I blink heavily, my vision narrowing to a tunnel. “Save her,” I slur, the darkness creeping over the edges of my sight. “That’s all.”
His eyes widen. “Our child?” he asks, the words barely carrying over the noise.
The anesthesia drags me down, wrapping me in heavy chains. “You lost the right to that word,” I whisper into the mask.
Then, the world goes black.
I am trapped in a void of muffled sounds. I feel no sharp pain, just a terrifying, violent tugging deep within my abdomen. It is the horrific sensation of my body being emptied. Voices yell in clipped, frantic bursts. I hear suction. I hear the clatter of metal trays. I hear Nicolás swearing softly, a desperate, continuous prayer mixed with medical commands.
“Come on,” he murmurs. “Come on, come on…”
Then, a sudden, heavy silence falls over the room.
It is the worst silence in the world. It is the absence of life.
I fight the drugs. I drag myself upward through the suffocating darkness, forcing my eyelids open to a slit. The bright lights blind me.
“Why…” I choke out, my throat thick and numb. “Why isn’t she crying?”
Nobody answers. The nurses are frozen.
“Why isn’t my baby crying?!” I scream, but it sounds like a weak croak.
María is moving frantically at a warming station in the corner, her back to me. Two pediatric nurses are huddled over a tiny, motionless form.
Nicolás is standing over my open body, his hands covered in my blood. He slowly turns his head to look at the warming table.
And that is when I see it. The horror.
It completely breaks across his perfect face. The great Dr. Herrera looks like a man who has just watched his soul burn to ash.
“Bag her,” he orders the pediatric team, his voice shaking. “Push epi. Breathe. Breathe!”
The seconds stretch into eternity. One. Two. Three. Four.
My heart stops. I am ready to die. If she is gone, I want to go with her.
Then—a sound.
It cuts through the antiseptic air like a razor. Small. Wet. Furious.
A cry.
My baby cries out against the harsh, cold world, a brilliant, beautiful wail of life.
The sound tears something open inside my chest that the scalpel never could. I sob, a deep, ugly, earth-shattering sound of pure relief. María turns around, tears streaming openly over her mask. “She’s back,” she laughs wetly. “She’s breathing. It’s a girl, Cecilia. A beautiful girl.”
A girl. My daughter.
For a fraction of a second, the heavy dread lifts. The nurses smile.
But Nicolás does not move. He stands absolutely paralyzed.
One of the pediatric nurses hastily wraps the screaming infant in a sterile blanket and carries her toward me so I can see. She is so red, so angry, her tiny fists clenched tight. She is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.
As the nurse steps closer to the operating table, the edge of the blanket slips down just an inch, exposing the infant’s left shoulder.
Right there, resting just beneath her collarbone, is a distinct, dark, star-shaped birthmark.
Nicolás sees it.
I watch the remaining blood completely vanish from his face, leaving him ashen. I watch the exact, devastating second his past catches up to him and breaks his knees.
Because he has that exact same birthmark.
So did his late father. So did his grandfather. It is the undeniable, genetic stamp of the Herrera bloodline, the very bloodline his mother claimed I was trying to pollute.
Nicolás takes a stumbling step backward. His hip clips a surgical tray. Metal instruments crash to the tiled floor with a deafening clatter. He does not even blink. He is staring at the screaming baby as if the entire universe has just collapsed and rebuilt itself inside this room.
He looks at me, his eyes wide, wet, and utterly destroyed.
I am too weak to feel vindicated. I am too drained to enjoy his devastation.
“Her name is Elena,” I whisper.
His lips part. “Elena,” he breathes out.
The name physically hurts him. It was his beloved grandmother’s name—the only Herrera who ever treated me with kindness.
Before he can take a step toward his daughter, a secondary alarm shrieks.
María points wildly at the suction canisters. “Doctor! She’s hemorrhaging! Uterine atony, she’s bleeding out!”
The warm, victorious glow vanishes, replaced by a freezing, violent tide. The edges of the room immediately turn black. My hands go numb. The noise of the monitors fades into a dull roar.
I hear Nicolás shout my name. Not ‘the patient’. Not ‘Morales’.
“Cecilia! Push fluids! Give me clamps!”
He leans over me, his face twisted in absolute terror. He looks less like a godlike surgeon and more like a desperate man violently pounding on the gates of hell, begging for a soul back.
“Stay with me,” he pleads, tears falling from his eyes onto my cheek. “Please, God, stay with me!”
But the cold is too heavy. I close my eyes. The last thing I hear before the dark water pulls me under is Nicolás Herrera violently ripping off his bloody glove with his teeth and screaming at the nurses.
“Use my blood! Test it now! I’m a universal donor, take whatever she needs! Do not let her die!”
Then, absolute silence.
When I wake, there is no bright light. There is only the soft, muted gray of a hospital room at dawn.
I lie still for a long time, listening to the rhythmic hiss-click of a machine beside me. My body feels as though it has been filled with lead and stitched back together with barbed wire. My mouth is filled with cotton.
But I am alive.
I turn my head slowly. The room is a massive, luxurious VIP recovery suite. And sitting in a leather chair by the window, bathed in the pale morning light, is Nicolás.
He is not wearing a white coat. He is in wrinkled scrubs. His dark hair is a messy, unkempt disaster. There are deep, bruised bags under his eyes, and a thick strip of white medical tape rests in the crook of his arm—where they drew his blood to pump into my veins.
He looks like he has aged ten years.
He senses me moving and immediately sits forward, his hands clasped tightly between his knees.
