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“Wren?” I hear Cian call from just outside the bathroom door.
I ignore him and pull up my skirt. I can’t cut myself anywhere obvious; he’ll see through the ploy immediately. So I lift my leg and prop it up on the counter, which is quite a feat considering I’m the size of a beluga right now. I pluck up the shard of broken glass between two and hold it to the soft flesh of my upper, inner thigh.
At the last second, I pause. Oh, God… am I really going to do this?
My hand is shaking. The thought of cutting into myself feels so wrong. But I’m running out of options.
It’s this or nothing.
“Wren? You alright in there?”
Biting down hard on my tongue, I slash the shard of glass over my skin. At first, I feel nothing. Then comes the sharp, stinging, gnawing pain. It’s weird how much that pain makes me want to laugh. I dump the offending shard of glass in the wastebasket, along with the whole towel, glass shards and all, and pull my skirt back down.
“Wren?”
I open the door and limp out. The nerves have left a sheen of sweat coating my face. All the better to help sell this little charade.
“I’m… not doing so good…”
He blinks in confusion. He looks paler and skinnier than ever. “What do you mean? What’s going on?”
“I told you I had a serious medical condition,” I gasp, keeling over with my elbows pressed to my knees. I can feel the blood trickle down my inner thigh. I hope to God I haven’t overdone it and given myself a serious injury. If that wound needs stitches, I’m screwed.
“What about the pills? The—the—the damn blood pressure pills. I sent you them. You’re supposed to?—”
He had sent the pills—and I’d promptly flushed them down the toilet. “Of course I’ve been taking them!” I protest. “But clearly, they’re not working. Which is why I wanted you to take me to see my doctor. She’s the only one who can treat my—ahh?—”
“Fuck!” He lunges in my direction, though he freezes just short of actually touching me and drops his arm. “Wren…”
Biting down on my lip, I shake my head. “Something’s not right… Something’s really…” I put my hand under my skirt, careful to get as much blood on my fingers as I can manage before pulling it out again. “Oh, God…”
“Fuck.” Cian’s eyes bulge. “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck!”
I look at him desperately. “I have to see a doctor, Cian. My doctor. This isn’t normal… ahh, it hurts…”
“As ucht Dé,” he hisses as his eyes narrow with anxiety. “Okay, why don’t you lie down and?—”
“Lie down?” I snap. “Lie down?! I might be losing my baby and you want me to lie down and do what: wait for him to die?”
He’s sweating now far worse than I am, rivulets of gray perspiration dripping down his temples. “I’ll—fuck, I’ll get you a—a doctor, goddammit!”
I cry out wordlessly. My clever ploy is slowly starting to feel like a car without wheels. If he gets some random doctor in here, they’re going to discover that I’m bleeding out of a manufactured cut in my thigh and then the jig will be up.
“I need Liza. Only she’ll know what to do.” I grab his arm with my bloody hand, leaving smears of red on his skin. “Please, Cian. I’m begging you. You’re better than this.”
He looks aimless, helpless, hopeless. His eyes keep roaming around the room like there are instructions written on the walls if he just squints hard enough.
“I wanted to be,” he croaks softly.
“I’ve lost so much already. I can’t handle losing my baby, too.” The panic is building higher and higher. If he simply refuses to take me to Liza, then I’m out of ideas. “And you can’t afford to have this baby die on your watch.” That gets his attention. “Dmitri will burn down the whole of Chicago if it means finding and destroying you.”
His lips are chalk-white now. He licks them again and again. “It might not matter either way. He’s going to go apeshit on me regardless.”
“Not if I plead your case.”
His eyes snap to mine. “Why would you do that?”
“If you take me to Dr. Liza right now, I will vouch for you,” I promise him. “I will tell Dmitri that you did whatever you could to help me, to save this baby. He’ll listen to me, Cian.”
