Chapter 6 - On His Knees
The hydraulic jaws tore the sedan’s door from its hinges with a shriek of tortured steel.
Before the metal had even hit the asphalt, Dante’s arms were around me.
He didn't pull roughly. He moved with a terrifying, reverent gentleness, his bloody fingers sliding behind my neck and beneath my knees, lifting me from the wreckage as if I were made of spun sugar.
"I have you," he rasped, his voice vibrating against my ear, thick with tears and ragged breathing. "I have you, *anima mia*. You're safe. I've got you."
The tactical medics were already there, shouting over the storm, rolling a heavy stretcher through the snow.
"Sir, we need to get her to the chopper! Her water broke, she’s in active labor, and vitals are erratic!"
Dante didn't let them take me. He carried me directly up the ramp of the specialized medical transport helicopter that had landed on the cleared section of the road.
The interior of the bird was a fully equipped trauma bay—monitors, warming blankets, two flight surgeons in scrubs.
Dante laid me on the gurney, but his hand never left mine. His fingers, smeared with his own blood and grease from the car, gripped my hand with a desperate, crushing intensity that matched the contractions ripping through my pelvis.
"Doctor! Look at her!" Dante roared, turning on the medical team like a wounded animal. "Stop the pain! Do something!"
"Mr. Moretti, step back!" the lead physician shouted back, snapping on latex gloves. "She’s having twins, she’s at thirty-one weeks, and she’s fully effaced! We cannot stop this labor! We have to deliver these babies right now or they will suffocate!"
*Twins.*
Dante’s head snapped back to me. His jaw slackened.
"Two?" he whispered, his obsidian eyes wide, glassy with absolute shock. "Lena... two?"
"Don't touch me," I gasped through the pain, trying to pull my hand from his grip, but my body had no strength left. "You don't... you don't get to be here... Dante, you gave this away!"
The words hit him like a physical blow.
The most feared man in the Midwest—the billionaire who had wiped the Rossi crime family off the map forty-eight hours prior—collapsed.
His knees slammed against the diamond-plate metal floor of the helicopter.
He didn't let go of my hand, but he buried his face in my knuckles, his broad shoulders shaking violently as deep, agonizing sobs tore out of his chest.
"I know," he wept against my skin. "I know I don't deserve to breathe the same air as you. I know I destroyed us. But please... please, Lena, let me stay. Don't make me leave you while you fight for their lives. Hate me. Kill me after this. But let me protect you now."
The helicopter lifted into the air with a violent lurch, turning south toward the specialized neonatal trauma center in Boston.
Another contraction hit—an explosive, tearing sensation that arched my back off the stretcher.
"She’s crowning!" the doctor yelled. "First baby is descending! Lena, I need you to push! Push right now!"
"I can't," I cried, hot tears blinding me. The exhaustion of four months of hiding, the cold, the terror of the car crash—it had emptied me. "I don't have anything left... I can't do it..."
Dante rose from his knees.
He didn't touch my face—he seemed terrified that his touch would contaminate me—but he leaned over me, his dark eyes burning into mine with an intensity that pulled me back from the edge of unconsciousness.
"Look at me, Lena," he commanded. The arrogance was gone, replaced by a raw, primal devotion that stripped him bare. "You are the strongest thing on this earth. You survived me. You survived what I did to you. You carried our children across four states in the dead of winter. You can do this. Look at me and take my strength. Squeeze my hand until the bones break, but *push*."
I looked into his eyes.
The hatred was there. The betrayal was there.
But beneath it, answering the call of survival, was the memory of the boy who had once sworn he would die before he let the world hurt me.
I gripped his hand.
I screamed, bearing down with every remaining shred of my soul.
The pain was infinite, tearing through my flesh—and then, a sudden, wet release.
A high, thin wail cut through the roar of the helicopter engines.
"First baby is out!" the doctor called. "It’s a boy! 3:14 PM. Small, but his lungs are working! Clamp the cord!"
Dante let out a ragged gasp, a sound that was half laugh, half sob, his eyes fixed on the tiny, purple creature being wrapped in heated blankets by the nurse.
"A boy," Dante breathed, looking down at me, his face wet with tears. "Lena... he’s beautiful. He looks like your father."
"Second baby is in distress!" the surgeon interrupted, his voice tight. "Heart rate is dropping! Lena, we don't have time! You have to push *now* or we lose the girl!"
*The girl.*
The panic slammed back into my chest.
"Lena, push!" Dante begged, his hand tightening around mine, his forehead pressing against mine, breathing his air into my lungs. "Give me our daughter, Lena! Bring her home!"
I screamed again, a sound torn from the deepest catacombs of my body.
I pushed through the darkness, pushed through the fire, pushed until the helicopter cabin tilted and the stars went black.
A second cry.
Sweeter, softer, like the chime of a small bell.
"She’s here," the nurse whispered, tears in her own eyes. "She’s breathing. Both babies are stable."
I collapsed back into the pillows, my chest heaving, the world spinning in slow, golden circles.
Through the haze of exhaustion, I felt a hand touch my hair. It was trembling violently.
I opened my eyes.
Dante was kneeling beside the gurney again.
He had cut the umbilical cords. His hands were covered in our children's blood, our combined life. He looked at me with an expression of such total, humiliating adoration that it looked like agony.
"You brought angels into hell," he whispered, pressing his lips to my sweat-soaked temple. "And I swear to you, on my life, on my soul, on whatever mercy God has left for me... no one will ever make you cry again. Even if you spend the rest of your life making me pay for what I did."
I closed my eyes.
May you like
The darkness pulled me under, but for the first time in five months, the cold was gone.
***
