Page 25 of Iron

“Stand down!” a voice called out and the crowd parted as the man walked forward. “Petra.” I wasn’t sure if he said my name as an acknowledgment or a greeting, so I said nothing in return.

Without another word, he tilted his head, turned around, and walked back through the path that had been made for him.

I followed along, my eyes straight forward as I clicked my way to the back of the room.

“Up there, take a left,” he told me once we’d reached a set of stairs at the end of the hall.

I nodded as a way to tell him thank you.

His low chuckle floated into my ears as I began to ascend the stairs to the next floor.

When I turned left, I found a door. I didn’t bother knocking before I reached for the handle and opened the door.

Inside I found what looked like a small apartment. My feet carried me over the threshold into a living room that was about one third the size of mine— maybe even smaller.

I found the man that I was looking for sitting right on the couch in front of me.

His brow was raised as he looked at me.

And there was something I never expected to see in his arms.

“What is that?” I asked. I was confused and curious but my voice let on to none of that.

“A baby. What the hell does it look like?” His lips tipped up in an amused smirk.

Yes, I knew it was a baby. That wasn’t what I was trying to get at.

“Why is it here?” I asked, each word coming out slow as if I was frustrated.

“Because I offered to watch her.”

“And you couldn’t let me know that was the reason you didn’t come over?”

It was clear that he was safe and I didn’t really need to be here anymore. But there were a few more answers I needed before I left.

“Wasn’t watching her when you sent me that text. Didn’t offer to look after her until after I saw it.” He was smug and cool. There was something in his tone that told me that he wasn’t even sorry about it. And I even wondered if he did it on purpose in a way to spite me even if I didn’t know what was going on at the time.

At least it wasn’t his. Or so I was assuming. We hadn’t talked about babies and such because there hadn’t been a need to. He’d never mentioned that he had one. And while we had this on and off thing going, we’d never set rules for what happened in between. I didn’t care if he carried on with other women. I didn’t really. I didn’t expect the man to be committed to me because I couldn’t even give him a sliver of myself. He got what he got. And I was pretty sure he understood that it was all he was going to ever get. So that said, it could have been his. You would have thought something like that would have come up at some point. Then again, we didn’t talk about each other’s lives.

And I was perfectly fine with that.

In fact, I preferred it that way.

“I don’t do babies,” I said.

He must have found that amusing because his eyes twinkled and that half-knowing smile was tipping up his lips.

“Sit,” he said and his head cocked to the side indicating that he wanted me to take up the open space on the couch next to him.

“I’d rather not.”

“Sit, Pet,” he said a little more forcefully.

My body snapped rigidly, my spine growing even straighter.

I was not going to let him talk to me like that. I was in charge. I may have been a woman but I bent for no man.

“Hey, Prez,” someone said from behind me as they came in without knocking.