Page 198 of Nine Months to Love

Mikayla materializes on the porch. I stop breathing as I watch her take her place beside Natalia. But everything about her is wrong. Her face bleached of color. Her eyes hollowed out with terror.

Stefan speaks words I can’t catch. Mikayla’s entire body turns to stone.

Then Natalia draws a gun.

“No!” The scream rips from somewhere primal inside me as I throw myself against the door.

The gunshot detonates.

Mikayla collapses.

And something inside me shatters completely.

I seize the latch with both hands and wrench it sideways with impossible strength. The screws anchoring it to the frame aredying, eaten by rust and they groan as I pull harder. The groans become shrieks. One screw surrenders. Then another.

Then, finally, the latch tears free.

I explode through the door and run.

My legs feel like I’m dragging them through concrete. The grass is glass beneath my bare feet. Reality collapses to a single burning point: Natalia leveling her gun at Mikayla’s skull as she lies prone and bleeding in the yard.

I don’t think. Thinking is for people who won’t survive.

And I have a daughter to live for.

I collide with Natalia like a wrecking ball, a streaking comet of momentum and fury and desperation. We crash down together. Her gun launches from her grip and spins across the grass.

She writhes beneath me, fingers transformed into claws aimed at my face. Her nails carve trenches across my cheek. I scream but my grip doesn’t falter.

Then she’s gone—torn away from me.

Stefan has her by the throat. He hoists her off the ground like she’s made of paper, his fingers buried in her neck. Her feet thrash uselessly at nothing.

“Stefan!” I claw my way upright. “Stefan, stop!”

He doesn’t hear me. Or he hears me and it changes nothing. His face has become something else entirely—rage distilled to its purest form. Hatred without filter or mercy.

Natalia’s face bleeds red. Then purple.

“Stefan, please!” My hands find his arm. “Don’t do this. Don’t kill her.”

His eyes cut to me. For one terrible moment, I think he’s already gone. That there’s nothing left of the man I know.

But his grip eases. Barely.

Natalia sucks in air like a drowning woman. Stefan lowers her but his hand remains welded to her throat, the other reaching for his gun.

He aims it at her skull.

“Don’t move,” he warns.

Natalia doesn’t. She stands there, breathing ragged, eyes burning with defiance even now.

I turn to Mikayla. She’s still down, blood flowering across her shirt in an obscene bloom. But her chest moves. Barely.

“Mikayla,” I whisper, dropping beside her. “Hold on. We’ll get you help.”

“No,” she rasps. “Let me... finish.”