Page 31 of Pack Baby for the Bratva
“Excellent. Sarcasm means you’re conscious.”
A tiny, furious sound came from her.
Good. I would take furious over being frightened any day of the week.
The hospital was only a ten minute drive. Inside it was all fluorescent lights, disinfectant, and the kind of forced calm that makes you want to start a fight with a wall. Maeve was taken through almost immediately, Artem still attached to her hand.Gregor and I followed because there was no universe where we were leaving her alone with strangers and clipboards.
The nurse was brisk, kind, and completely unfazed by the fact that three oversized Russian men had just materialized around one very pregnant omega at an ungodly hour.
“Let’s get you checked, dear.”
Maeve nodded, wide-eyed and pale, but she didn’t argue. That scared me more than if she had. Maeve looked like someone who argued with furniture when it inconvenienced her. Silence did not suit her.
I took up position in the corner of the room because there was nowhere else to put six-foot-something panic in an NHS examination cubicle.
Machines beeped. Paper rustled.
Artem sat beside Maeve with his whole body locked tight except for one hand, which kept stroking slow circles over her knuckles like that was the only part of him still capable of movement. Gregor stood by the door with his usual expression of controlled murder, but his fists were white.
Then the doctor came in, checked Maeve over, listened, pressed, waited, and finally said, “You’re having contractions, but they’re irregular. The baby's heartbeat is strong, and you’re not dilated. It looks like Braxton Hicks. False labour. We’ll monitor you for a while to be safe.”
Maeve blinked at the ceiling.
Then she said, with the hollow dignity of a woman who had been personally betrayed by anatomy, “I would like to complain to whoever named it false labour.”
The doctor’s mouth twitched. “Would you?”
“Yes. False suggests imaginary. That was not imaginary. My uterus just staged a coup and invited an audience.”
Even Gregor smiled, tight as it was but in fairness to him it was practically jazz hands.
Artem lifted Maeve’s hand and pressed his mouth to her knuckles. “I’ll file the complaint.”
She narrowed her eyes at him. “Don’t kill anyone.”
“I wasn’t going to kill anybody.”
“You paused.”
“I was considering solutions.”
“That is Russian for who do I kill?”
I laughed before I could stop myself.
The sound in the room changed after that. Maeve’s shoulders came down a little. Artem looked marginally less like he was about to bite through a wall. Gregor’s stance eased by maybe half an inch, which I counted as a spiritual breakthrough.
A nurse handed Maeve a gown and asked her to change for monitoring.
Maeve nodded, but her fingers shook when she reached for the ties of her dress.
Artem stood immediately.
He didn’t make a speech about helping. Didn’t ask if she was all right every four seconds. He just stepped in and did what was needed, slow and careful, hands steady where hers weren’t.
That was the thing about Artem. People saw the suit, the money, the control, the whole impossible bratva heir package and assumed he was all forced. But he could be careful in a way that snuck up on you.
The monitoring took an hour.
