Heart and Heir

chapter 4

what could be the reason for me to finally act right?

I pulled the sheet off my bed i had carried him to, folded it into a thick square, and pressed it against his side with both hands. He made a sound that went through my whole body. Warm blood came up through the cotton and over my knuckles.

"Stay with me. Elias, look at me."

His eyes opened a c***k. They didn't find me.

"Don't call her," he said.

"Who?"

"Anyone."

His eyes closed again.

I should have screamed again. I should have run down the corridor and pounded on every door until the house woke up. But I'd already screamed once, loud enough to wake the dead, and no one had come. In a house this size, with this many staff, that wasn't an accident.

Somebody had heard me and stayed in bed.

The phone buzzed against the carpet. I snatched it up before I could think about it and flipped it over. The message was still there, white on black.

Is Elias dead yet? Tell her it's done. I want what I was promised.

My stepfather's number, every digit of it. I had called it from a hospital corridor when I was nine, and from school when I was sick, and from my mother's kitchen the night before I was sold. I'd never once pictured him typing those words.

"Tell her."

Tell who? Me? The old woman? A third person I hadn't met yet?

I couldn't make the thought hold still. I shoved the phone into the waistband of my skirt, under my sweater, against my skin. Then I pressed the sheet harder and counted my breath because counting was easier than thinking.

Is Elias dead yet.

Not "did he get hurt". Not "did you do it?". As if his death were a delivery that was running late.

The bleeding slowed after what felt like an hour and was probably ten minutes. I made myself look. The cut was low on his left side, long, ragged at one end. It was ugly, but it wasn't pouring anymore. He was breathing. His lips were gray.

I got him onto his back in the middle of my floor and knelt there, shaking, with my hands in his blood. The thought arrived without being invited.

If he dies, who owns the baby?

I hated myself for it. It was a cold, ugly little calculation, the kind my stepfather would have made. But it was my brain doing it, not me. My brain had been trained in that room with the diamonds and the pen. "You will give him a child. When the child is born, you leave." Nobody had said what happened if the father died first. Nobody had needed to. A house like this had a lawyer for that.

My hand drifted to my stomach. Barely anything there. Five weeks of nothing and a thin line of lines on a plastic stick.

"I'm not letting you take that," I whispered, to nobody.

I tried the phone by my bed. It rang twice in the empty house and a voice answered, smooth and awake at ten at night.

"Household. How may I help?"

I put it down.

I couldn't use the staff line. I couldn't call a doctor the old woman had paid for. If I rang the police, I'd be handing a bleeding man to officers who'd arrive in cars, in front of cameras, to the house of a family who knew all their names. And Elias had said *anyone*. He'd said it with his last strength, and I didn't know why, but I'd believed him.

That left me, a sheet, and a man I'd slept with in a doorway three weeks ago and shouted at since.

I pulled his jacket off. His shirt came away from the wound with a wet peeling sound I will hear for the rest of my life. I ripped my best blouse into strips, because it was the only cloth I had left that wasn't already ruined, and bound him as tightly as I could.

Footsteps.

They came down the corridor, slow and heavy, and stopped outside my door.

I stopped breathing. I put myself between the door and Elias without deciding to, my hands still red, the phone against my belly like a hot coin.

Three knocks. Soft. Practiced.

"Miss Anya." A man's voice, low. "It's Marcus. Please open the door."

The driver. The one who stared at the horizon while his employer's grandson kissed me on a porch.

I didn't move.

"I know he's hurt," Marcus said. "I found the blood in the garden. It goes from the garage to the east stairs. If I could follow it, so can anyone."

I looked at the floor. Beyond the carpet, past my threshold, a thin dark line on the polished boards of the hall. I hadn't even thought of it.

"Anya. Please."

I opened the door a hand's width, with my body wedged into the gap.

He was a broad man in his fifties with a face like a closed fist and a coat thrown over his pajamas. He looked at me, at my hands, at the shape on the floor behind me. His face didn't change. His mouth went flat.

"How long ago?"

"Nine. Maybe nine-ten."

"Has he spoken?"

"He said not to call anyone."

Marcus closed his eyes for half a second. When he opened them, he was already moving, stepping past me into the room and dropping to his knees beside Elias with a kind of rough, familiar tenderness I hadn't known the man had.

"You stupid boy," he said, very quietly. "You stupid, stubborn boy."

He pressed two fingers to Elias's throat, then lifted the bandage and looked. I watched him decide something.

"It missed the organs. Barely." He glanced at me. "This is your work?"

"I used what I had."

"It's good." He said it like it cost him. "I'll get a doctor. Not hers. A man I trust. Fifteen minutes."

"Marcus—"

"Lock the door behind me. Don't open it for anyone, not for the staff, not for the old woman herself. Understand?"

"Someone heard me scream," I said. "I screamed for ten minutes and nobody came."

His jaw tightened. "I know."

"Why?"

"Because somebody in this house was told to stay away from this corridor tonight." He stood and wiped his hands on his pajamas. "I've been trying to learn who for six years."

He turned for the door, and his eyes went to my waistband. Just for a second. The edge of the phone had slipped above the fabric, the screen still faintly lit.

I saw him see it. I saw what that did to his face.

He crossed the room in two strides and caught my wrist, not roughly, but like a man who'd already decided I wouldn't pull away.

"Where did you get that?"

"It fell out of his jacket."

"Have you read it?"

I could have lied. Something in his hand, in the way it shook, told me I'd already lost the chance to.

"Yes."

Marcus let go of me slowly. He looked down at the man on the carpet, then back at me, and when he spoke, his voice had gone so low I almost didn't catch it.

"Then listen to me very carefully, Miss Anya. That phone doesn't leave this room. Not for the old woman, not for the police, not for the man who's bleeding on your floor." He took a breath. "And when he wakes up, he's going to ask you if you read it. Tell him no."

"Why?"

"Because if he knows you know," Marcus said, "he'll go after your stepfather himself. And your stepfather isn't the one who wrote the order."