Spectacle (Menagerie #2)(86)
She glanced back and forth between me and the doctor. “I only helped fate along. The oracle told me you’d give me a baby. I just wanted to speed things along. And make sure it was Willem’s.”
No.
I clutched my stomach. “This is your husband’s baby?” I turned to the doctor, my hands shaking against my scrubs top. “You inseminated me? Without my permission? Without my knowledge?”
“I had you sedated,” Tabitha admitted. “Willem wasn’t ready to know, and you didn’t need to know until you started having symptoms. Dr. Grantham wasn’t even sure it would take.”
“You didn’t tell your husband. How did you even—” I bit off the end of my question. I didn’t want to know how she’d gotten a donation from Vandekamp without his knowledge.
And since he didn’t know, he’d had no reason to take me off that sadistic full-contact roster. “Now you don’t know whose baby I’m carrying.” I swung my legs over the bed and stood on the cold tile floor. “You and your husband are both sick. You deserve each other. But neither one of you deserves a kid, and you’re sure as hell not getting mine.”
I marched past them both, my focus on the glass door, beyond which Pagano stood watching the whole thing unfold, wide-eyed. Waiting for instructions.
“Grab her!” Tabitha ordered, and the doctor’s shoes shuffled behind me. I didn’t think he’d touch me—surely he knew what I was capable of—until pain stabbed into my right thigh.
I stumbled backward and made it four steps before the room started to look...fuzzy. “Help me catch her!” Dr. Grantham shouted as I began to wobble, and though Tabitha didn’t move, someone caught me from behind. Someone braced my back with one arm and swung my legs up with the other, until I was being carried like a child.
Pagano stared down at me, frowning.
“Put her on the table,” Dr. Grantham ordered, and a second later I felt cold paper beneath me.
I tried to sit up, but my body wouldn’t cooperate. My limbs were too heavy.
“Help me strap her down.” The doctor’s voice sounded like it was being stretched, and Tabitha’s face seemed to have suffered the same fate.
“No. Let me up,” I insisted, but the syllables came out all mashed together. As if I were somehow speaking without the use of my teeth.
Tabitha’s oddly loose and stretchy face turned toward the end of the table. “I’ll get her feet.”
Something soft surrounded my wrists and ankles, but I no longer felt like struggling. My head rolled to the side, where the doctor’s gut took up most of my field of vision. The weave in the sweater beneath his lab coat began to scroll strangely, as if the threads were constantly moving, stitching themselves together over and over.
While I knew that that made no sense, I found the whole thing more fascinating than truly bizarre.
Someone lifted my shirt up to my rib cage, and I gasped when something cold and wet landed on my stomach.
“What’s that for?” Tabitha asked, but I had to listen carefully to understand her. Time seemed to be stretching, and taking the rest of us along for the ride.
“We use an ultrasound to guide the needle.” The doctor pressed something into the goop on my stomach and began to move it back and forth in small motions that spread the goo. The machine on my right beeped, then erupted in a soft whooshing sound. “That’s the baby’s heartbeat.”
Tabitha’s hands flew to her mouth and her eyes widened.
Mine filled with tears.
“Don’t get too attached...” the doctor warned, his voice fading in and out, along with my vision “...won’t have the results for a few days.”
Tabitha nodded, staring at the screen as if it were a glass ball about to show her future.
“Delilah, I need...hold still,” the doctor said.
“And I need you to go fuck yourself.” I’m not sure anyone understood me, but that didn’t matter. Even if all the energy hadn’t been sucked from my body by the sedative, I wouldn’t have moved. That would only mean hurting myself or the baby.
My plan was to hurt everyone else.
“Okay, I think we’re ready.”
I gasped at the pinch in my abdomen, then I let my head fall to the side again, where the threads in the doctor’s shirt were still weaving their way around his soft belly toward his back.
When I blinked, tears ran down my face onto the padded table.
“I think that will do it...the heartbeat is still strong.” The doctor set something on the wheeled tray, then began wiping goop from my belly. “She’ll need to rest... No work, no intercourse and obviously no travel. A little fluid leakage from the site is... If there are any other symptoms...me immediately.” He finished wiping my stomach, then tugged my shirt over my still-sticky skin, and I struggled to bring the world back into crisp focus. “And in a few days, we’ll know whether we need to reorder those prenatal vitamins or schedule an end to this whole thing.”
Dr. Grantham picked up the sample he’d pulled from my womb and as he walked away, I stared at his back and willed the furiae to wake up. To find a reason—any reason—to give him the self-inflicted, gory end he so richly deserved.
Delilah
I was confined to my cell for three straight days, and by the end of the second, I’d decided that solitary confinement qualified more as torture than rest. I saw no one but Pagano, who was evidently under orders to check on me every few hours, in spite of the fact that a camera had been installed in the corner of my cell while I was doped out of my mind and being stabbed by a needle.