Page 2 of Fire and Silk

And blood.

I still remember the white.

The kind of white that hurts to look at—walls, sheets, lights. A sterile, humming whiteness that swallows everything. Even the sound of a heartbeat.

I remember not feeling my legs. Just the heaviness. Just the hollow. Just the ache curling in a space that should’ve held life and instead held nothing at all.

The room smelled like antiseptic and wilted flowers. A nurse moved silently around me, pretending not to notice that I hadn’t blinked in ten minutes. That my hands hadn’t unclenched from the sheet since they told me.

You lost the baby.

Just like that. Four words. A bullet sentence.

He came later. Pietro.

Still wearing blood on his collar. Not mine. Maybe not even his. I didn’t ask.

He stood at the edge of the bed like he was afraid to touch me. Like I’d break if he did. Or maybe he’d break. I don’t know.

I looked at him, and I remember my voice—not a whisper, not a scream, just… still.

“I lost our child.”

His mouth opened, closed again. And then he said it.

“I can’t stay.”

It was quiet. So quiet. Like it wasn’t abandonment. Like it was logistics.

“They’ll come again,” he said, like that made it rational.

Like that made it okay. Like I hadn’t just bled out the only good thing we ever made.

I remember wanting to scream. To tear something. To tearhim.

But all I did was turn my face to the wall and say, “Then give me something in return.”

A demand spoken from the pit of me, hollowed out and raw. Because if he could walk away from the body that carried both of us…Then he damn well better leave a piece of himself behind.

I remember the IV drip ticking like a metronome beside me. The bag above my head half-empty, the color of faint iron. I couldn’t feel anything below my hips, but my fingers... they twitched with something ugly. He had turned to leave.

I didn’t call his name. I didn’t plead. I just said, “I know what you’ve been doing.”

He stopped mid-step.

“I know about the shipments moving through Dock 17. I know about the quiet meetings at Teatro Del Mare. I know about the names you erased to rise.”

Silence.

“I know enough to walk into a police station and tell them everything.”

He turned, slowly. His expression wasn’t anger. It wasn’t even fear. It was grief.

“You’d die,” he said.

“So would you,” I answer.

He stepped closer, his jaw clenched, his voice a low rasp. “Then why say it?”