still trapped somewhere between the nightmare and this room, but something in me let go instead, let him fold me against his chest, his arms wrapping around me like they might hold the pieces of me together by sheer force alone.

I was still stuck there, though. Still stuck in the moment Fabian’s voice had told me I’d been pregnant, and that I’d lost it.

The dream had only dressed the truth up in a crueler shape. Fabian murmured something against my hair, low and soothing, but I felt nothing.

Not comfort, not relief, not even the fear that had chased me out of sleep. Just a vast, hollow numbness, and beneath it, something worse, a guilt so deep and total it felt like it belonged to my bones rather than my mind.

I had noticed the changes. The exhaustion. The tears that came from nowhere. The dizziness I’d waved off as stress, as fear, as everything except what it actually was. I had felt my own body shifting and I had looked the other way, too consumed by Nicolai and his chaos to ask myself the one question that might have changed everything. I hadn’t protected them. I hadn’t even known to try.

The guilt of that ran so deep it pushed me straight out of Fabian’s arms.

“I don’t have the right to be consoled,” I said, my voice flat, distant even to my own ears.

Fabian’s face crumpled instantly. “Baby, don’t push me away. Please.”

I only stared at him, blank, unsure of what he wanted from me. I had nothing left to give him.

Every part of me that used to know how to comfort someone else, how to reach for the people I loved, felt burned out and empty, scraped clean by everything the last few days had taken from me.

I pulled away from him fully then, sliding out from under the sheets, and made my way toward the balcony doors on unsteady legs.

I felt his eyes on me the entire way, felt the ache of him watching me leave without trying to stop me, but I couldn’t turn back. I slid the door shut behind me and sank down onto the cold tile, drawing my knees to my chest, letting the weight of everything finally settle over me like something suffocating.

He didn’t leave me out there alone for long.

I heard the door slide open behind me a few minutes later, followed by the quiet shuffle of him lowering himself down beside me, close but careful, not touching.

He didn’t say anything. He simply pulled out his phone and occupied himself with something on the screen, giving me the space to exist beside him without demanding anything of me.

His scent reached me before anything else did, that familiar, grounding warmth that had always meant safety, long before either of us knew what to call the thing growing between us. For the first time since waking, I felt something other than numbness and guilt. I felt him. His patience. His stubborn, unshakable love for me, sitting quietly at my side without asking for anything back.

I wanted to thank him for that. But the thought curdled the moment it formed. What exactly would I be thanking him for? I had lost our child.

The child that would have been some small, impossible version of him, a tiny Fabian I hadn’t even realized I wanted until the wanting was already gone. Gratitude felt obscene next to that. An apology felt more honest.

So that was what I gave him instead.

“I’m sorry,” I said, my voice cracking, thick with everything I’d been holding down.