Page 47 of Santiago's Conquest (Four Dark Horsemen 1)

For who can resist its tempting pull?”

Briseis

From Flora’s Dairies

23 October

I’m trapped inside the Ivory Tower with no way of escape, waiting for this nightmare to be over while desperately trying not to get attached to the life growing inside me.

After my failed abortion attempt, I came home to discover Father had received an offer from Andreas to work on the architecture of a building in France. Dad jumped all over this idea, especially when it was mentioned the building would serve as an orphanage after its reconstruction. He announced our yearlong trip to France to me, happiness bursting through every pore.

I’d almost finished high school and had only two subjects left, which I could easily finish in the monastery. Due to his work schedule and where the building was located, Dad predicted we wouldn’t have been able to see each other much or at all.

The project was scheduled to be done by New Year, so I could come back and enroll for winter semester.

Knowing Andreas’s plan, I anticipated this request and numbly nodded at his joy, packing my stuff while writing a letter to Howard.

I couldn’t call him or face him for fear of telling him the truth about my condition. God only knows what he would have done to Andreas or me.

Or maybe I just protected myself, because I imagined I could go back to him once all of this was over and he would never know about this.

I lived with this belief in the monastery among the nuns who knew about my condition, while studying the subjects and reading books. I ignored everything about the pregnancy, even when the female doctor Andreas assigned to me kept talking about my progression.

The only thing I had to do was swallow all those vitamin pills, because Andreas wanted a healthy baby.

My days and nights were spent in dreams of coming back to Howard, his arms waiting for me and the life we would build together someday.

He still wrote me letters after I sent my address. They were full of poems of love and devotion, promising me a great future for us.

His words gave me solace in my despair and agony until…

Until a few months ago.

Until she kicked.

Until I saw the imprint of her tiny foot stretching my stomach, showing herself to me, and tears formed in my eyes from wonder.

Up until that point, the baby was nothing but the devil’s spawn, created in the inferno of my pain, sired by the demon himself.

After?

After, she became a baby, alive, moving inside me, and…

Mine.

I started talking to her, noticing her restlessness when I was silent and how she loved when I read books aloud.

How she would listen to me if I rubbed my stomach and asked just for a moment of reprieve from her kicking.

Suddenly, everything the doctor said was super important, and I followed every order, wanting her to be healthy.

And somewhere along the way, I started to love her.

Which brings me to now.

I’m terrified to give birth to my baby girl, or at least I think it’s a baby girl. There is no ultrasound here; however, she kicks the most when I call her she.

Where before I couldn’t wait for the delivery date, now I dread it with everything in me, fear sinking deeper and deeper into every cell in my body at the prospect of Andreas snatching her away from me.

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