PART THREE. BLOOD HEIRS.
Kaiden
You don’t forget the way a nursery smells when it’s wrong. Powder and plastic and copper. The copper is what turns my stomach, the thin, metallic thread of fresh blood that doesn’t belong anywhere near stuffed bears and wallpaper clouds.
“Left, two doors,” Matteo’s voice crackles in my ear. “Heat signatures, three moving, one down.”
I roll my shoulders and push through on silent feet. Hunter is at my back, a shadow the size of a wall. The clinic looks legit if you don’t read between lines. Fertility posters. Hopeful blues. A receptionist desk with pamphlets neatly squared. The rot is beneath. The kind of place that preys on women who would trade anything for a heartbeat on a grainy screen. We hit the door. Hunter’s boot takes the hinge; my shoulder finds the frame. Inside, a doctor in a paper cap is trying to drag a metal cart, squealing wheels and clattering glass.
“Hands,” I say.
Hunter slams him to the tiles so hard the cart jumps and a tray spills syringes. I cover the room, two techs hugging the wall, one woman on the gurney crying soft like she’s trying not to be here. There’s a bruise old as last week under her eye.
“It’s okay,” I tell her, because somebody has to. “We’re here. You’re safe.”
That word tastes like a lie and I hate it. It’s the best I have.
Matteo and Jeremy flood in with our team. I’m about to ask for files, servers, backups, anything and everything I need, when I see it. A wall of locked cabinets. Label maker tags. And there, fourth from the top, a folder sleeve peeking where the cabinet didn’t shut flúsh, my wife’s name written clean across a tab. Donatello. I don’t remember crossing the room, just the cold jolt in my palm when the lock bites and doesn’t give. I force breath through my nose and gesture. “Key.”
The doctor wets his lips, eyes cutting between me and Hunter. “That’s… confidential.”
“Luciano will love hearing how you define confidential,” Hunter says, and smiles with no teeth. The doc folds like paper and drags a chain from his neck. The cabinet sticks, then opens all at once. Files, organized, tidy, each life flattened to paper. The one with Mia’s name is heavier than it should be. I pull it free and flip. Bloodwork/ Imaging. A typed letterhead I don’t recognize with its watermark feather–thin across the page. Unexplained infertility, it reads, like someone shrugged their shoulders inside a lab coat and called it a day. I keep turning. Notes in a different hand. A consult she didn’t tell me about. A date from three weeks ago. A recommendation for a “trial protocol” requiring “offsite compliance.”
1/3
My vision tunnels until all I can see is her signature, small and brave at the bottom of a form. She walked into this place alone. She sat in a chair under these lights and swallowed down the way It smells down here because she wants what I want and she didn’t want to make me watch her want it.
“Kaiden.” Hunter’s voice is low.
I don’t look up. “Say it.”
“She didn’t put you on as emergency contact.”
I’m not sure what hurts worse, knowing she didn’t, or knowing exactly why. Because it kills me that I can’t fix this. Because every negative test we’ve thrown away felt like I failed her, and she knows what the failure does to me.
The woman on the gurney whispers, “Please,” and I shove my grief down where it belongs and put my hands back where they’re useful. We get all of them out. We lock the clinic down and feed the drives to Jeremy’s hungry little ghosts. By the time we climb daylight, the blues and reds of our own cars are washed in morning gold and my chest has that hollowed out feeling you get after a fight.
Hunter leans into my shoulder, both of us watching first light drag its color across the street. “Luciano will ask if we want to shut it down,” he says.
“We shut it down,” I answer, because some things are not questions.
He nods, then tips his chin at the folder under my arm. “You’re gonna tell her you found it?”
“Not today.” I tuck it inside my jacket like a secret knife. “Not when we’re supposed to celebrate.”
He doesn’t argue.
“C’mon,” Hunter says, thumping my back. “Our Nonnas will have our heads if we’re late.”
Hunter
Family looks different when there’s a baby in the room. It softens edges that never soften. It makes hands gentle that only ever learned to break. Our niece is six months of chaos and cheeks, and she has Isla’s mouth and Mason’s watchful eyes. She sits on Nico’s lap with both fists buried in his shirt. like she owns his heart…and she does, and he grins like he couldn’t be happier about the theft. The house hums with people who would kill for us and people who used to want to kill us. That’s how Donatello parties go. There’s music in the kitchen and a poker game at the end of the long table and one Nonna arguing with the other about whether the baby needs socks when it’s eighty degrees outside. I’ve got Mia tucked under my arm, her head on my chest, the exact weight that finally lets my ribs expand all the way. She laughs when Isla smears frosting on my cheek. She looks good, color in her face, hair up, a slice of shoulder out where my hand keeps gravitating. Only I know what it cost her to get out of bed this morning and button a dress instead of armor.
“Uncle Hunt!” Isla chirps, swinging our niece into my arms before I can block. The baby squeals and grabs two fistfuls of my beard. I fake being mortally wounded. She smacks me with a sticky hand and I take the hit like it’s a sacrament.
Mia watches, and the smile she gives me is all kinds of complicated. Pride. Hurt. Want. The wanting is the quietest part, and the loudest.
Last month’s late period that never landed. The tests lined up like little white coffins on the bathroom sink. The fight we didn’t have because we were too tired to throw it.
“I want to hold her,” she says, and her voice doesn’t wobble, so I put our niece in her arms and pretend I don’t watch her.
Nico drifts by with a press of a hand to my shoulder that says he knows. Mason appears with a plate the size of a shield and hand–feeds Isla strawberries like he was born to adore. Mia cuddles the baby closer and I see it hit her, soft and fatal, the way babies smell. Hope. Milk. The start of a life imploding your own. She breathes in and steadies and I tuck my mouth against her hair and say the only true thing I have.
“We’re going to be okay.”
She nods. Not because she believes me. Because she believes in me. That difference keeps me up at night.
