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Thanos appeared behind the frail security guard.
‘And if you wait in the reception, we’ll let you know as soon as your baby arrives.’
He swore angrily. ‘No. I want to be in there. Hannah needs me.’
For a moment, the nurse’s face flashed with sympathy, but then she was all business again. ‘Miss May was very clear on this point. There was no one she wanted called, no one she wanted notified. She told me she is alone.’
Leonidas couldn’t meet his brother’s eyes. Pain and raw disbelief filled him as he digested this, feeling the rejection of that statement, the line she’d drawn in the sand excluding him from this moment—knowing he deserved no better.
‘Tell her I’m here. Please.’ The words were hoarse, his stomach rolling, his expression full of desperation.
The nurse relented. ‘I will. Please go and wait in reception for now.’
‘But I—’
‘This is not your call,’ the nurse insisted with a quiet firmness in her voice. ‘If she wants to do this on her own, you have to accept it.’
Leonidas stared at the nurse, then at the doors, then back at the nurse. Hannah’s scream tore through the air and Leonidas felt an agonising need to go to her, to hold her, to do something...anything to help her.
‘Please.’
‘It’s not my call.’ She lifted a hand to his chest. ‘I’ll tell her you’re here. Go and wait for me out there.’
Every bone in his body railed against this; every fibre of his being demanded he stay, that he fight her, that he fight to be with Hannah. But she didn’t want him. She was doing exactly what she’d said she would—making her own life.
Despair swallowed him up. He stalked out of the corridor and into the reception room, which was full of happy, waiting family members. Leonidas was the only one who looked as if he could murder someone with his bare hands.
Thanos sat on one of the chairs, his calmness infuriating to Leonidas.
Leonidas was not calm.
Every time he heard her cry out his body was a tangle of pain, of outrage and impotence. How could he let her go through this—without him?
What could he do to help?
Nothing.
But that didn’t change the fact that he was living a moment of sheer terror, that he’d spent the last three months in a state of agony and now it had come to this. Her pain filled him and worry—irrational, desperate anger at his own stupidity—drove through him like a blade.
He’d wasted time. He’d gambled. And now he could lose everything.
When a team of two nurses ran through the waiting room and disappeared into the corridor, he followed. When they pushed into Hannah’s room, his heart dropped. A doctor followed.
Leonidas couldn’t bear it.
He pushed into the room, and almost wished he hadn’t when he saw the pain on Hannah’s face, the look of sheer terror.
‘Sir, I told you, you can’t be here.’ The nurse who was at Hannah’s legs shot him a fierce look but Leonidas ignored her.
He strode to Hannah’s side and took her hand in his, his eyes burning into Hannah’s.
‘I belong here.’
She looked up at him, her expression showing him only pain, only hurt, and he swallowed, fear tearing through him. ‘I belong here.’
She didn’t say anything, so he stayed; he kept her hand in his and she squeezed it so hard he wondered if circulation might completely stop, half hoping it would so he could feel something like the pain she was enduring.
He stroked her hair at times, and she said nothing to him—nothing to anyone—there were only the indiscernible, guttural sounds of her cries.
