Page 135 of Tarnished Queen

He’s silent for a long time.

Then he says the only words that could break my heart any further.

“There is no baby anymore, Belle. The baby is gone.”

He says it so fast that I almost miss it. I pause, waiting for him to say something else. To somehow restate the sentence in a way that won’t cut me to the bone.

“Wh… what?” I finally splutter when he offers nothing else.

He sighs and shakes his head. “They said they didn’t hear anything. No heartbeat. The baby didn’t make it.”

I drop back onto the bed, the weight of my body too much to bear.

It’s over. Everything is over.

Even when Nikolai told me that he didn’t care about me, some small, pathetic part of me thought he would come around. If I gave him a child and we raised it together, he’d learn to love me. All the time we’d spend together, playing and making food and changing diapers… Deep bonds are formed in the trenches. I thought we’d go through the trenches of parenthood together. I thought that one day everything would work out.

But now, the baby is gone and we have nothing.

“I’ve lost everything,” I whisper.

I squeeze my eyes closed. I don’t want to cry anymore. Especially because I don’t think Nikolai will comfort me, and crying in front of someone who couldn’t care less would only make it all worse.

Suddenly, a shrill ring cuts through the room. I glance back at the machines around my bed, but they’re beeping along as usual.

“It’s mine.” Nikolai holds up his phone for a second. Without looking at me, he backs towards the door. “I have to take this.”

I nod weakly. “Okay.”

The second the door closes, I collapse on the bed. I can’t hold myself up another second. But I can’t cry, either.

My eyes burn, my throat is clogged, but the tears won’t come. The rug has been pulled out from under me in every way, and I don’t know how to respond. So I press my face into the stiff, over-bleached blankets and focus on inhaling and exhaling.

When Nikolai comes back, I don’t want to look as shredded to pieces as I feel. I have to be able to face reality: he doesn’t love me and our baby is gone.

Physical pain lances through me at those twin thoughts. It’s a snake eating its own tail, two sides of the same coin, one leading into the other, the other leading right back into the first. He doesn’t love me and our baby is gone. Our baby is gone and he doesn’t love me.

Slowly, I press up to sitting. Just as I get myself resituated in the bed, the blankets pulled up around my waist, the door opens.

I turn to the window. I don’t want to see him. Not yet.

Footsteps pad across the floor, but I focus on the window. The blinds are halfway open. I can see slashes of the sky and the buildings surrounding the hospital. The day looks bright and warm—a far cry from the chill creeping into my chest.

I feel a presence behind me, the magnetism of a body close to mine.

Then there’s a sharp pinch in my bicep.

I spin around and see the syringe in my arm first. The needle is long and thin, gleaming in the sunlight.

As I watch, a pale, delicate hand pushes the plunger down all the way.

“What—” Realization is already coming over me as I look up into the face of the last person I ever wanted to see again.

“Good to see you again, Belle,” says Xena.

Her face is clean and makeupless, making the sharp lines of her cheekbones even more brutal. When she smiles, I instinctively pull back. It’s like a she-wolf showing me her teeth before she rips my throat out.

I inhale to scream, but the sound stays locked in my lungs. My tongue has disconnected from the rest of me. Piece by piece, my body is going offline. My arms hang uselessly at my sides and my legs are lumps beneath the blankets.

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