Page 131 of Pucked Around and Found Out

I protected this baby.

And now I'm sitting in a burning building.

The thought arrives so sharp it almost cuts through the smoke-drowsiness settling into my limbs.

What am I doing?

I look down at my stomach. At the small swell that is harder to ignore with every week that passes. At the life that exists inside me without asking for any of this, that had no vote in the war I was born into, no say in the family that created it, no choice about arriving at this particular intersection of violence and grief and desperate, complicated love.

This baby chose me.

The thought is irrational. Babies don't choose. I know that. But it arrives with the full weight of something true and I hold it, as the heat presses closer and the smoke burns at the back of my throat and I think… I survived Walter House. I survived Xaden's warehouse. I survived Masen's gun and Fiona's bullets and the worst year of my life and I survived every single thing this family, this war and this world threw at me. Now I am sitting on the floor of a burning building because I am tired.

I am so tired.

But the baby is not tired.

The baby is only beginning.

I try to stand.

My legs are slower than they should be, the smoke already doing its work, the world going slightly soft at the edges. I get one knee under me and push and the effort is enormous in a way that tells me I have less time than I thought. The ceiling above me is black with it now, the smoke pooling and descending, and I understand with the specific clarity of a person who has run out of time to be vague about things—I made a mistake.

I made a mistake.

Get up!

I press both hands flat to the floor.

Get up, Toren.

I try.

The world tilts.

My arms buckle and I go down and the marble is hot now under my palms, warm in a way the floor should never be warm, and the last coherent thought I have before the edges go dark is not about Xaden and not about the war and not even about Masen's face in the firelight.

It's about a baby the size of a peach.

Still here.

Still mine.

I'm sorry.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

XADEN

The lock on my cell door is old. Sturdy, but old. Which means it has weaknesses.

I've been working on it for the past hour, using a piece of metal I pried from the bed frame, manipulating the mechanism with patience I didn't know I had.

I ease it open, listening for guards.

Distant footsteps, but nobody's nearby, I slip out and move to Cas's cell.

“X?” His voice comes through. “That you?”