The Drowned Heartbeat

The night I first felt the baby kick, I held my phone to my belly and recorded for three full minutes straight.

I sent the video to Dante, but Valeria was the one who opened it.

That night, she smashed the bathroom mirror and slit her wrists with the shards.

Dante rushed back to the estate overnight. He grabbed me by the hair and dragged me down to the basement, throwing me straight in front of the security monitors.

"Did I or did I not tell you to keep that thing out of her sight?"

"Couldn't bear to miss a single kick, could you?"

"Then watch it. Second by second."

For three minutes, Noah was hung upside down and submerged into a vat of ice water.

Paralyzed from the waist down, he couldn't even kick his legs to struggle. Only his hands thrashed wildly beneath the surface.

I threw myself at Dante's feet, swearing over and over that I would never record it again, never send another clip, never let anyone see it.

He pried my fingers off his legs, one by one.

"Too late."

The next day, a fetal monitoring belt was strapped securely around my stomach. The data fed directly to his phone.

"For every second it moves, Noah spends a second under the water. We settle the tab every night at midnight."

"Until she wakes up."

For a month, I hid myself in the most remote corner of the estate, wrapping a restrictive corset around my belly, layer by suffocating layer.

But I could only bind my stomach; I couldn't bind the kicking.

Noah was submerged four times.

The fifth time, the timer on the screen hit ten minutes.

I watched Noah sink into the freezing water inch by inch, my palms pressed desperately against my stomach.

On one side, my brother. On the other, my unborn child.

I could only keep one.

Splash.

On the monitor, the surface of the ice pool exploded.

Noah hung upside down, plunging headfirst into the freezing depths.

This was the sixth time.

The timer in the corner of the screen ticked upward mercilessly.

Nine fifty-eight.

Nine fifty-nine.

Ten minutes exactly.

"Time's up!"

I lunged at the heavy oak desk.

"Dante, it's been ten minutes! The baby only moved for ten minutes yesterday!"

Dante didn't even look up. His fingertip slowly scrolled through the fetal movement log on his phone, like a ruthless auditor checking a ledger.

"Ten minutes and forty seconds."

"You bound your corset over the monitor. The signal dropped for forty seconds."

"Those count against you, too."

He raised a hand.

Two bodyguards stepped forward instantly and pinned me to the carpet.

Dante stared at his watch, waiting secondhand by secondhand.

I was forced to watch the screen as Noah’s hands, clawing blindly at the surface of the water, slowly went slack.

Forty seconds.

It felt like a lifetime.

"Pull him up."

Dante finally broke the silence.

"Try another stunt, Chloe, and it'll be a hell of a lot longer than forty seconds."

Noah was dragged over the edge. He curled up on the wet concrete, coughing up a lungful of water.

His chest heaved violently.

He was still alive.

The bodyguards released me. I pressed my shaking hands into the rug, unable to stand up for a long time.

Over the past month, I had tried everything.

I bound the corset until my ribs bruised and I couldn't breathe. I lay on my side all night, absolutely terrified to turn over. I starved myself, praying the baby wouldn't have the energy to move.

But it kept growing, day by day.

Noah had already been submerged six times.

The first time was three minutes.

This time, ten minutes and forty seconds.

What about next time?

I thought back to last week, when I secretly asked the estate's family doctor if there was any medication that could make the baby quiet down.

He pushed up his glasses, looking at me like I was a lunatic.

"Ma'am, fetal movement is absolute proof that the child is alive."

"If you want it to stop moving completely, there's only one way."

He didn't finish the thought.

I understood it perfectly anyway.

I slipped my hand into my coat pocket. My icy fingertips brushed against a pair of soft baby shoes.

Creamy white, with a clumsy little bear embroidered on the toes.

Dante had bought them.

The day he found out I was pregnant, he canceled a high-stakes sit-down with the Corsican mob and stood completely alone in a baby boutique for two hours.

When he finally came back, he dropped to one knee in front of me, gently pressing those tiny shoes against my belly, measuring them again and again.

"This small?"

"Chloe, will he really fit into something this small?"

The man who terrified the entire New York underworld had red-rimmed eyes that afternoon.

Then, Valeria came back.

The very first time she saw my swelling stomach, she fell to her knees in the hallway, clutching her head and seizing violently.

Dante ripped off his suit jacket and threw it over my torso, masking my belly entirely.

"Cover it up."

Since that day, I became a ghost in the estate.

Wherever she was, I wasn't allowed to appear.

I questioned him. I fought with him.

He only ever gave me one answer:

"She lost a child. She’ll never walk away from that trauma for the rest of her life. And you? You just have to endure it for a few more months."

"Don't be so selfish, Chloe."

I never dared to take those white shoes out of my pocket again.

"Chloe."

Dante's cold voice yanked me back to the present.

"Did you hear what I said?"

I squeezed the tiny shoes in my pocket as a vicious, agonizing cramp suddenly tore through my lower abdomen.

"Dante... the baby will never affect Valeria again."