Chapter 310: That little snake

She had begun to pace again. Her face was tight.

"You have no idea the trouble he put me in. At the company. That little snake." She spat the word.

"He went through the whole accounts department. He changed the codes. He signed papers he had no right to sign, and then he vanished. I spent two days cleaning up behind him. Two days! I had six auditors in my office, and a lawyer, and a man from the bank who wanted to know where fifty million had gone."

"Aria," Manuel said. "And now he is coming here?"

"Aria."

"I will kill him. I will wring his neck if he appears before me again."

"Aria, baby." She stopped.

Manuel had stepped in front of her. He was not touching her. He only stood close, looking down at her with his quiet eyes, and he waited until she met them. "You are talking too much," he said gently. She stared at him.

"You are talking about the company, and the accounts, and Marcel. You are talking about everything." He lowered his voice. "Because you do not want to think about what is upstairs."

Aria’s face crumpled.

It happened all at once. She had been holding herself up with anger, with words, with the frantic energy of a girl running from a fire. He reached out and quietly turned off the engine. She stood in the middle of the hall, hands at her sides. Her eyes filled. Her chin shook.

"I can’t," she whispered.

"I know."

"I can’t." She turned and walked to the window. She put her forehead against the cold glass and stared at the gray road. Her breath made a cloud on the pane. Behind her, nobody moved.

She did not cry. She could not. She had used up all her crying a long time ago. She stood at the window and let the glass cool her skin, and she thought about a hospital bed.

A glass cubicle with a thin blanket, a face like paper, who had stopped eating and stopped sleeping and stopped believing. The virus had come that almost took her life. Sienna had done everything to find the cure.

She had sat on the edge of the bed and held her hand. She had brought soup that Aria could not eat, and books that she could not read. She had read aloud in a bad voice when Aria’s eyes hurt too much to look. She had said, Don’t you dare, every single night, in the dark. Don’t you dare give up on me.

She had never once given up on her.

Not when the fever came back. Not when the doctors lost hope. Not when Aria herself, at three in the morning, had turned her face to the wall and said, I think I’m finished. Sienna had only held her hand tighter, and said, No.

She would never forget the sight of Sienna on the floor of that chopper. Gray and looking limp. A hand curled open on the cold metal. She had looked down at that face and felt the world tip sideways, and every word she knew had drained out of her head at once.

She had not dared to hope.

That was the truth of it. Even now, with a team of doctors upstairs and a hundred machines humming, she could not make herself believe. Hope was a thing that broke. It was a glass she had once held with both hands, and watched fall.

She was too scared to hope. Please, she thought, with her forehead against the window. Please. Don’t you dare. Don’t you dare give up on me.

Behind her, Manuel crossed the floor without a sound and laid his coat over her shoulders.

The doctors came down after hours.

It was almost dark. The long windows of the hall had gone from gray to blue to black, and somebody had lit the lamps. Aria had stopped pacing. Manuel sat beside her on the stairs. Marcus leaned against the wall with a wet cloth pressed to his swollen eye. In the far corner, Elena had finally sat down on a hard wooden chair and did not move.

Viktor stood at the foot of the staircase. He had not sat since Marcus walked him down. He stood with his hands at his sides and his eyes on the landing, and when the first pair of shoes appeared at the top, he was already moving.

There were three of them. The oldest went first, a tall man with silver glasses and tired eyes. He held a clipboard against his chest. He walked down slowly, one step at a time, and Viktor read his face the whole way and could not tell what it said.

"Mr. Kessler."

"Tell me."

The doctor stopped on the last stair. He took off his glasses, wiped them on his sleeve, and put them back on.

"For starters," he said, "congratulations." Viktor stared at him. "Your wife is four weeks pregnant."

The words did not make sense at first.

They sat in the air like a sentence in another language. Viktor heard each one. He did not understand them. The hall was very quiet. Somewhere behind him, Aria drew in a sharp breath.

Pregnant. Then it landed.

It landed all at once, something in him broke open. A smile spread across his face, wide and helpless and young. It pulled at the cut on his forehead. It lit his tired eyes. He put his hand over his mouth, and his shoulders shook, and a sound came out of him that was half a laugh and half something else.

A baby.

A child with her eyes. A small hand in his. After the garden, and the ship, and the gun, and the blood on the stone, here was one bright thing that nobody had been able to take.

He was happy. He was happy. For one long, glorious breath, there was nothing else in the world.

"But," the doctor said. The smile stopped.