Page 147 of Beautiful Ruins
I had seen too clearly what the world could take away when it decided to be cruel.
I wasn’t letting that happen again.So I built walls around her.Around us.Layers of protection most people would call excessive.
Men on the perimeter.Camera systems that watched every inch of the estate.
A doctor who visited twice a week just to check on her because the thought of something going wrong between appointments made my chest feel like it was being crushed in a vice.
Tone told me I was spiralling.
Atlas told me to calm the hell down.
Even Archie had suggested—very politely—that perhaps I should consider therapy before I gave my unborn child a nervous breakdown from the womb.
They were all wrong.Or maybe they weren’t.
But none of them had been there that night—the night I lost everything I loved.
None of them had learned what it felt like to bury both a wife and a child before either of them had the chance to live.
So I watched.I guarded.I dominated what I could.
And I loved Izzy with a kind of intensity that sometimes frightened even me.
Because she wasn’t just the woman I had fallen for.
She was the one who had dragged me back into the world after I had stopped caring whether I lived in it or not.
I glanced down at her again.At the faint curve beginning to show beneath the fabric of her shirt.
My child was there.Alive.Real.The thought twisted something deep in my chest.
Izzy stirred slightly beneath my hand.
Her eyes opened slowly, still heavy with sleep.
She looked at me for a moment, blinking away the haze.
“You’re doing it again,” she murmured.
Her voice was soft.Amused.
“What?”
“That thing where you stare at me like I might disappear if you blink.”
I huffed softly.
“You might.”
She rolled her eyes and moved onto her side, pressing closer into me.
“I’m pregnant, Raze.Not made of glass.”
“That’s debatable.”
She laughed.
The sound hit me straight in the chest.God, I loved that sound.
