“I know, baby.”
“I just want to sleep.”
No, this wasn’t good. “Just stay awake a little longer, yeah? Keep me company. We’re almost there.”
“You know,” she began. “I used to have nightmares in the beginning about that place. That someone would drag me there again, and I wanted to die before it ever happened.”
Fuck, he wanted to murder every asshole who had been involved all over again.
“But I never understood why they took me,” she mused, her fingers playing with the hem of the bloodied shirt. “I was no one. And yet, they kept asking me questions like I knew so much.”
He let her talk, glad that she was staying awake.
“They asked me if they should tell you your little girlfriend was there,” she huffed a laugh. “I wasn’t anything to you then.”
She was wrong. “You were always something to me. I just didn’t know what it was.”
“I don’t even know when my feelings for you changed,” she continued, adjusting in her seat. “I used to dream you would be my first kiss, you know. But it was a dream. You were so far away.”
“I’m not anymore,” he pointed out, and she turned her head to look at him, her green eyes somber.
“You saved me from my nightmares then, and you saved me from them now,” she said, putting a hand on his arm. “Thank you.”
Hit by the emotion in her voice, Dante kept his eyes on the road, taking her bloody hand and kissing it. “You’re mine, Amara. Mine to cherish, mine to protect, mine to love. We may not be husband and wife to the world but I have been married to you in my heart for eight years. And no matter what comes at us, we will get through it together. We build our empire together. No more running. Promise me.”
“Even if we lose the baby and I can’t give you any more?”
He tightened his grip on her hand. “Even then.”
Swallowing, she pressed a kiss to his shoulder. “No more running.”
With that, he swerved into the hospital emergency parking and prayed for both his woman and his child to be safe.
They lost a baby.
They didn’t lose another.
It was in the hospital, lying on white sheets while Dante got his side stitched, refusing to leave her when the middle-aged female doctor had come in with the news.
She’d been eight-week pregnant with twins, and one of them had latched onto her strong enough to make it through the ordeal while the other hadn’t made it.
She was still pregnant but she had lost a baby.
She didn’t know what to feel.
The doctor said it was a phenomenon called the ‘vanishing twin syndrome
’ that wasn’t as rare as people believed. It was odd, the sense of loss interlinked with the sense of euphoria she was feeling. Looking at Dante, she saw the same reflected back at her, the emotion intense on his face, his eyes on her stomach as the doctor checked her with a stethoscope.
“It’s too early to know the gender,” the doctor told them. “But the ultrasound showed this little one doing well. However, I have to urge you to be careful throughout the whole pregnancy. The miscarriage puts you at high risk.”
Amara nodded, still processing the grief and the relief.
“Anything specific we should be doing, doctor?” Dante asked from her side, his hand holding hers, his gaze determined.
“For now, I would suggest refraining from any strenuous physical or mental exertion,” the doctor said. “We’ll keep monitoring as we go.”
Dante nodded. “And sex?”