Bloody Heart (Brutal Birthright #4) - Sophie Lark Page 0,43
those cuts, but from something else. From someone else.
“Don’t touch me!” I scream, staring at those awful hands.
Those are the hands of a criminal. A killer.
“I’m so sorry . . .” he says.
“Don’t touch me! I . . . I . . .”
Everything I had planned to say to him has flown out of my head. All I can see is his battered face, his bloodied hands, the snarl still baring his teeth. I see the unmistakable evidence of violence. Evidence of the life he leads.
A life that can’t include a child.
“I’m going away tomorrow,” I say, through numb lips. “I don’t want to see you anymore.”
Dante stands perfectly still, his hands falling to his sides. “You don’t mean that,” he says.
I don’t. I don’t mean it. But I have to do it.
“This is over between us,” I tell him. “We’re done.”
He looks stunned. Dazed, even. “Please, Simone . . .”
I shake my head, silent tears coursing down my cheeks. “I’m leaving. Don’t follow me.”
He swallows hard, his lip split and swollen. “I love you,” he says.
For once, the one and only time, his voice sounds gentle. It tears my heart in half like paper. Tears it again and again.
I could stay. I would stay, if it were just me.
But it’s not just me anymore.
I turn and run away from him.
18
Dante
I don’t believe she’ll actually go.
I think she loves me. So I think she’ll stay.
But I’m wrong.
She flies to London the next morning.
And doesn’t come back again.
19
Simone
Maybe if I wasn’t so cold and scared that night, I would have made a different choice.
Maybe if I wasn’t so sick in London . . .
I had hyperemesis gravidarum throughout the pregnancy. Vomiting twenty, thirty times a day. I got so skinny I was nothing but bones. The doctors put a permanent IV line into me, so I wouldn’t die of dehydration.
I was hospitalized in the second trimester.
The baby was born early in the third, at thirty-four weeks. He was tiny. God, so very, very tiny, only 5 lbs 2 oz. He didn’t cry as he came out. He looked blue and wizened. Barely alive.
The birth was nightmarish. They gave me nitrous gas for the pain, but I had a poor reaction to it. I started to hallucinate—I thought the nurses were demons, and they were trying to tear me apart. I thought the doctor was a monster wearing the mask of a human.
I thought Dante came to the hospital, but he only stood in the doorway, glaring at me. I begged him to forgive me for leaving. For not telling him about the baby. He wouldn’t speak to me—he only stared at me with a cold, furious expression.
After the birth, when I’m in my right mind again, I believe that was the one thing I saw that was actually true: Dante won’t forgive me for this, if he ever finds out. Never, ever.
My parents come to the hospital. They hadn’t known I was pregnant—I made Serwa swear not to tell them. Mama cries and asks why I kept such an awful secret. Tata scowls and demands to know if Dante is aware of what he did to me.
“No,” I whisper. “I haven’t spoken to him. He doesn’t know.”
Because the baby was small and having trouble breathing, they put him in the NICU, in an incubator. I’ve barely seen him or held him at all. All I know is that he had a lot of curly black hair and a tiny, limp body.
The nurses keep giving me drugs. I’m sleeping all the time. When I wake up, the baby’s never in the room.
On the third day I wake, and my parents are sitting next to the bed. There’s nobody else in the room—no nurses, or Serwa.
“Where’s the baby?” I ask them.
Mama glances over at my father. Her face looks pale and drawn.
They’re both dressed nicely—Mama in a blazer and skirt set, Tata in a suit. Not exactly formal, but the closest thing to it. As if they have an event to attend. Or maybe this is the event.
I feel disgusting by comparison—unwashed, unkempt, in the cheap cotton hospital smock.
I wonder if other people feel this way by comparison to their own family—unworthy.
“We need to discuss what you plan to do,” Mama says.
“About what?” I ask her.
“About your future.”
The word “future” used to have such a bright sparkle to me. Now it sounds hollow and terrifying. Like a long, dark hallway to nowhere.