CHAPTER 14 – Alone and Pregnant
678 Words
The flat was exactly as promised.
Small. Clean. Anonymous.
Ugly brown curtains hung over the windows. The sofa sagged a little in the middle. The fridge hummed.
The neighbors were noisy enough to provide cover, quiet enough to mind their own business.
The perfect place to disappear.
Elena stood in the middle of the living room, a suitcase by her feet, an envelope of documents on the coffee table.
Her new name stared up at her from the papers.
Lena Cruz.
Close enough to answer to. Far enough to look ordinary.
She unpacked in a daze. Folded clothes into drawers. Lined up cheap toiletries in the bathroom. Placed the one photo she’d brought—her and Marco and their mother in front of an old church—on the bedside table.
The silence pressed in.
At night, the absence of the sea roared louder than waves.
She lay on the thin mattress, hand on her stomach, imagining tiny ears, tiny fingers.
“We’re okay,” she whispered, because someone had to say it. “We’re safe. That’s what matters.”
Her chest burned.
She missed the way Tommaso’s laughter bounced off the kitchen tiles. She missed Rosa’s scolding. She missed the stupid, infuriating way Matteo stole toast off her plate.
She missed his voice.
He didn’t call.
Of course he didn’t. That was the point. The performance meant distance. Any contact now could undo the safety he’d bought with cruelty.
Still, every time her cheap phone buzzed, her heart leaped uselessly.
Days bled into weeks.
She found a small clinic that didn’t ask too many questions. The doctor frowned at her notes, recommended vitamins, did an ultrasound.
The first time Elena heard the heartbeat, she cried.
Fast. Strong. So loud in the quiet room that it drowned out every memory of gunshots.
“That’s your baby,” the doctor said, smiling. “Very active.”
Elena held the grainy printout like treasure.
“Hi,” she whispered later, back in the flat, tracing the blurry curve that would be a spine. “Your father would say you’re already difficult.”
Her throat closed on the word father.
She put the ultrasound in a small box under the bed with the burner phone and the contract she’d almost thrown away but couldn’t.
At night, when the loneliness pressed too hard, she talked to the baby.
She told stories about a house on a cliff, about a boy named Tommaso who never tied his shoes, about a woman named Rosa who pretended not to care but always kept extra soup.
She talked about a man with scars and storm eyes, whose hands were steady even when the world shook.
She left out the blood, the threats, the staged cruelty. Those were hers to carry for now.
“You’ll meet him one day,” she murmured, palm flat on the gentle rise of her belly as months passed. “The real him. Not the man from the contract. The one who talked to your heartbeat and called you a miracle and a liability in the same breath.”
Her voice wobbled.
“If we survive,” she added quietly.
Because somewhere, back in the city she’d fled, the war with Il Corvo raged on.
And fate, as she would learn soon enough, wasn’t done with the De Luca family—or with the woman who had tried to walk away from it.
For now, though, she was just a pregnant woman in an ugly apartment, counting kicks and days and breaths, waiting for a future she couldn’t see yet.
She fell asleep like that, hand on her belly, whispering to the life inside her:
“We’re not trash. We’re not a mistake. We’re the part of this story he couldn’t cut out.”
And far away, in a house on a cliff, a man who’d thrown her out in public sat alone in his office, a hidden ultrasound picture in his drawer, planning a war he meant to win—so that one day, she could come home without fear.
- Writer
