“Ky…” I whisper, my heart rate speeding up. “I—”
“Stay focused, baby. We’re right here.”
I feel something cool touch my arm and instantly my blood runs cold, a shaky breath leaving my lips.
Killian’s gentle voice filters through. “I’m going to push through now, okay? She’s put a barrier around these memories inside your head, which is why you’re half here and half there. She’s good.”
Fire explodes around my skull.
“But I’m better.”
They didn’t keep me in The Pen, thankfully. They allowed me back into my room to carry on to full-term, but no one was allowed in to see me. Not even Bear. I sat in the same spot almost every day, and ate the same food, listened to the same music, and watched the same shows. It was almost like a running clock working in fast-forward. I watched my life bleed away, and there wasn’t anything I could do to stop it.
It was around seven months when everything started happening. Mid episode of Peaky Blinders, my lower belly contracted like an iron fist around my ovaries, ready to tear them right out.
I screamed, arching my back off the bed while gripping onto the bedcovers. Kennedy came rushing in some time after, pulling my sheets down off my body. It wasn’t until I felt her fingers at my entrance that I realized what she was doing.
“It’s too early,” I wailed, swiping my hair from my face. It had dulled out into a grungy gray now instead of my steel silver.
I tried reaching for the calendar on my bedside table, knocking over all the oils and creams that the doctor had me on so I wouldn’t get any stretch marks. Joke was on them because I still got some faint stripes over my ass cheeks.
“It doesn’t matter. It is coming,” she said, removing the blanket from my legs.
“No!” I screamed, and she paused dialing the numbers on her phone slightly, just long enough to dismiss me with a simple glare. She raised the phone to her ear and I flicked my foot out until it kicked the phone out from her grip. “Bitch, it is too early. This baby will not survive.”
She lowered herself off the bed to pick up her phone, keeping her eyes on mine. “It will. You may not.”
“What do you plan to do?” I asked, when it dawned on me that there was no way these people would ever want anything good for a baby. My hands fell protectively over my bump as I slowly pulled myself up into a sitting position.
“You don’t need to worry about that—” She finally talked into her phone, and I realized right here that whatever happened today, they would need to kill me before they could take my child away from me. I grew it from scratch. It was mine. I didn’t know shit about this world, and I wasn’t a good person, but I’d be a great mother, or at the very least I would die trying. I gave this baby life. I would give mine to protect it. I needed a plan.
I slowly started to crawl my way out of my bed, but it was too late. My door swung open and three other nurses entered, pushing sterile silver trolleys with weird looking utensils on top.
“What are you doing, you crazy bitch…” I yelled to Kennedy, right as another contraction ripped through me so viciously that I fell to the ground, swiping all those oils and creams from my bedside table.
“Inject her,” Kennedy demanded, and I swung around until my knuckles collided with one nurse’s cheek, then I reared the back of my elbow into the other one’s face.
“Fuck you!” I screamed, running straight for the doctor while picking up a scalpel from the tray and plunging it into her thigh.
A god-aching wail tore out of her as she clutched the outside of her thigh and the door once again swung open with a couple of soldiers barging in.
“My little psychopath.” A fist flew right into my face before everything went black.
“I don’t—no. I don’t. No more…” I murmur. This time, I’m sure it’s out loud.
“Take him the fuck out!” someone yells in the background.
The hand is gone. Kyrin isn’t beneath me. Where is Eli? My breathing picks up again, this time my blood exploding into flames.
“No!”
My mind is sucked back into a vortex of memories I now wish I never asked for back…
My brain moved in fast-forward, as if it merely reminded my body exactly what it had been through throughout the time that my memories had been tampered with. This time I fell, falling into my body on the bed and seeing things firsthand instead of watching…
I woke, eyes blurry with tears. “What are you doing?”
There was a single light that hung above my body, and three more people surrounded me in white coats, wearing nothing but surgical masks.