Chapter 3 - Facing the Truth at the Bedside
The high-risk delivery room was loud with the electronic beep of monitors and the rhythmic, terrifying hissed gasp of oxygen being delivered through a nasal cannula.
In the center of the room, surrounded by three nurses adjusting IV drips, lay Mia.
She looked tiny beneath the heavy white hospital blanket. Her golden-honey hair was damp with sweat, clinging to her pale cheeks. Her sea-glass eyes were half-closed, heavy with medication and exhaustion, but her hands—thin, pale, with raw knuckles—were pressed flat against the high, round dome of her belly.
She was guarding them. Even semi-conscious, her body was a fortress built around her children.
"Mia," Carter breathed.
He crossed the room in three long strides, pushing past a nurse who tried to give him a gown. He dropped to his knees right beside the metal frame of the bed.
Her eyes fluttered open. For a second, the fog of pain cleared, and she looked directly down at him.
"Carter?" Her voice was a cracked whisper, barely audible over the hum of the heart rate monitor. "No... no, you're not supposed to be here."
"I'm here," he said, reaching out to cup her face in his trembling hands. His skin was cold; hers was burning with fever. "I'm right here, Mia. I'm not going anywhere."
"The papers..." She tried to turn her head away, a tear leaking from the corner of her eye and soaking into the white pillowcase. "Harrison... he said you signed them. You wanted... you wanted to be free."
A brutal, sickening spike of guilt tore through Carter’s chest. He squeezed his eyes shut, pressing his forehead against the side of her mattress.
"I don't want freedom," he choked out, his voice raw with tears he hadn't cried in thirty years. "I never wanted freedom, Mia. I was an idiot. A coward. I thought... I thought I was letting you go because I was destroying you."
"You left me alone," she whimpered softly, a sudden contraction seizing her body. Her back arched off the bed, her knuckles turning white as she gripped the side rail. The heart monitor’s alarm began to chime in a rapid, panic-inducing crescendo.
"Pressure is spiking! 190 over 110!" a nurse yelled. "Dr. Cruz, her oxygen saturation is dropping!"
Dr. Cruz stepped up to the bed, her face grim. "We don't have an hour. We have to go now. Get OR 3 prepped immediately! Call NICU—we have two thirty-two-week infants incoming!"
"Carter," Mia gasped, her fingers blindly reaching into the air as the nurses unlocked the wheels of her bed. "Carter, the babies... don't let them... please save them..."
Carter grabbed her hand, lacing his fingers through hers with an desperate, uncompromising grip. He stood up, running alongside the rolling bed as it was pushed out into the corridor toward the surgical suite.
"Listen to me, Lauren Fields," Carter growled, his voice trembling with a ferocious, absolute authority that shocked even the medical team. "You are going to breathe. You are going to pull through this. And our children are going to live. Do you hear me? I am holding your hand, and I am not letting go. Not now. Not ever."
Mia stared at him through the blur of her tears, seeing for the first time in four years the raw, unfiltered fire beneath his icy exterior.
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"You called me Mia," she whispered as the double doors of the operating room swung open.
"Because you're mine," he rasped, pressing his lips to her sweaty forehead just as they pushed him back at the sterile barrier. "You've always been mine."
