IT'S COMPLICATED: THE MAFIA'S HEIRS

Chapter 6: Two Heartbeats

The clinic was nothing like I expected.

I don't know what I had been imagining something cold, maybe, something that matched the house and the gun on the counter and the general aesthetic of Luca Wolfe's life, all steel surfaces and the absence of warmth. Instead it was a private practice forty minutes from the compound, small and quiet and decorated in the kind of muted colours that were designed to make people feel calm, which was doing absolutely nothing for me personally. A receptionist who didn't look up when we walked in. A waiting room with two other people in it who didn't look at us either.

Luca had called ahead. Of course he had. We were seen within four minutes of arriving.

I changed into the gown they gave me and sat on the edge of the examination table and looked at the ultrasound machine in the corner and thought about the fact that in approximately five minutes I was going to see, on a screen, the two lives that had detonated mine. That they were going to stop being a word, twins, plural, the thing Luca had said in my dorm room like he was reading off a weather report and become something real. Something with a shape. Something I could not look away from.

Luca stood near the door with his hands in his pockets, exactly as composed as he always was, giving nothing away. He had not spoken much on the drive over. Neither had I. We had developed, in the space of less than twenty-four hours, a specific kind of silence that wasn't comfortable exactly but wasn't hostile either the silence of two people who were in something together and hadn't yet decided what that meant.

The doctor came in. Dr. Reyes, young, efficient, the kind of professional calm that meant she had probably seen every possible version of this situation and had stopped being surprised by any of them. She introduced herself, asked a few questions that I answered on autopilot, and then told me to lie back.

I layed back.

The gel was cold. I stared at the ceiling and breathed.

And then the screen came on.

I turned my head and looked, and for a long moment I couldn't process what I was seeing just shapes, shadows, the grey and white landscape of somewhere I had never looked before. And then Dr. Reyes moved the probe slightly and said, very calmly, "There's baby A," and pointed, and I saw it.

A shape. Small and unmistakable. A curve that was a head, a flutter that was ......

"That's the heartbeat," Dr. Reyes said.

I stopped breathing.

It was so fast. I hadn't expected that, how fast it was, how insistently alive, this tiny flickering thing on a screen that was somehow mine, somehow part of me, somehow real in a way that two pink lines on a test and the word twins in a dorm room had not prepared me for at all.

"And baby B," she said, moving slightly. "Right here."

Two. Two heartbeats. Two small insistent flickers on the same screen, side by side, both of them going at exactly the same determined pace like they had already decided something together before any of us had a say in it.

My eyes were burning. I pressed my lips together and stared at the screen and told myself very firmly that I was not going to cry in this examination room, and then I cried anyway, quietly, just two tears that I wiped away before they could become something larger, but they were there and they were real and there was nothing I could do about them.

I became aware, in the periphery, that Luca had moved.

He was standing beside the table now, closer than he had been, looking at the screen with an expression I had never seen on his face before. Not the flat controlled neutrality he wore like armour. Not the calculated calm that made him impossible to read. Something else, something quieter and more unguarded than anything he had shown me in four months of knowing him, a stillness that was different from his usual stillness because this one didn't feel deliberate.

He was looking at his children for the first time.

And for just a moment, just one brief unprotected moment, Luca Wolfe looked like a person.

I looked away before he could feel me watching. Turned back to the screen and memorised the shape of those two small flickers because I understood, somewhere in the part of me that was already starting to be their mother whether I was ready for it or not, that this was the moment everything became irreversible. Not the test. Not the word twins. Not the duffel bag or the locked door or any of it.

This. Right here. Two heartbeats on a screen.

This was the moment.

Dr. Reyes printed images and talked about dates and appointments and things I absorbed at a remove, writing down what she said in my phone because I didn't trust my memory right now. Luca asked questions, specific, practical, informed questions that told me he had already done research, had already started preparing in the way he prepared for everything and I listened and felt something shift in my chest that I did not examine too closely.

We left forty minutes later. I had a folder of printed ultrasound images in my lap and a due date circled on a card and the sound of two heartbeats still running on a loop somewhere in the back of my mind like a song I hadn't chosen but couldn't stop hearing.

Luca didn't speak for the first twenty minutes of the drive.

Then, without looking away from the road: "They're real now."

I looked at him. At the profile of his face, unreadable as always except for something around the eyes that wasn't quite the same as it had been this morning.

"They were always real," I said.

"I know." A pause. "They're more real now."

I didn't say anything to that. I looked back out the window and held the folder against my chest and thought about the way he had looked at that screen, unguarded, undefended, just for a moment and told myself it didn't mean anything. Told myself it was just biology. That any person would look like that seeing something like that for the first time.

I was getting better at lying to myself. I wasn't good enough at it yet.

We turned onto the road that led to the compound and I was already thinking about calling my mom, about Bryan's text and then Luca slowed down, I looked up, my heart dropped completely into the floor of his car.

Two people at the gate.

My mom first. Still in her good coat, the navy one she wore when she wanted to look composed and was not, clutching her bag with both hands the way she did when she was frightened. Twelve missed calls. I had not called her back. I had been so consumed by everything inside that house that I had not called my mother, and she had come here, had found this place somehow, had stood at this gate in her good coat and waited.

And beside her, arms crossed, face set into an expression I knew as well as my own name .....

Maya.

Maya Rollins. My best friend. Bryan's sister. The person who had known me since we were fourteen and had texted me at the end of the worst night of my life to say I know. And I'm on my way with Mom.

She had meant it literally.

Luca stopped the car. Looked at the gate. Looked at me.

"Friends of yours," he said. Not a question.

"My mom," I said. "And Maya." I paused. "Bryan's sister."

Something moved across his face. "Do you want to see them?"

The question surprised me so much I turned to look at him fully. He was watching me with that steady unreadable gaze and I searched it for the catch, for the condition, the control and I couldn't find one.

"Yes," I said carefully.

He nodded once. Pulled forward and opened the gate.

My mom saw the car and her whole face crumpled, relief and fear and four months of not knowing mixed into something that hit me in the sternum like a fist. She was moving toward the car before it had fully stopped, hands on my face the moment I stepped out, checking me the way mothers check people they love when they've been scared, eyes, face, are you hurt, are you okay, I need to see for myself.

"Natalie. Are you alright? Who is that man? Where have you been? why didn't you call me?"

"I'm okay, Ma." I covered her hands with mine. "I'm okay. I'm sorry, I'm so sorry."

She pulled me into a hug I let myself have for three seconds. Then I became aware of Maya, still standing exactly where she had been, arms still crossed, watching me with that expression that scared me more than anger would have. Maya's anger was loud and immediate and survivable. And this meant she had been sitting with something long enough to know exactly what she wanted to do with it.

I straightened up and looked at my best friend across the roof of Luca's car.

Maya looked at me for a long moment. Then at Luca, standing at the driver's side with his hands in his pockets, watching everything the way he usually does, like he was filing it away. Then back at me.

"Twenty-four hours," she said quietly. Completely steady. "You've known for twenty-four hours and you didn't call me. Not once."

"Maya..."

"Bryan called me," she said. "At midnight. Crying." A pause. "I didn't know Bryan could cry. I have known him my whole life and I have never once seen him cry until last night."

The words landed exactly where she meant them to.

"And the whole time he was talking," she continued, in that same terrible quiet voice, "all I kept thinking was she knew. She knew about this man, about all of it, and she didn't tell me. Her best friend. She didn't tell me."

I opened my mouth.

"How long, Natalie?" Her voice cracked just slightly, just at the edges, just enough to tell me that the stillness was costing her something. "How long were you keeping this from me?"

Behind me I heard Luca's door close softly, and his footsteps moving toward the house, giving us space in the way that surprised me every time he did it, these small unexpected gestures that didn't fit the rest of him.

And in the silence that followed, with my mom's hand in mine and Maya's eyes on my face and two ultrasound images in my other hand showing two heartbeats that were going to change every single one of our lives...

I didn't have an answer.

Not one that was good enough. Not one that explained four months of silence in a way that made it okay. Not one that gave Bryan back the night he'd spent crying, or gave Maya back the best friend she thought she knew.

"I'm sorry," I said. And meant it more than I had ever meant anything.

Maya looked at me for a long moment.

Then she looked at the ultrasound images in my hand. At the folder. At the shape of what was printed on those pages, visible even from where she was standing.

Her face changed.

"Natalie," she said slowly. "Is that..."

"Yes," I said quietly. "It is."

The silence that followed was a different kind entirely.

And somewhere inside the house behind me, I was almost certain I heard Luca's phone ring, and the way he answered it, low and sharp and suddenly very alert, told me that whatever was coming next was not going to be small.