Rock Bottom (Tristan & Danika #2)(64)

I didn’t panic. I felt too tired, too lethargic to panic. Panic took energy.

The blood was not so very much, I told myself.

I laid down and found a towel, pressing it against me, hoping to stop the flow if I held very, very still. Was it getting worse all of a sudden? Could it even be called spotting anymore? It had become a steady, worrisome flow.

I rubbed my slightly rounded belly, closing my eyes.

I want this baby, I thought. It was the closest I’d ever come to a prayer.

Please, let me keep this baby.

I had never wanted anything more, not even Tristan’s love.

TRISTAN

Kenny dropped me off at the curb in front of my apartment building. I was f**ked up in the extreme. I knew I’d be catching hell for it later, but at just that moment, I felt no pain, and getting a bit of grief seemed a small price to pay for blessed numbness.

I knew I’d missed some texts from Danika, but she was pissed at me again, our last conversation beginning and ending with her bitching at me for being unreliable, and that was more than I wanted to deal with at the moment.

It took me way too long to fish the keys to my apartment out of my pocket and fumble the lock open. I stumbled more than walked to my bedroom. I had just begun to unbutton my jeans, my eyes on the bed in the darkened room, when I realized that I wasn’t alone.

“Danika,” I called softly, not wanting to wake her if she was asleep. I didn’t want her to see me like this again, if I could help it.

I lay down beside her, still fully clothed, reaching a tentative hand out to find hers.

Her fingers were limp, her palm cold as I linked our fingers. I moved closer. Even shit-faced, my first instinct was to warm her up.

I slipped under the covers, hugging her to me. She was so deeply asleep that she didn’t so much as twitch.

Forgetting entirely that I’d been meaning not to wake her, I slipped my hand up her shirt, then ran it over her body, starting at one cool, rounded breast, over her belly, meeting resistance in the form of bunched up cloth as I tried to delve between her legs.

Impatient, I dug deeper into the swaths of fabric.

I tensed as I my seeking fingers touched something wet and cold.

My heart started pounding.

It was the loudest sound in that still as death room.

I stumbled back, sobering instantly, but becoming no less clumsy as I fumbled along the wall for the light switch, sheer panic setting in.

I’d taken the covers off her with my rough attentions, and so the first thing I saw was the blood.

So much blood.

My breath stuttered in my lungs as I moved back to her, my fingers trembling as I put them to her neck. My eyes closed in relief as I made out her faint pulse.

I swallowed hard as I glanced again at her lower body.

So much blood.

A thick towel bunched between her legs was soaked through with it. Underneath her, the bed was soaked with it.

So much blood. Too much blood.

I fumbled in my pocket, fishing out my phone. I didn’t remember dialing 911, or even speaking, and I didn’t know how long I held the phone to my ear even after it went dead.

I was terrified to move her, and so I huddled over her, trying to warm her up, pulling her baggy T-shirt down to cover as much of her lower body as I could manage.

I stroked her hair, and murmured reassurances in her ear. They were for my benefit alone, since she didn’t stir, didn’t so much as twitch under my reverent, soothing hands.

I’d never been so scared, abject terror making my limbs numb. I could hear my teeth chattering with it, tapping out a click-click-click noise that seemed to fill up the room.

Click-click-click.

I pulled the blanket up to her neck. I checked her pulse again.

Click-click-click.

Time slowed down, until it felt like I’d been waiting hours, and still she didn’t rouse.

Finally, the sound of the ambulance approaching, a fairly common sound in Vegas, and one I’d never been so relieved to hear before in my life, got me moving.

I made sure the front door was unlocked, reconsidered, and just left it open.

I was hovering over her when the paramedics came in. They were loud but efficient.

My eyes stayed glued to Danika, desperate for any sign of life from her.

She stirred as they moved her from the bed to a stretcher, her hands shifting over her taut belly.

My gut clenched. It could have been the state I’d been in walking in the door, or just plain shock, but it only occurred to me then that the baby was in danger. I’d been too singularly focused on the peril Danika was in to even consider it before.

No. My mind shied away from it, from either possibility. I couldn’t take that, not on top of everything else.

I’d been a flake lately, just letting too many things go, but this, this was too much. I couldn’t bear the thought.

I wanted our little family, needed it.

Danika roused in the ambulance. She cried and screamed and cursed as that little life bled out of her, but in the end, she was as helpless as I was.

Hours later, utterly defeated, she finally rested, with the help of some much needed painkillers.

I spent the longest night of my life in the St. Rose Dominican hospital, where we lost our baby.

I hadn’t thought that life would hand me another thing that could break me like Jared’s death had, but this did.

Jared’s loss had left a small hole in my heart that had been seeping slowly and steadily since his death, but this, this was a hemorrhage.