The ambulance doors were already open when Dante Moretti reached the curb.

Elena lay on the stretcher beneath a silver emergency blanket, her dark hair damp from the misting Chicago night, her face so pale it looked almost unfamiliar.

The West Side bus stop behind her glowed under a dirty plastic shelter.

A torn schedule slapped against its frame in the wind.

Kedzie Avenue hissed with passing tires and winter rain.

Dante saw none of it clearly.

He saw her hand.

Her fingers were curled tight around a folded clinic card, so tight the knuckles had gone white.

The paramedic nearest her was trying to check her pulse without disturbing it.

“Sir, step back,” the woman said.

Dante did not step back.

Marco Vale moved in beside him, not touching, not speaking.

He knew better.

Dante’s face was calm in the dangerous way it became when something inside him had already passed beyond rage.

“That card stays with her,” Dante said.

“She needs transport,” the paramedic said.

“Now.”

“She gets transport.

She gets every doctor you have.

But the card stays with her.”

The paramedic looked from Dante to Marco, then to the two black SUVs that had rolled silently to the curb behind them.

She understood enough to stop arguing.

“Fine.

Ride if you’re family.”

For three months, Dante had told himself he no longer had the right to that word.

He climbed in anyway.

The ambulance doors slammed shut, muting the city.

Elena’s breathing came shallow and uneven beneath the oxygen mask.

A monitor beeped beside her.

The paramedic began calling vitals to the hospital, words Dante had never feared before because they had never belonged to Elena.

Pregnant.

Four months.

Unconscious.

Possible dehydration.

Low blood pressure.

No visible trauma.

Dante sat beside the stretcher with his hands open on his knees so he would not reach for her and wake up every instinct he had buried.

The clinic card remained trapped in Elena’s fist.

Marco’s voice came through Dante’s earpiece.

“The watcher is outside.

I have him separated.”

“Who changed the order?” Dante asked.

“Not on paper.”

Dante’s gaze moved to Elena’s face.

“Then somebody was careful.”

“Yes.”

“Be more careful than they were.”

The ambulance lurched through traffic.

Elena stirred at the movement.

Her brows pinched as if pain had found her even in sleep.

“Elena,” Dante said before he could stop himself.

Her eyelids fluttered.

For one second, her eyes opened halfway.

They were unfocused, glassy with confusion, but they found his shape beside her.

Her fingers tightened around the card.

“Don’t,” she breathed against the mask.

Dante leaned closer.

“Don’t what?”

Her voice vanished into the oxygen hiss.

The paramedic adjusted the mask and told him not to crowd her.

Dante sat back because Elena needed air more than she needed his questions.

At Mercy General, the emergency bay swallowed them in white light.

Nurses took the stretcher through double doors.

Dante followed until a doctor blocked him with a hand that trembled only slightly.

“We need space to stabilize her,” the doctor said.

“She is pregnant.”

“We know.”

“Four months.”

The doctor glanced at the chart.

“Approximately, yes.”

“Is the baby alive?”

The question cost him more than any order he had ever given.

The doctor’s expression softened in spite of himself.

“We’re