In that second, something inside my chest fractured for good. Not my pelvis—the seven-year illusion of a partnership. Whatever faith I’d had left in his oath dissolved into ash.

Without the anesthetic, raw agony rocketed up my nerves and detonated behind my eyes. My hands locked onto the steel bed rails. My fingernails bent backward.

The veins in my forearms bulged like knotted roots.

“Push! If you don’t push, you’ll cause fetal distress!” Preston’s voice rained down like frozen hail.

I didn’t scream. I didn’t beg. A decade of absorbing life and death in the trauma bay had given me a terrible, crystalline clarity in the middle of the torture.

I channeled every ounce of humiliation and rage into my grip.