Page 130 of Knight
"What?"
His hand finds mine under the covers. His fingers lace through mine and he squeezes — firm, deliberate, the grip of a man who has learned that holding on is braver than letting go.
"Whatever happens tomorrow." His voice is low. Raw in a way that the dark earns and the daylight would make him cover. "Whatever it costs. Whatever we lose. This — you — this is the thing I know."
I squeeze back. My thumb presses against his knuckle. The bone beneath his skin is solid and warm and real.
And the thing I have been carrying inside my body for three weeks presses against my silence the way it has pressed against it every morning since the test showed two lines in a gas station bathroom, because apparently every turning point in my life happens in a gas station.
Three weeks. I have known for three weeks.
I found out the day before the Marchese capitulation. Stood in a bathroom stall with a plastic stick in my hand and the fluorescent light buzzing overhead, and my reflection staring back at me in a mirror smeared with water spots, and I did the math the way I do all math — by cost, by weight, by what it means for the people who depend on me.
I did not tell him.
The war was still running. The Marchese had not folded. Isadora was still a blade hanging somewhere in the dark. Every morning I woke up beside this man and calculated whether today was the day the ground would crack and I would need to grab my siblings and run and I could not — I would not — give him one more thing to protect while bullets were still possible.
So I carried it. The way I have carried everything since I was eighteen. Inside my body. Behind my ribs. In the quiet space where I keep the things that matter most until I am certain the walls will hold.
The walls held.
The ground is solid. Romeo is beside me. Tomás is breathing through the wall. Marisol fell asleep trusting the silence. And the thing growing inside me — the size of a raspberry, according to the article I read on my phone at three AM last Tuesday while Romeo slept beside me with his hand on my hip — that thing deserves to exist inside a truth instead of a secret.
"Romeo."
His thumb stops moving against my knuckle. He hears it — the shift in my voice. The register changed from the woman who was laughing about braids and gas station dresses to the woman who is about to hand him something she has been holding alone.
"What is it?" Quiet. Careful. The voice of a man who has learned that when I change registers it means I am about to say something that will rearrange the furniture in his chest.
I press my palm flat against his sternum. Feel his heartbeat — steady, strong, the rhythm I was listening for ten minutes ago when I pressed my ear to his chest and searched for home.
"There is one more thing I know."
His hand covers mine. His fingers curl around my wrist. I feel his pulse accelerate beneath my palm — three beats faster, four, the body reading the room before the mind catches up.
I lift my head from his chest. Find his eyes in the dark. The green is barely visible — just the faintest ring of color around pupils blown wide by the dark and the hour and whatever he sees on my face.
"I'm pregnant."
Two words. Conversational volume. The way I say everything that matters — direct, grounded, at the pitch of ordinary life, because the extraordinary things do not need volume. They need truth.
His hand tightens around my wrist.
His breathing stops. A full three seconds of silence — the same three-second pause I watched him hold during operationalcalls, the gap where a different man would fill the space with noise. But this silence is different. This silence is the sound of a man whose entire internal architecture is reorganizing around two words spoken by a woman lying on his chest at two in the morning in a city where his brother is bleeding and a war is waiting, and the world is breaking, and she just told him she is carrying his child.
"Say that again."
His voice is barely there. A whisper scraped raw against something I have never heard in his register before — not charm, not grief, not the earned calm of a man leading through crisis. Something new. Something I am hearing for the first time because this man has never been a father before, and the sound of him becoming one is a frequency that did not exist until this second.
"I'm pregnant. Three weeks. I found out the day before the Marchese folded." I keep my voice steady. My hand steady on his chest. "I didn't tell you because the war was still running and I needed to know the ground would hold before I put one more life on it."
"Nova."
"The ground held."
His hand releases my wrist. Both arms wrap around me — tight, fierce, the grip of a man who just discovered that the thing he is fighting for tomorrow morning doubled in size between one breath and the next. His face presses into my hair and I feel his chest expand against mine and the exhale that follows is shaking and raw and it sounds like a man laughing and crying at the same time except Romeo Rivas does not cry twice in the same story so what he does instead is hold me so tight my ribs ache and whisper my name into my hair three times like a prayer he just learned.
"Three weeks." His voice is muffled against my scalp. "You carried this for three weeks. Alone."
