“Ho’d dis, Mommy.” Calliope holds out a plastic block to me, part of a set she’s trying to fit through the right shaped holes on the toy in front of her. I take it and stare at her face, which is screwed up in concentration as she decides which slot the plastic star in her other hand will go through. “Here?”

She points at an opening and looks at me for approval. I give her an encouraging smile.

“There’s only one way to find out.”

She looks at the star she’s holding one last time, then places it against the hole. The five points slip through easily, and she turns wide eyes back on me.

“You did it!” I celebrate along with her, scooping her into my arms. I wrap her up and kiss every inch of her face while I tell her how proud I am over and over again. Her laughter chimes gloriously in my ears. Her smell fills every breath I take, and it starts an uncontrollable chain reaction. At first, it’s almost cleansing… But it changes.  It starts with an unexpected wash of unease that quickly and irrationally unravels into paranoia, then fear, then…

“Christian!” My hands lock down as Calliope moves to pick up another toy, and she whines while she tries to struggle out of my grip. I pull her against me and scurry to my feet, turning panicked eyes on the windows laying dark and dormant behind the curtains of the hotel room. The hairs on the back on my neck rise and an eerie, invasive feeling overcomes me, like I’m being watched. Maybe there are cameras in the room. Maybe they’re waiting for us to leave, or tracking the movements of our security team.

“Ana?” I spin towards Christian’s voice just as he steps into the room, and the moment his eyes fall on me, his face melts with concern. “Come here.”

I don’t move, so he takes the few steps it takes to close the distance between us and wraps both me and Calliope in his arms. She starts to struggle again, but my hands stay firm.

“Daddy!”

“Ana, give her to me.”

“No!”

“Ana…” He reaches up and grasps my face, cupping my chin so he can tilt my head up and force my eyes to his. He holds my gaze until I start to breathe again, and my grip relaxes. Calliope stops squirming. He slides his hands against her sides and pulls her out of my arms, resting her on his hip. I start to protest, but his lips cut me off before I’ve even formed the first word.

It calms me.

“What happened?” he asks, pulling away from the kiss.

“Nothing. I just…” I pause, pressing my lips together and shaking my head as I struggle with just how ridiculous I’m being. “I just smelled her.”

His eyes narrow. “Okay… I don’t really know what I can do about that…”

My shoulders deflate a little and I bury my face into him to try and hide my growing anguish. “I don’t think I can leave her.”

I feel him take a deep breath, and release it as though he’s been waiting for this to come all day. Honestly, he’s probably been waiting for it since we left Seattle. “You don’t have to.” I shoot a pointed look back at him, but he maintains every ounce of sincerity. “You don’t have to.”

“Christian, this is the biggest night of your life. I’m not missing it.”

“This isn’t the biggest night of my life.” He tilts my chin up again, refusing to let me hide from him. “Not by far.”

Somehow, even with the phantom of a tremble still haunting my lip, I manage to smile. The real kind that makes the cold trepidation in his eyes warm a little. I stare back into the depths of those dark gray irises and go through the breathing exercises Flynn gave me for situations just like these.

“That’s better,” Christian whispers when he feels me relax. He sweeps a hand over my cheek, then turns for the door. “Mackensie!”

“Yes, sir?” Our nanny pops her head through the open door and Christian holds Calliope out for her.

“Will you give her a bath and put her to bed, please?”

“Sure thing.” She takes my daughter and turns her toward me. “Say good night to Mommy.”

“Nigh-nigh, Mommy.” I smile again and lean in to kiss her on the cheeks, but when Mackensie turns and leaves the room, the uncomfortably familiar feeling of dread fills the void she leaves behind. Automatically, I reach down and cradle my stomach protectively. Christian pulls my hand away and draws my eyes to his again.

“Have I told you how absolutely beautiful you look tonight?”

“Not yet.” My eyes move down to my dress. It’s a deep emerald green, with a long flowing skirt that’s cinched at my waist, a plunging neckline, and long sleeves that hide the barely healed scar on my shoulder. “Kate bought the dress…”

“I’ll have to remember to thank her. You are absolutely breathtaking, Anastasia.” He smiles and pulls a flat box from the inside of his tuxedo jacket and holds it out for me. “This is for you.”

I turn nervous eyes down to the hinged lid he pulls back, and feel my breath catch when I see the necklace laid on the black velvet inside. Three thick rows of diamonds make up the chain, and there are tendrils of increasingly large diamonds and emeralds cascading delicately towards the center, which would fall between my cleavage. It’s gorgeous, and so, so over-the-top.

“H-how much did this cost?” I breathe. 

Christian frowns. “Don’t worry about it…”

I swallow thickly, unable to move. I know if I reach for it, my fingers will tremble, and Christian will notice. I know if I look at him, he’ll see the sudden alarm in my eyes. So I just stand there and stare at it, and that gives me away just as much as the other stuff would.

“Ana?”

“I-I—” I tuck my lip beneath my teeth, and he reaches out to tilt my face up to his. His eyes meet mine, immediately searching.

“Red,” he mutters when he doesn’t find the answers himself. I press my lips together, and draw in a long, uneasy breath.

This is Flynn.

After I lost it that first night back home, Christian went with me to go see Flynn the next morning. Last time, after Lincoln, he was looking for answers. He wanted Flynn to tell him how he could fix me so we could get back to normal. This time, the only thing he’s cared about is keeping me from shutting him out again. From hiding from him. And so now we have a safeword. Any time Christian says it, I have to tell him what I’m thinking. I’m not allowed to lie, and I’m not allowed to hide the ugliness. And has to make that safe for me. Whatever confession I have to give, he has to respond with love.

It’s actually managed to build a very deep sense of trust between us. So, in the spirit of that, I take a deep breath and continue. 

“Luke told me awhile ago that I had been targeted before because of my wedding ring. It’s just… there are going to be photographers at this event tonight, and I don’t think I want to be seen in…” 

I let the words trail off because I know he’ll fill in the blanks himself. He does, and I wait for pain or rejection to color the heart-stoppingly beautiful features of his face, but it doesn’t come. He nods, closes the lid to the jewelry box, and reaches down to take my hand. 

I don’t know if I’m waiting for his fingers to shake with suppressed irritation, or tighten in a show of pain, but I definitely don’t expect it when he slips off my wedding ring and tucks it into his palm. He lifts my bare finger to his lips, and gently kisses the tattoo there. Then he moves to the room safe, locks the jewelry inside, and turns to reach for me. 

“Come, love.”

He leads me into the main room where Taylor is gathered with Evan, Smith, Wyatt, and Harper. All five of them look up as we enter the room.

“Taylor, would you please go over the plan for tonight with Anastasia?”

He nods. “Smith, Wyatt, and Harper will remain here with Calliope and Mackensie. All three of them will have a communication line with me.” He reaches up and taps his ear to draw attention to the earpiece. “We have body doubles for both you and Mr. Grey, and I will be taking them through the hotel to the limo waiting out front, while the two of you are escorted to the car we have waiting for you out back. When you arrive, you’ll be taken through a private entrance we’ve arranged with the venue, and they’ll have you seated first. You will not be exposed to the public at all.”

I take a deep breath, actually feeling a little better now that I can visualize it. “Okay.”

Taylor gives me an affectionate smile, then steps to the side so I can start for the doors to our suite. I don’t move though, and Christian doesn’t push me.

“Are you ready?” he asks instead. Clenching my teeth in apprehension, I reach over for his hand and nod. He pulls me from the room, and the moment we’re through the door, all of my senses sing to life. I can hear my heart pounding in my ears, as my pulse starts to race. It’s like in a vacuum. Sound changes, the walls around me feel like they’re closing in. I have to focus to control my breathing. 

When the elevator dings, I throw myself protectively in front of Christian. He simply wraps his arms around me and carries us both inside.

My thoughts move to Calliope as we descend to the ground floor. I want to think through every single way someone could try to get to her, and then double check with Taylor that he’s made preparations for it. Maybe even ask if he’s thought of anything I haven’t. But that isn’t healthy, so instead I look at the numbers and repeat each one in my head to keep my thoughts busy.

“Did you see the edits Stevens sent for Phoenix?” Christian asks, while Taylor and Evan murmur quietly to one another behind us.

I nod. “I have more to send back. I was planning on doing that tomorrow morning before we leave.”

“Are you happy with his performance so far?”

I press my lips together. Obviously, I haven’t been in any shape to go back to work, and since I’d already sent Jacki to New York to take over the newly rebranded Grey Library, Christian asked me to pick someone to step in while I was out. I chose Stevens, and when he asked the obvious follow-up in the meeting where Christian offered him the job, he’d told him I was taking extended maternity leave.

A few days after that, a card came to our house from my employees, congratulating me for our upcoming bundle of joy. Christian was standing right next to me when I opened it, but he didn’t say anything. He’s gone to every one of my doctor’s appointments, held my hand, and listened to the plan Dr. Baker and I have put together in complete silence. He hasn’t mentioned termination again, but he also doesn’t really talk about my pregnancy at all. Grace thinks that means he’s coming around, but I’m not sure. If he’s accepted it, he hasn’t said it, and the strange cold war surrounding this one thing that could be so good and healing for us right now, is instead incredibly lonely.

But I’m too much of a coward to say anything because I don’t want to fight with him again and drive him back to that– No. It’s fine. We’re fine.

I nod and squeeze his hand as the elevator doors roll back and our security leads the way into the brightly lit corridor on the other side. There’s a man and woman standing there, dressed identically to Christian and I.

“Your doubles for this evening, Mr. Grey,” Taylor says, gesturing to each of them. Christian reaches out a hand for the man, but I miss the introduction because I’m too focused on the handshake. Christian’s hands are much larger than this man’s, and his shoulders are broader. And my hair is a shade darker than the woman next to him. She might be a little taller than me too…

Will anyone else pick up on those differences?

Christian turns another concerned look on me when I don’t respond to something the woman says directly to me, so I shake away my daze and work my face into a smile. “Thank you so much for being here tonight,” I tell her. She responds in a thick, Swedish accent.

“It’s my pleasure, Mrs. Grey.”

“Shall we?” Taylor asks, gesturing for our doubles to start towards the lobby. They do, and when both Taylor and Woods fall in around them, I feel a shock of panic.

“Wait, I thought Evan was going to take us to the car!” I hiss, while the flashes from the paparazzi waiting outside the main entrance reflect like Christmas lights off the wall in front of us.

“No, I am,” a voice says behind us. I spin so fast I nearly disorient myself, and the grin Luke gives me as Christian reaches out to steady me has me instantly irritated. That irritation vanishes though when his jacket shifts, and I see the gun strapped to his chest.

He doesn’t even work for us anymore.

“Ready?” he asks, turning his gaze up to Christian. He nods and Luke turns to a door that tells us it is for staff only, and ushers us inside. Jade is there waiting, dressed in a gown the exact same shade of cherry as her lips. She squeals excitedly when she sees me and thrusts her arms around me.

“Oh my god, isn’t this place magical? I’ve never left the US before, did Luke tell you that?” Her joy is so innocent and resounding that I can’t help but be swayed by it. Even if it’s only a little, her smile brings me a sense of levity that is welcoming. When I glance at Luke, I can tell he notices the difference. And the smile I get in return tells me that I’m getting a glimpse of why he’s fallen so in love with her.

Christian takes my arm and leads me through the narrow hallways to the kitchen, then through a back-storage area to a loading dock that can’t be seen from the street. There’s a car there waiting for us, but we have to wait for Luke to clear the alley before we can step outside. It isn’t the limo our decoys left in. This car is much less conspicuous. The windows are tinted so darkly that I don’t know if you’d be able to see inside even if you pressed your face directly against the glass, and the door is so heavy when Luke pulls it back for us, that I’m sure it’s reinforced with bulletproof armor.

“You nervous, big shot?” Luke asks as Christian steps aside to let me crawl into the back seat. I catch his frown as I move past him.

“Like you wouldn’t believe.”

“Why? You know you’re going to win, right? You created perpetual motion. You’re literally going to be considered one of the fathers of modern science.”

“I know.” His response is confident, but uninterested, and Luke gives him a strange look as he climbs in after us.

While we drive through the autumn drenched streets of Stockholm, Jade points through the windows and beams with excitement back at Luke each and every time she spots something new. He stares back at her, glowing. Absolutely soaking in every ounce of her radiance.

Christian looks at me as though he’s worried I’ll start to cry.

“I’m trying,” I whisper to him, grateful Luke is currently lost in his own little world.

“I know.” His fingers untangle from mine so that he can brush them through my hair and rest gently against the side of my head. My eyes shift to his and the look of understanding and love that pours over me is like catching the very end of a rope right before you know you’re about to fall. I swallow and inch closer to him, as though immersing myself in his aura will ward off the trepidation. He leans in and presses his lips to my ear. “I don’t have any expectations, Anastasia. I’m just going to love you.”

I breathe him in as he pulls back and stares into the depths of his eyes, looking for any hint of insincerity. There’s only devotion. I haven’t seen any sign that he may be losing patience with my constant breakdowns or increasing worry that I may be slipping too far, the way that it was last time. He hasn’t buried himself in work, trying to come up with his next powerplay that will once again elevate him beyond the reach of his enemies. 

In fact, he’s barely worked at all.

All GEH business is currently being conducted out of my house. Ros shows up at my door every day at the same time that Flynn does, and while I have my session with him on the sofa in the living room, Ros disappears into Christian’s office. They work until my time with Flynn is done, and the moment he leaves, so does Ros, and Christian turns his full attention back to Calliope and me.

“I love you too,” I whisper through the darkness between us. He smiles, presses his lips to mine, and kisses me with all the love I need to feel to remember I’ve got him back for good.

“Wait, where are we going?” Jade asks when the car suddenly turns down a side street and the long line of limousines filling the road leading up to the venue disappears behind us. Luke shoots a cocky look down at her.

“We’re VIPs, baby.” She rolls her eyes and shakes her head, then plops back into the seat and crosses her arms over her chest with disappointment. The back sides of the tightly packed buildings that make up the alley we turn down to get to the back entrance are much less scenic than the public street.

The car stops outside an unassuming brick wall set with an industrial looking door. There’s a woman waiting there in an impeccable black gown. She smiles as Luke pulls back the door and Christian steps out, eagerly reaching out a hand for him.

“Welcome, Mr. Grey. I’m Eva Karlsson, and on behalf of The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, let me just tell you how happy we are that you were able to attend tonight.”

“The honor is mine,” he replies as he shakes her hand. She beams and turns to me, but before her hand can wrap around mine, Luke starts impatiently pushing us towards the door.

“Okay, inside, inside, inside…” he repeats to us over and over again. Eva looks shocked and indignant as he practically shoves me past her, but Christian moves so quickly in response to his orders that she doesn’t have time to argue. In fact, Luke keeps his urgent pace as he leads us through the maze of hallways, so she doesn’t even really get the opportunity to offer Christian the welcome speech she has prepared for him before we emerge in the ballroom where the ceremony will take place this evening.

The room is enormous, filled with dozens of round tables that are set with fine china and glittering centerpieces. Though a few people have already begun trickling in from the ruckus that’s going on behind the doors on the other side of the room, it’s mostly empty, and as we’re led to our table near the stage, I glance at the entrances all around us. Taylor stands at one and Woods is already posted at the other. Both of them are checking tickets for every person who enters.

Their plan seems to have gone off without a hitch, and as I’m settled down into a seat between Christian and Luke, I start to breathe easy again.

Until I start thinking about Calliope…

“Christian!” Grace calls, hurrying across the ballroom with open arms for her son. He turns to go to her, so it’s Luke who sees the shift in me. While the rest of our family starts towards us, he reaches up to touch his earpiece.

“Harper, you there? You got eyes on the baby? Go to her.” He reaches up and peels the clear rubber out of his ear and hands it to me. I scrunch my brow together as I take it, but when I hear the small, sleepy sounds Calliope makes on the other end, I shoot him a grateful look.

“Hey, beautiful,” Kate says, coming around the table to give me a hug. “How are you?”

“I’m alright.”

She glances over at Luke, who shrugs, and after taking a long breath, she leans down to kiss me on the cheek. “I’ll come take Christian’s chair when they call him up there, okay?”

“If they call him up there,” Elliot argues. “Let’s not forget there are three other people nominated, and one of them discovered a new wavelength frequency, so let’s not count our chickens, okay?”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence, Elliot.” Christian rolls his eyes, and Elliot chuckles before sliding into a seat next to Kate. He accepts hugs and congratulations from my father and Kim next, who both come around the table to me once they’ve passed my husband off to Mia. Ros comes next, then Welch and a few other high-ranking GEH engineers. And just as everyone starts to settle down, he turns and comes face to face with his father.

They stand there, staring at each other for a moment. Then slowly, Carrick’s face breaks into a glowing smile. “I am so fucking proud of you, son,” he says, and Christian’s lips go tight.

“Thanks, Dad.” They hug, and it lasts much longer than I’ve ever seen them embrace before. I think I see Carrick whisper something into Christian’s ear, and he nods before he pulls back and claps his father tightly on the shoulder. Grace reaches a shaky hand for her husband as he comes to sit next to her, and I feel a wave of elation when I see the profound sense of satisfaction that shines back at me behind Christian’s eyes. He takes a seat and reaches for my hands, kissing the back of my fingers before entwining our fingers and tucking them both into his lap.

Dinner is served and it gives us the chance to forget about the stakes of tonight and enjoy each other’s company. We’re served a special kind of fermented fish as an appetizer that we’re told is a Scandinavian delicacy. I have to have it moved as far away from me as possible, because the smell immediately makes me want to vomit, but that just seems to provoke Luke and Elliot. No one else will touch it, so they start piling it on their plates.

“First to puke loses,” Elliot says, glancing at my best friend. Luke raises an eyebrow.

“What does the winner get?”

“To be Master of the Universe, obviously.”

“My million-dollar prize,” Christian offers, and Elliot’s face breaks into a huge grin.

“Oh, fuck yeah.” He takes the last scoop of fish and gives Luke a taunting smile. “You ready?”

Luke nods and picks up his fork. Mia gives them a count down and once she says, “go!” they both start shoveling food into their mouths. Elliot immediately starts to gag. Luke’s like a machine.

“Oh my god, it’s so bad,” Elliot groans, struggling with everything he has not to lose what he’s managed to get down. His face is beat red, he keeps involuntarily cringing… he looks over at Luke like he’s suddenly concerned he might not be human. “What the hell, dude?”

Luke swallows the very last bite and tosses his fork on his plate. “I have to live off Jade’s cooking now, nothing phases me anymore.”

“Hey!” She slaps him across the chest and he laughs, pulling her into him and smothering her with kisses. 

“Oh my god, you smell like that disgusting fish!” she says. The indignant look she tries to give him through the smile she can’t hold back makes me giggle, and Christian squeezes my hand under the table.

“More champagne?” the waiter checks as he passes by.

“Water for her, please,” Christian says, nodding to me, and Grace winks at me from across the table. I turn to look at him, for any sign of what he’s thinking, but the lights dim, and the first speaker takes the stage.

The speeches are endless. Presenters, nominees, past winners, foundation members… the ceremony drags on for hours. I spend the beginning listening to Mackensie read to Calliope, and then her soft breathing as she falls asleep. But once Luke takes his earpiece back, I lean into Christian and fight the jet lag and pregnancy hormones that make me want to sleep. I’m just about to lose that battle, when they finally call Christian’s category.

I hold my breath as they talk about all the amazing progress that has been made in the field of physics this year, and my heart starts to pound in my chest when they bring up Endurance.

“And so without further ado, please help me welcome this year’s recipient of the Nobel Prize in physics, Mr. Christian Grey.”

The room erupts in deafening applause and somehow, Kate’s shriek of exaltation still manages to ring around the room. I turn to Christian to find him already looking at me, a look of determination set on his face that doesn’t match the taste of victory in the air. He holds tight to my hand as he gets out of his seat, dragging me with him, then pulls me into a deep kiss that is entirely inappropriate for the venue. I can hear the vague whoops and hollers echoing through the still ringing applause, but he doesn’t let me go until Elliot reaches out and physically grabs onto him.

“Bro…”

He pulls back and the hard lines I’d seen in his face right after they called his names have smoothed out into complete serenity. “I love you,” he says.

“I love you too.”

The carefree smile that touches his lips as he squeezes my hand and steps away from me makes my heart skip. I stay on my feet, following him with my gaze as he makes his way onto the stage. True to her word, Kate slips into Christian’s empty seat, and pulls me down with her just as he begins to speak.

“Good evening,” he begins. “And thank you to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for this incredible honor. It’s one I humbly have to share with my entire team. Frederick Welch, my head engineer. I had an idea, and his brilliance is what made it a reality. The outstanding team of scientists who led this discovery with noble hearts and unrelenting belief. The weight of their contributions is so significant, that it seems inadequate for me to be the one standing before you tonight. My contribution was mostly paying for it, and even that was made possible through the tireless efforts of my COO and dearest friend, Rosaline Bailey. GEH will become Endurance, but I am not Endurance. This team is Endurance. And because of the excellence this team represents, and the work I know that they will continue despite their already resounding success, I have found peace in the decision I’ve made about the future of the technology and the company that controls it.”

There’s a curious murmur around the room, and both Carrick and I exchange confused looks.

“I am resigning as CEO of Grey Enterprises Holdings,” Christian says. “Effective immediately. Rosaline Bailey will step into my place and all future communications regarding the evolution of the Endurance project will come from her and the GEH team. I have no further comment.”

And that’s it.

He turns around and walks off the stage. The crowd devolves into an uproar as people try to figure out what just happened. Even me. Did he just… did he just give up GEH? I turn to Ros, and when she looks back at me, a single tear rolls down her cheek.

“Is this real?” I ask her, noting that she doesn’t look particularly shocked. When she nods, I scramble out of my seat and fight my way past Luke and through the throngs of people and camera flashes until I get to him. His hand closes around mine at the same time Woods grips onto my back and Taylor slides up on his other side. They push us through the chaos to the back entrance we came through, then lead us quickly through the hallways to the car that’s already waiting for us.

“Wait, what about everyone else?” I ask when he pulls open the door for me to get in.

“They’ll find their way back to the hotel.” I glance nervously back at the doors, but climb into the car and slide across the seat to make room for Christian. I can hardly even wait for the door to close behind him.

“What the hell did you just do?!”

“What I should have done years ago, but was too selfish to do.” He takes my hands in his and looks deep into my eyes. “When I finished Endurance, the moment I succeeded, I knew that I was going to get everything I ever wanted. Those deep wants, the ones that come from all that trauma in my childhood. But when I had that realization, I didn’t feel anything. There wasn’t any profound sense of relief or life-affirming accomplishment. It felt like anything else. Like completing the state project, or signing a lucrative contract. And while everyone around me celebrated like it was the greatest day of their lives, I just wanted to get home to you. The only thing that makes me feel the way I thought Endurance would make me feel… that I thought GEH would make me feel, is you. Is looking into your eyes, tasting your lips, hearing you tell me you love me… That’s what I care about. That’s the only thing I care about. I don’t choose GEH, Anastasia. I don’t choose the hell that comes along with the ambition and ruthlessness GEH brings out of me. I don’t want to be that person anymore. I choose you. I choose Calliope.” He swallows, then slowly reaches down and places a hand over my stomach. “I choose our family.”

I think my heart may have burst.

“You mean… you—you–”

“Without GEH, I can be here for you every step of the way. I can carry you through this pregnancy. I can make this safe for all three of you. I promise you, I am going to get you through this, no matter what it takes, because… I want it too.”

“You do?”

“I do. I really, really do.”

I let out a loud, sharp sound that’s somewhere between an exalted laugh and sentimental sob, then take his face in my hands and crash my lips to his. He kisses me back, telling me over and over again how much he loves me.

“It’s not going to be like last time, Christian,” I whisper against his lips. “I’m going to do everything Dr. Baker tells me to do. I’m going to be perfect, I swear to you.”

He pulls back and gives me a pointed look. “Can I get that in writing?”

I laugh and start shaking my head, the disbelief still hanging over me like a bad feeling you can’t shake. “What does this mean for us? Is it going to go back to the way it was before Endurance? I mean, when we thought we were going to lose everything?”

He shakes his head. “No. Ros and I have agreed to a very generous severance package and… I still own the patent on, well, almost all of GEH’s technologies. Including Endurance. We’ll be collecting royalties as long as those technologies are in use.”

“So… we’re good?”

He laughs. “Our great-great-great-great grandchildren will be good.”

There’s a turbulent storm of emotion building inside of me that’s becoming harder and harder to suppress. I push my lips together to keep them from trembling, and his eyes melt with concern.

“What’s wrong?”

“It’s all just hitting me. No more business trips.”

He smiles. “No more business trips.”

“No more long hours.”

“No more long hours.”

“I’ll have you. Always.”

“Always.” He scoots closer to me, and cups the sides of my face with his hands. “I told you after I finished Endurance that the only thing I wanted was to be with you. Now I will be. I’ll be a better husband. I’ll be a better father. I’ll be a better man. From this day forward, I’m giving myself to you, the way you’ve always, wholly, given yourself to me.”

The sincerity beneath his deep timber resonates in my soul in a way that brings me peace. That gives me visions of futures I’ve never seen before where we’re wrapped up in only each other, in only our children, and we’re blissfully happy about it. There aren’t dark figures lingering in the shadows. The pictures aren’t painted with a slightly ominous shade. Everything is just washed in golden light, wrapped in feelings of serenity and contentment. As I once again imagine picking up a slightly bigger Calliope and tossing her into a pile of leaves while Christian chases two little vaguely outlined children around us, my eyes well with tears.

“I can’t believe it,” I sniff, dashing the tears away. “You did it. After all this time, you really, actually did it.”

He frowns. “Did what?”

“You’ve given me the world, Christian.”

He blinks and stares back at me, a smile slowly crossing his lips as love shadows every line and curve of his face. He leans in and hovers a few precious centimeters from me, then slowly pushes his lips into mine. It’s the most meaningful kiss we’ve ever shared. So deep, so sweet, so tender… It’s the kind of kiss they write epic poems about, and it’s that kiss that leads us into our happily ever after.

The End.

Epilogue

“God damn it, Anastasia!” Luke hisses angrily through my earpiece. “What part about ‘stay where you fucking are’ don’t you understand?”

The gates in front of me groan open, but I don’t make any moves to drive forward. I sit with my eyes darting back and forth, straining my ears through the earpiece for any indication that the distraction has worked.

“Daddy?” I whisper.

“I’ve got eyes on him,” Woods replies. “They haven’t seen him yet, but they’re getting closer.” There’s a faint clicking noise that sounds like the hammer being pulled back on a gun. “I’ve got the guy on your right, Ray. You go left.”

I take a deep breath, watching several shadowy figures emerge from the house and start moving toward me. My heart is thundering in my chest, and every inch of my skin is covered in terrified goosebumps.

“Wait,” Woods whispers. “They’re turning around. They’re heading back toward the gate.”

“My guy too,” Harper says. “He got a radio call, they’re all headed towards Mrs. Grey.”

Thank god.

Two of the figures coming up the drive step into the wash of light from my headlights, and a different kind of fear grips my chest. My hands are trembling, so I pull them from the steering wheel and tuck them beneath my legs, doing my best to turn a fully confident front on the man who approaches my open window.

“Good evening, Mrs. Grey,” he sneers, and the passenger door opens. A hand reaches across the empty space and yanks me out of the drivers seat. The pressure puts too much stress on my shoulder and I let out a pain filled whine as I leave my seat. My legs get tangled between the seat and the man who quickly slides into the car to replace me, knocking my knees together hard enough that they still sting when I’m finally set upright in a stranger’s lap in the passenger’s seat.

“They’ve got her,” Smith says.

“Not for fucking long,” Luke replies, and the way he says it sounds almost like a personal slight. I can hear him moving quickly through the property. Some kind of foliage rustles around him, there’s a crunch of gravel beneath his feet.

“Sawyer, you’ve got company,” Wyatt warns him, but Luke’s response is almost gleeful. As the van starts to pull forward through the gate, I listen to the scuffle he has with whoever caught him. There aren’t any gunshots or any calls for help. The only thing I hear are muffled sounds of struggle, until Luke finally whispers, “I’m at the house.”

“Annie, listen to me,” my dad says urgently. “We are coming for you, but you are going to need to buy us a little time. Do not struggle, do every single thing they tell you to do. Just keep them talking, okay?”

I can’t answer, so I take another deep breath and let it out in a long, loud sigh that I hope he knows means I heard him. I don’t get any confirmation, only a volley of hushed orders and quiet grunting.

The van pulls into an empty garage and the rumble of the door as it closes behind us sounds more ominous than I’m prepared for. It makes every part of me tremble. I’m keenly aware that they’re going to try to use me against Christian, and everything that implies makes my heart hammer against my ribcage.

They can’t find out I’m pregnant.

I press my eyes closed as tightly as I can, fight the instinct to cradle my stomach, and remind myself that they’re going to bring me to him. Once I have him, my team will get us out. I just need to have a clear head and keep my courage until then.

“She’s inside,” Woods says. “Let’s move.”

“I’m already in the house,” Luke says, though he says it so softly, it’s almost impossible to distinguish the words.

The door that leads from the garage into the house opens, and a man hurries through it. He looks at the van with a giddy kind of excitement that looks too childish for the menacing atmosphere around him. When I’m pulled from the car and he gets his first real look at me, that excitement transforms into unbridled joy.

He looks up, holding his hands together as if in prayer, and whispers, “Thank you.”

Someone behind me calls something in Arabic, which the man in front of me responds to. I glance between them, trying to understand what was said, but Harper answers for me.

“They’re searching the van. They’re trying to figure out if she’s alone.”

There are more foreign words exchanged which Harper tells us is a consensus that I came on my own, and an order to sweep the van for any tracking or listening devices. The entire time she whispers in my ear, I keep my face blank. Every ounce of my control goes into keeping myself from reacting to the sounds in my earpiece so that it won’t be discovered. Especially when rough hands start searching my body for a wire. 

Thank god military technology isn’t that clumsy anymore.

The man who seems to be the one giving orders begins stalking toward me, and I close my eyes. Searching deep inside for strength.

His hand reaches up and cups my face, so I open my eyes and look at him. The shit eating grin on his face widens further.

“It really is you,” he says, the British accent in his voice telling me exactly who I’m dealing with. Nigel Dalton. “Could you really be this fucking stupid?”

“Or this fucking serious,” I say back, surprised by the even tone in my voice. On the inside, I can already feel adrenaline moving through my veins. “Where is my husband?”

“Hm, maybe I was wrong, Mrs. Grey. Maybe you’re exactly the person I need.”

He smirks at me, then pushes my face away with enough force that I nearly topple over. Hands grab me from behind, keeping me upright, and then hold me so there’s no way I could escape their grasp.

When Nigel turns around and re-enters the house, I feel a shove against my back that forces me to follow after him. The house is dark, except for a single ray of light at the end of the hallway that sends obscure and frightening shadows looming over me while the threat of danger creeps nearer. There are muffled sounds that are hard to distinguish coming from somewhere in the house, and as we approach that light, they become clearer. I hear a deadened blow followed by a pain filled grunt that I can immediately recognize as Christian’s.

A hand covers my mouth before I’m able to scream. I thrash violently against the hands holding me in place, not feeling any pain from their restraints and using that numbness to fight harder. I’m single minded in my need to get to Christian, but the moment I’m able to slip through one set of hands, three more are on me and I’m wrestled to the ground and gagged.

“Annie, are you okay?” my father’s worried voice demands in my ear. I fight against the man restraining me, knocking my elbows against the hardwood floor, and whimper in pain. “Annie?!”

“I’ve got eyes on her,” Luke says, so deathly quiet it sends a chill up my spine. “She’s got six guys with her, all armed.”

“Do not pursue alone!” my father hisses between panting breaths that tell me he’s moving very quickly, but Luke’s threatening response sounds so disconnected from himself that I’m not even sure he’s aware he spoke out loud.

“Get your fucking hands off of her.”

“Luke, that is an order! Stand down!” 

My head is being held tightly against the unyielding floor, but my eyes dance around to every corner of the room they can find, looking for Luke’s approach. No one seems to move though, so he must still be hiding. Waiting. I let my body go limp, and Nigel lets out a taunting laugh before he turns away, instructing his men to keep me there.

He rounds the corner and says something again in Arabic. A few seconds later, another man joins us from the room where Nigel is now and when I see his blood covered hands, I can’t stop the impulse to fight against the man holding me again. We struggle for several seconds until I hear Nigel speak, and I go still again. 

“Had enough?” he asks. There’s a spitting sound, and the creek of a wood chair before I hear Christian’s strained, but arrogant response.

“Are you kidding? I used to get off on this shit.”

Nigel laughs. “You’re very brave, I’ll give you that.”

“What do you know about brave? You’re a fucking coward. I can see it in your eyes. You’re terrified that your entire pathetic life’s work is about to be completely unravelled by a better man. You think you’re in control here, but make no mistake, at the end of this, you are going to lose everything. And I am going to take it from you.”

“Do you know what I really think, Grey?” Nigel asks. Christian doesn’t respond, but he continues anyway. “I think you’re going to pick up the phone, call Ms. Bailey, and tell her to break your energy technology apart bit by bit.”

“That’s never going to happen. I don’t give a fuck what you do to me.”

“To you, maybe. What about your wife?”

I can’t see him. I’m not even in the same room as him. But I can feel the change in the air the moment those words cross Nigel’s lips.

“Careful. That’s a line you really don’t want to cross. I’m going to ruin you, but you won’t walk out of here if I even hear you mention her again.”

“Well then, you’re not going to like what comes next very much. Not unless you pick up the phone and call Ms. Bailey.”

“Harper and I have the north entrance. Smith, Wyatt, are you ready for entry?” My dad’s voice and the responses from my team in my earpiece nearly drown out Christian’s response. 

“Bullshit.”

“Excuse me?”

“You don’t have her. Ros wouldn’t lie to me.”

“You’re sure about that?”

 “Unequivocally. I know what and who I have around her. I know you don’t have her.”

“I mean, it’s not like your confidence isn’t earned, Grey. I’ve watched others fail over and over again… but I would hope by now you’ve realized that I’m not like the others. And I’m not fucking around. Pick up the phone.”

“Go to hell.”

“There’s a 2nd story and an open landing over this room.” Luke whispers. “I can see at least one guy up there and he’s packing. Someone’s gotta get up there or he’ll pick us off like fish in a barrel.”

“I’m headed that way,” My dad replies.

“You really going to make me do this, Grey? You really wanna go this far and put the woman you love through what I’m gonna do to her?”

“You’ll never touch her. My people would die first. And if they do, you’ll still have to get through Sawyer, and you’ll still have to get through her dad. I know neither one of them will let her out of their sight while I’m gone.”

He sighs. “Alright, but remember I gave you the chance to stop this…”

 The floor creaks with heavy footsteps, then Nigel’s voice calls out into the hallway in Arabic once again. The body holding me down disappears and suddenly I’m wrenched up off the floor. The gag that had been held in my mouth falls forgotten to the ground as they drag me into the room and toss me, hard, onto the floor at Nigel’s feet. I feel a shock of panic for my babies, and it’s made worse when he pushes me roughly with his foot and I roll so that Christian can see my face.

His is a disaster. He’s bleeding from his nose, his lip, and nasty cut on his left cheek. There are different levels of bruising all around his face, the newest ones bright red, others a deep purple, and some that have already started to fade to a greenish-yellow. It adds dimensions to his face that shouldn’t be there, and it makes the anguish I see when his gray eyes meet mine seem almost monstrous.

“Ana?” he breathes in horror.

“I’m okay,” I answer back. Nigel’s hand twists in my hair and yanks me up off the ground, making me shriek with pain. Then he pulls my face right up to his lips.

“Let’s not make promises you can’t keep. Okay, sweetheart?”

“Let her go!” Christian commands. Nigel smiles at him.

“I’m sorry, Grey. You want this to stop, you’re going to have to call Ms. Bailey..”

He reaches for a knife sitting on the table next to him and brings it to my skin. Christian starts to thrash violently against his restraints, but I go perfectly still. 

Keep him talking. Protect your children.

“Wait!” The knife pauses only a breath away from the skin on my throat, while Christian continues to struggle uselessly. The hand Nigel has in my hair tightens. 

“That’s a useless word, beautiful. You’re not in Seattle anymore. You don’t have any power here.”

A high pitched noise sounds from somewhere off to my right, and Nigel’s hands release me. He falls to the ground, clutching his arm, and when I see the blood start to seep through his fingers, the room devolves into chaos. Several shouts fill the room and guns are drawn, pointing in every direction. There’s a crash on the other side of the room, and every barrel turns toward it, which is when Luke comes through an archway opposite from the entrance to the hall and dives at the man closest to him.

They roll across the floor, but the gun that turns in Luke’s direction drops when the man holding it is shot in the shoulder from somewhere on the 2nd floor. The man who was holding me down in the hall waves for someone to go investigate, but as they start to move, the glass on the windows of the back wall shatter apart into a million pieces and Wyatt and Smith come into the room with weapons drawn.

I move to Christian. He leans over to cover as much of my body with his as he can while I unfasten his right wrist from the arm of the chair he’s in. Once it’s free, his adept fingers are faster at untying the last knots and the moment he’s released himself, he grabs me and pulls me behind a sofa. His body covers mine, his hands gently hold my head to the ground, and bullets fly over the top of us.

“Where’s Calliope?” he whispers.

“They don’t have her, we came here. She’s safe.”

“Fuck.” He lets out a sigh of true relief that’s washed out by the implied threat in the very next words out of his mouth. “Stay down, and do not move. Do you understand me?”

“What?”

“Stay down, Anastasia.” He pushes himself up from the floor and launches himself over the couch. I scream for him to come back, but the sound is lost in the pandemonium around us. Crawling on my elbows, I move to the very end of the couch and peer around it. The room looks like a scene from The Avengers, but in the worst way possible. The danger all around me is so incredibly real, and it’s everywhere. Luke is locked in a fight with someone who is much bigger than he is. Wyatt and Smith wrestle with another guy who is trying to get a clean shot up at the 2nd floor balcony, and when I look up at his intended target, I see my dad fighting with a man who is trying to dump Harper over the railing. In the struggle, his gun falls to the floor with a sickening thud, just as Nigel scrambles up off the floor and tries to bolt from the room.

Christian slams him down on the ground.

It’s hard to know where to keep my attention, since every man I love is locked in a life and death battle. The glint of the knife Nigel dropped catches my attention just as it’s about to be brought down into Evan’s back, but Wyatt is there and the two of them manage to gain control of the weapon. Smith has to fire again, hitting his assailant in the thigh and incapacitating him. My dad has gotten Harper out of her precarious position, but the man the two of them are fighting seems to be better at hand to hand than either of them are. Luke tears around the room like the Tasmanian Devil, unleashing violence on whoever gets in his path. Christian attacks Nigel like a bloodthirsty wolverine.

Eventually, Harper and my father gain the upper hand and manage to subdue the man they’re fighting. Luke brings the last man left to resist us to his knees with a gun pointed at the back of his head, and everything goes still except for Christian.

“Mr. Grey,” Woods says as he and Wyatt pull him off of Nigel. Christian doesn’t stop. He fights their restraints just as hard as he intends to fight the man who put his hands on me until Luke manages to break through his bloodlust with one single word.

“Ana.”

Christian stops and looks back at me, finding me kneeling at the end of the couch and trembling. His eyes meet mine and with each second they stay locked there, his breathing becomes more regular, his body relaxes, and his face softens. Evan and Wyatt release him and he starts towards me. But behind him, I see Nigel sit up and weakly pick his gun up from the floor, and point it at his back.

“Fuck you, Grey…”

“Christian!” I scream.

The gunshot rings through the otherwise silent room at exactly the same time that Luke and I begin to move. Luke leaps through the air and slams into Christian, both of them falling to the floor. He hits him hard enough that Christian lets out a harsh grunt of pain before he scrambles to his knees and looks back at the man who fired. But the rage that brews inside of him is quenched by my father’s horrified scream.

“Annie, no!”

Christian rounds on me at the same time I look down at the blood quickly soaking the front of my shirt. The bullet hit me in the chest, right below my right collarbone, but I can’t feel it. I can’t feel anything. Everything around me seems to slow down. My father leaps down the last few stairs and starts to sprint for me. Luke launches himself off the ground. There’s another gunshot, and the other members of my team start shouting at one another and moving around the room. The color drains from Christian’s face and his expression morphs with anguish.

“NO!”

I still don’t feel it. Not until I try to take a breath and the air that moves through my lungs suddenly has me drowning in fire. I collapse just as Christian gets his arms around me.

“No, no, no, no, no!” he insists, again and again, his eyes moving over me in disbelief as he slowly lowers me to the ground. A weird convulsion moves through me, making my body jerk unnaturally, and it seems to break Christian’s sanity. He reaches for the weak part of my collar and yanks against it, shredding my shirt down the middle and exposing my wound.  Both Luke and my father fall to their knees at my side in the next second.

“Get out of the way, Christian,” my dad says, pushing his hands aside so he can press his own against the hole in my chest. I start to choke on the fire blazing in my lungs and my dad’s eyes move to Luke.

“Exit wound?”

Luke carefully pushes me up onto my side and glances over my back. When he speaks, he sounds terrified. “Yeah, it’s sucking air.”

“Fuck,” my dad hisses. Christian looks between them with alarm.

“What does that mean?”

“She’s not getting enough air,” Luke says. “She’s going to suffocate.” My father looks up at the rest of my team.

“Get me something to seal it!”

“I’ve got it,” Luke says. He shrugs his backpack off and tears it open. He pulls out something black, but whatever it is, he tosses it aside and instead takes the clear cellophane wrapper it was encased in and presses it to my skin. “Grey, there’s duct tape in there. Give it to me.” 

Christian’s hands dive into Luke’s bag and he pulls out a roll of duct tape. With his teeth, he quickly tears four short strips off that Luke uses to completely seal the plastic wrap to my skin. I whimper while he works, but the pain boiling inside my chest isn’t enough to keep me from hearing the torment in the angry words he spits at me through his impending tears.  “You’re so fucking stupid, Ana. Why would you do that? Why the fuck would you do that?!”

I try to tell him I’m sorry, I try to explain that it hadn’t been a decision—that Christian was in danger and I reacted on impulse. But when I open my mouth, the only sound that comes out is a ghostly moan.

“Don’t try to talk, Annie,” my dad says. “Be still. I need you to stay calm, because the more you panic, the faster your heart is going to beat, and the more blood you’re going to lose. I need you to just breathe. Okay, sweetie? Just breathe for me. Breathe for your babies.”

I take a breath, but the fire makes me wheeze. My father’s eyes shoot up to my husband.

“Christian, keep her focused. Keep her calm.”

I feel his hands cup my face, and then the only thing I can see are his eyes. They’re swimming with tears, but there’s a fierce kind of determination burning like the flames in my chest behind them.

“Breathe, baby. I need you to keep breathing for me.”

It’s painful, but I manage to breathe in and out every time he tells me to as long as his eyes stay connected to mine. I’m starting to fully realize what’s happened to me, and as my mind races to my babies, I want to panic. It’s not even a want, it’s a natural, biological reaction that I put everything into fighting because that’s the only way I can protect them. It feels like trying to stop falling after you’ve jumped out of a plane, but despite the impossibility, I find a way to do it. Because it’s the only way I can save my babies, and I have to fight with everything I have for the man holding on to me. 

“Breathe, baby…” He pleads again. 

I do. In and out. In and out. In and out. 

Each and every of those breaths feels like swallowing a hot fire poker. 

Once Luke has the wound bound tightly in plastic, it becomes a little easier to breathe, but everything around me starts to drift away. I can see my father, Luke, and Christian, but it’s like I’m looking at them in a dream. The pain radiating in my bones starts to fade, my vision goes black around the edges, and the fire in my chest turns to ice. It’s like the chaotically beating chambers of my heart freeze the blood pumping through them, until my whole body goes cold and I begin to shiver. There’s a faint taste of blood creeping into my mouth.

No. Please, no…

“Ana, stay with me,” Christian says, commanding rather than pleading. “You have to keep breathing, baby. Just keep breathing.”

“We’ve gotta get her out of here,” my dad says. “Get her back to the plane.” He nods to Christian, who then scoops me up to his arms. He moves so quickly through the house to the garage that it makes me nauseous. Everything around me begins to spin, the same way it does when I’ve had too much tequila. Only this time, I’m terrified to let myself succumb to the blackness that beckons me toward peace.

“Hang on, Ana,” Luke begs while he helps Christian get me into the van. They lay me on the floor between the seats, and Christian straddles my waist so he can keep pressure on my chest. His eyes move wildly back and forth as the thudding beneath his hands begins to grow weaker.

“Don’t you dare, Anastasia,” he warns me, tears finally breaking and rolling down his cheeks. He pushes harder against my chest. “You are not allowed to leave me, do you understand? You are not allowed to leave Calliope. Don’t you fucking dare!”

Smith takes the wheel and hits the gas so hard that the tires squeal and smoke beneath us. We fly in reverse down the driveway, and the blackness presses down on me harder, becoming more and more difficult to resist with each passing second. Wyatt produces a medical kit from somewhere in the van that mercifully has a transfusion line inside. He and Luke help get the needle in my father’s arm while Christian holds pressure on my wound. The cold starts to feel more persistent and my mind moves again to my babies.

“Christian…” I whisper weakly. He shakes his head.

“No, stop. No good-byes, you just need to hold on. Just keep breathing…”

“She’s going under,” my dad’s voice echoes in the distance. “Luke change places with Christian and start chest compressions…”

There’s a shift, and then I succumb to unconsciousness. The last words I hear are Christian’s desperate plea.

“Please, hold on…”

Next Chapter

“Alright, is everyone on?” Taylor asks, placing his phone on the table between him, Luke, my father, Elliot, and Carrick. Ros and I both hover nervously behind them.

“We’re here,” Smith answers. Taylor turns to Luke and nods.

“I got into the city traffic cameras. There’s one at the intersection down here that caught an unmarked van leaving the parking garage at 2:41 AM, so I used that time stamp to follow them down the highway to the airport. They had a private plane waiting for them, and I couldn’t get the security footage from the airport, but I did manage to get the flight logs. No manifest, but there was a destination. Riyadh.”

My dad’s brow creases with surprise. “Saudi Arabia?”

The words trigger a memory that plays through my mind like a film reel. A conversation between Carmen and Christian the night he took me to that sex club in New York.

Don’t you realize what will happen if you pull this off? Eliminating the need for combustible fuel will eliminate the need for corporations who make that their business. The Saudis, Exxon, BP, Halliburton… You prepared to take them on too?”

The echo of Carmen’s voice fits our current situation like a puzzle piece, completing the picture of a nightmare I should have been prepared for. The warnings were there, I just stopped listening. I let my guard down, I stopped searching, and now…

The nervous energy I felt before suddenly becomes a little more tangible. A black thorn of fear coiling around my heart, it’s poison seeping dangerously into my thoughts.

“Did you forget about me, Ana?” Lincoln’s voice echos in the back of my thoughts, nearly drowning out what Luke says next. 

“I still know some guys in that area. I put out an APB for the flight and got a license plate for the car that met them at the airport. That eventually led to an address, and a name. Ahmad Hassan, the co-founder of HD Oil. The largest private oil company in the world.”

“Co-founder?”

“He’s got a partner. Nigel Dalton, who seems to be a real piece of work from everything I was able to find. We’re talking cartoon levels of villainy here. The man is personally responsible for the near eradication of three different marine species in the Arabian Gulf because of unsafe pollution from his oil rigs. He was being investigated over it, the investigator ended up dead.”

“He wouldn’t happen to be British, would he?” I ask.

“Yeah, he’s an expat.”

“He’s the one who called,” Ros says. “He’s the one who asked me to dismantle Endurance.”

Luke nods. “Then we’re on the right track.”

“So, what now?” Elliot asks. “Do we call the FBI back and tell them all of that?”

“No, that’ll take hours, maybe days, and I don’t think we’ve got that kind of time,” Luke says. “Ana’s got a plane and I know a guy still stationed in Kuwait who can get us over the border. We get into town, lay low until it’s dark, get inside the house, and bring Grey out.”

My father blinks at him. “That’s your plan? Some guy you know will get you over the border?”

“Well…”

“Do you know how far it is from your crossing point to Riyadh? Do you have any idea how many checkpoints there are or what the patrols are like along the way? Do you know what the road conditions are or if there are any kinds of hazards we’re going to deal with? What are you going to do if we run into trouble?”

Luke mashes his lips together. “Okay, maybe I’m open to suggestions.”

My dad gives him an incredulous look, then lets out a huff and throws his hands in the air. “Somebody get me a map, I guess.”

Jade perks up, eager for a way to help, so I direct her to the hallway that leads back to Christian’s office with my eyes. “In the library. Mia, will you show her?”

“Yeah.” Mia untangles herself from her mother and darts to Jade, snatching her hand and pulling her towards the library. They come back with the oversized, hardbound atlas that I’m pretty sure Christian bought more for how it looked on the shelf than for its intended purpose, but the maps contained inside are much better quality than I’d given them credit for. Carrick and Elliot end up stepping away from the table because my father, Luke, and Taylor pour over the maps, comparing them to pictures on Google Earth Luke pulls up on his phone, while laying out objectives and speaking in military terms that seem like a native language to them, but completely foreign to everyone else.

But I’m happy to let them handle the logistics. Both because any opinion I could offer would be grossly uninformed, and because I didn’t actually eat anything, so I only get to stand there for a few more seconds before my morning sickness hits me like a fucking wrecking bottle and I end up back on my knees in the bathroom.

Luke comes for me a few minutes later.

“Here,” he says, handing me a bowl of oatmeal. I take it and glance expectantly up at him, waiting for him to tell me the plan. Instead, he frowns. “I may have underestimated how difficult this was going to be. Your dad’s pretty firm that going in ourselves is a mistake. We don’t know what’s waiting for us and we have no idea really what these people are capable of. Turns out, an American billionaire being held hostage over Nobel Prize nominated technology that’s already been sold internationally, has like… huge implications, or something. I don’t know. He doesn’t think we should be taking this lightly.”

“So, what does he think we should do?”

“He and Taylor are talking about it now, but I think they’re going to call the FBI.”

“But you said—”

“I know.” He frowns, and I wonder if it’s because he has the same understanding that I do. That each and every second is precious, because right now, they’re counting down to Christian’s last. Tears start to well again and a horribly acidic taste fills my mouth. My body begins to hum with a nervous energy that makes everything feel uncomfortable and too restraining, like a phantom straight jacket.

“I knew this was going to happen,” I admit in a shaky voice. “Everyone treated me like I was crazy, but I knew this was going to happen again.”

“You weren’t crazy. Reckless, maybe, but not crazy. I told you before, Ana. You weren’t as wrong as he made you believe you were.”

I swallow the bitterness on my tongue. “All those people you told me about, all the things that Taylor’s stopped… did he know these people were out there?”

He shakes his head. “No, we weren’t prepared for anything like this. This isn’t some street thug trying to get a ransom or even some psycho with resources, like Lincoln was. These are the kinds of people that stage coups to overthrow foreign governments. The people who came in here are trained, just like we are. Maybe better.” He pauses, his jaw flexing like he’s chewing on his next words before deciding to say them aloud. “I wouldn’t have left if I knew this was coming. I’m sorry, Ana… I’m so fucking sorry.”

I take a deep breath and shake my head, refusing to accept the hint of defeat in his apology. “What would he do, Luke? If it were me who disappeared in the middle of the night, and he was here… what would Christian do?”

His shoulders rise and fall, but he gives me a starkly honest response. “He’d already be on that plane.”

I nod, and allow his words to give me resolution so that I can peel myself off the floor and march back out to the living room. Everyone is now surrounding Taylor and my father, trying to make arguments that they both seem to just be ignoring. I don’t give either of them a second glance. I move between them, pick up my cell, and begin scrolling through my contacts.

“Ana?” My dad checks. “What are you—”

A voice is speaking through the phone, so I hold up a hand to silence him. 

“Yes, this is Anastasia Grey. I need to speak with Senator Blandino immediately.”

It’s incredible how fast things turn around once I have the chairman of the Senate Committee on Armed Services on the phone. In just a little more than an hour, the plan to extradite Christian goes from borderline childish, to clinical. We’re given access to whatever resources we need and are offered every piece of relevant intelligence the United States government has. The only caveat is that, to prevent any possibility of starting an act of war, the US government, and by extension the military, has to remain as uninvolved in Christian’s rescue as possible. 

It’s a conundrum that pulls me back to countless memories over the last few months, desperate confessions from Christian about why Endurance meant so much to him.

“I want power. I want to build the kind of empire that controls what’s really important. Information. Policy. World Leaders. By the time I’m finished, wars will be fought before anyone ever gets close to you or Calliope again.”

Just like everything else, he was right. Maybe wars will be fought.

“So, with that understanding,” the military commander on the other end of the phone says. “Who do you have that could lead this kind of mission?”

“Jason Taylor,” Luke answers. “He’s got the most military experience of anyone on the team, and the most command experience.”

“No,” Taylor says. “I don’t.” He winces again as he shifts in his seat to lean forward. “I’m not in any kind of shape to get in a combative situation, and you need good men. Captain Steele has more expertise than I do, and more experience. I think I should stay behind with Calliope and the family, and Ray here should take the rest of my team with him, and take the lead.”

My dad nods. “I can do that.”

“Alright,” the voice calls through the phone. “Then Captain Steele will take point. We’ll coordinate military escorts into Saudi Arabia and ensure you’ll have a safe rendezvous point. You’ll have a vehicle waiting for you to get into the city, and personnel to back you up if you get in trouble.”

My dad glances around the room and gets a half-nod from Luke and Taylor. “Good,” he says. “It’s almost a 24-hour flight to Riyadh so better get going.”

“There’s a convoy headed up from Lewis-McChord. They’ll meet you at Boeing for take-off and they’ll give you everything you’ll need for us to stay in contact while you’re in the air.”

“Thank you, Colonel.” My dad hangs up the phone and Taylor gets out of his seat.

“All of you need to go back to the main residence. We’re going into lockdown until the team returns.”

“You too,” Luke says to Jade, and Taylor nods.

“Everyone.”

I take a deep breath and go to Kate. “Tell Calliope I love her, and don’t take your eyes off her, okay?”

She wrinkles her brow at me. “What are you talking about? You’re coming with us.”

“No, I’m not.”

“Ana…” Luke begins to argue, but I shake my head.

“I’m going with you. If it were me, there’s no way Christian would stay behind. It’s not any different the other way around.” I turn and stare my father dead in the eyes, leaving no room for argument. “I can’t stay behind and not know. I’m going.”

“You’re pregnant, sweetheart.”

“And I’m still going. Every second we stand here arguing about it, is another second we’re not getting to Christian.”

He hesitates, but only for a moment. The reluctance in his eyes is clear as he nods. Kate looks at me like she’s sure I’ve lost my mind and, maybe I have, but there’s just absolutely no way that I could stay here and not know what’s happening.

As everyone starts filing for the elevators, I feel a strong pair of fingers wrap tightly around my arm and yank. I turn to meet a pair of turbulent blue eyes. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

“Don’t, Luke. You’re not going to change my mind.”

His jaw tightens and I can see the storm of words ready to strike out at me like lightning teetering just on the edge of his tongue. But he meets my eyes and reads something there that makes him hold them back. Instead, he leans in and whispers in a voice so low that it’s almost threatening, “I swear to god, you will do every motherfucking thing I tell you to do, no questions asked. You got it?”

“Yes.”

“I mean it, Ana. Even if I tell you to run away and leave him behind, you do what I tell you to do.”

“It’s not going to come to that.”

“Anastasia…”

“Okay. I’ll do whatever you tell me to do.” He nods, but his eyes are still suspicious and he hovers behind me as I hug Grace and Mia goodbye. Kim sweeps me into her arms and offers words that are surprisingly encouraging, and Elliot makes me promise that I’ll tell Christian that he’s going to kill him the second he sees him for putting him through this. I give him a weak smile, then turn to watch Jade give Luke a long and deep good-bye kiss. Their eyes meet, exchanging a goodbye more personal than words ever could, and then she turns to me.

“You make sure he comes home to me, okay?”

I nod, then pull her into a hug.

Downstairs, Taylor funnels the rest of my family between the SUV and Grace and Carrick’s car. Transporting everyone back to the house takes every vehicle available to us, except one, and as I toss the keys to Luke his eyes widen.

“Holy shit, are you sure?”

I give him a very serious look. “Everyone else is already on the way to the airport. I expect you to get there as fast as possible.”

He hits the button on the key fob, and the lights to the Lamborghini blink back at us. He grins. “Ah, hell yeah.”

Luke quickens his pace as we take the last few steps to the car, while my dad glances uneasily through the windshield.

“There’s only two seats…”

I yank up the butterfly door and stand to the side for him to crawl in first. “There’s plenty of room for me to sit on top of you.”

A grimace crosses his face as he realizes how I know that, but he ducks into the car all the same and only bemoans its foreign status as I reach up to close us inside. Luke revs the engine while he shifts into gear and then peels out of the parking garage.

He keeps the speedometer above ninety, so we’re pulling onto the airfield at Boeing in less than ten minutes. Taylor has called ahead to have my jet prepared, but while we idle on the tarmac waiting for the rest of my team, I catch a glimpse of Christian’s plane still parked in the hangar. There’s an eerie kind of lifelessness that hangs heavily in the darkness around it. My own plane hums with life, the windows alight and welcoming, the stairs already stretching out to greet me.

It feels too much like a metaphor for what’s at stake.

“You ready?” Luke asks, turning to me as a familiar car pulls onto the tarmac behind us. I take a deep breath and nod. He reaches over and squeezes my hand before stepping out of the car and pulling me to the plane. We’ve already started to move by the time we take our seats, and the silence that had been so impressive the first time Christina took me up in this plane sounds oppressive as we take off.

It’s a long flight, and it’s not easy for me to sleep despite my father and Luke constantly suggesting I do just that. But every time I close my eyes, I’m terrorized by the echo of a voice in the back of my mind. It’s not Lincoln this time, it’s Christian. And the sound is filled with pain. The images my mind conjures of what they might be doing to him to get him to agree to destroy his life’s greatest achievement is more brutal than I would have through myself capable of. Eventually, it becomes too much, so I crawl onto the sofa next to Luke, lay my head on his shoulder, and wait with him in silence until we finally land.

It’s slightly disorienting stepping off the plane. It was dawn when we’d left Seattle, but the sun is low in the sky and somehow, still blazing hot in Riyadh. I don’t know what the time difference is, only that we have been on that god forsaken plane for an entire day, which means that they’ve had Christian for almost two.

I follow in the dusty cloud that pulls up from the sand with every step my father takes. He shakes hands with a man in a military uniform that has an impressive number of badges and bars displayed across the front. I watch the men the military has sent to our aid unloading a van from an aircraft carrier a few hundred yards away, and frown. When they said they’d provide a vehicle to get us into the city, I’d imagined a souped up Humvee with armored, reinforced steel and bullet proof glass. The drab and unimpressive shell of this vehicle looks too vulnerable, too ordinary. and for the first time, I think I really feel the danger in what we’re about to do.

“We can do this, right?” I hiss to Luke, holding a protective hand over my stomach. He reaches over to squeeze my arm.

“You don’t have to come if you’re scared. You can stay here, on the plane, with these fine men. You should stay here. They’ll protect you.”

I turn back and watch the soldiers milling around us again, my eyes narrowing in on the weapons laid across the table next to my father, and the guns on the jets that had landed on the sandy, makeshift airfield with us. It’s all a ‘Plan B,’ but I’ve been through this enough now to expect the worst case scenario. The threat of escalation is all around me, and if I’m not there to see how everything goes down, that’s all I’m going to think about.

“No,” I tell him. “I have to come. I need to see that he’s okay with my own eyes.”

His lips press together and his forehead creases with worry, but he nods and leans over to kiss me on the temple. “I’m not going to let anything happen to you, okay?”

“I know.”

After listening to the life and death instructions given to us by the military commander running base camp, we pile into the van and start towards the city. It’s a good twenty-five miles of open desert between us and the first sign so life, and the drive gives me too much space and silence to think about what we’re moving towards. It’s tense, nearly unbearable, and the only thing I can do is stare blankly at the equipment around me and… hope.

As we make our way into the city, using military GPS to take us directly to the estate where Christian is being held, Luke pulls out his phone and curls into the side of the van as though it could give him any modicum of privacy. I try not to listen, but he’s the only one who speaks, so everyone in the van hears everything he says.

“Hey, we’re just about there… I just wanted to call and tell you that I love you.” He’s talking to Jade, and there’s a kind of vulnerability in his voice that sounds strange coming from him. Luke is normally the guy who’s looking for a fight, who gets excited by the prospect of danger. Now, there’s hesitation, and it’s because he has something to lose now. And listening to him say goodbye to the woman he loves, just in case, has me in tears when we pull onto the dark street where my dad finally kills the engine.

“Is everyone ready?” he asks, slowly unbuckling his seatbelt and peering through the windows for any sign that someone has noticed our arrival. There’s a rumble of agreement that sounds around me, then Luke takes a black, heavy case out from under his seat and passes earpieces around. I twist the completely invisible bud into my ear, and nod when my father tests to make sure we can hear him. But when everyone begins to file out of the van, Luke’s hand tugs me back inside.

“You’re not coming.”

“What?”

“There’s a good chance it gets hairy in there and we can’t focus on your husband if we’re worrying about you. So, stay here, stay low, and stay quiet. We’ll be back with Christian in just a few minutes, okay?”

“But—”

“You’ll be able to hear us, Annie,” my dad says. “The moment I have Christian safe, I’ll give him my earpiece.”

“We need you to do this,” Evan adds. “Sawyer’s right. You first, remember?”

I take a few deep breaths and try to consider what they’re telling me objectively. Everything inside of me is screaming to refuse. It’s taking every ounce of my control not to bolt from this van and just run to the house glowing at the end of the street, because I know that’s where he is. But I need every single person on this team to come back safe too, and if going with them could put any of them in danger, I can’t argue with them when they ask me to stay.

“Okay.” I nod, though the word tastes like poison on my tongue. “But… be careful, okay?”

“We will,” Luke promises. He hugs me tightly and kisses me hard on the cheek before he disappears into the blackness. I hug Woods next, then my father.

“Come back to me,” I make him promise.

“I always do.”

The door to the van closes and the dome light slowly fades into nothing, leaving me alone in blackness with nothing but the muffled sounds of breathing in my earpiece. It’s one of the most intense moments in my entire life. I can hear my heart beating furiously in my chest, my stomach churns with nausea that I can’t allow to overwhelm me. I cling desperately to every softly whispered command, every involuntary sound, every footstep… waiting for the worst.

“I’ve got two on the south side,” Woods murmurs. “I can see a Galil and an AK-47.”

“I’ve got an AR-15 on the east wall,” Wyatt adds. “Three men. The other two have pistols on their hips.”

“Damn it,” my father whispers. “I’m moving up the north wall, there’s a light up ahead about 500 feet. I think it may be an open gate.”

“I can see it from my position,” Harper says. “You’ve got two on the other side. I’ve got them in my scope.”

“400 feet,” my dad says. “300…”

“Wait, Ray,” Luke hisses. “I’ve got movement on the North side, you’ve got three people headed right for you. 12 o’clock.”

“Fuck.”

“You got cover?” Smith asks.

“No, I’m out in the open here.”

“You’ve got ten seconds,” Luke says. “They’re armed.”

I hear my father grunt, and I don’t know what that means. If he’s found somewhere to hide, if he’s trying to get away, if someone has him… he’s gone silent as he tries to remain concealed and my heart pounds in my chest with each passing second. I wait in agony for anyone to say anything, for one word of reassurance, but there is only dead silence in my ears and it drives me right up to the brink of insanity.

“Shit, they’re going to see him,” Luke says, urgently. “We need a distraction.”

“Is any one open enough that they can create a diversion?” Woods adds. No one answers.

I don’t even think about it. I leap from the back into the driver’s seat and twist the keys in the ignition. My foot finds the pedal and I shove it down against the floor and jolt forward up the street towards Christian’s prison. The engine groans as I try to coax every ounce of speed I can from it.

“What the fuck is that?” Woods asks.

“We’ve got headlights coming up the street,” Smith says.

The gate to the driveway materializes in the beam of my headlights and I hit the breaks, reaching over at the same time to roll down the window.

“It’s me,” I tell them.

“You?” What the fuck do you mean it’s you?” Luke demands. I reach through the window and press the button on the speaker outside the gate. A deep voice responds in a language I don’t understand, but I don’t have to. He just has to understand me.

“My name is Anastasia Grey,” I tell the voice in the box. “I’m here for my husband.”

Next Chapter

“I don’t know, it was still dark…” Elliot’s eyes look into nothing while he answers the questions from the police. He’s not dazed or overcome with shock. It looks as though he’s reliving a memory.

Reliving a nightmare.

“They were already in the room by the time I woke up. Christian and I had been drinking, I was still a little drunk… At first, I thought it was him coming to fuck with me. But then there were more of him, of them. One held me down, one wrapped the tape around my head, and one zip tied me to the headboard. I was helpless before I even knew what was going on.”

“Then what happened?”

“They walked out of the room. I tried to shout for help, but I couldn’t move my mouth under the tape. I was trying to get out of the zip ties when I heard them fighting with Christian downstairs. It sounded bad, but I couldn’t move. I couldn’t even call out to him…”

“Did you hear anything about what they wanted, or where they were going?”

“No, they never said a word. The only thing I heard was…” He looks up at the still demolished foyer, and his face melts with something between pain and disgust. “That.”

The officer conducting the interview sighs, adjusts the recorder on the coffee table, and then turns to me. “Mrs. Grey, is anything else missing? Cash you had on hand? Jewelry? Any valuables?”

I don’t answer.

I can’t.

It’s not real.

Everything in front of me is happening as though I’m watching it on a television screen. I can see my family sitting around me, I can hear the police asking questions, and I can understand the answers they get in return. But I can’t interact with any of it. I’m in a daze. A completely inert state of unbeing. I can’t speak. I can’t move. I can’t even look at anything except the empty space in front of me.

“Nothing is missing,” Taylor grunts from the far side of the sofa. He makes several pain-filled noises as he shifts to sit more upright. The ice pack he holds to the side of his brutalized face never moves. “They were in, they were out. They only wanted him.”

“Yes,” the officer agrees, dejectedly. He reaches forward and stops the recording, then gives a sympathetic smile to Elliot. “Thank you, Mr. Grey. That’s all the questions I have for you.”

“I wish I could give you more,” Elliot replies, his voice breaking with each word. “You are going to find him, right?” 

“We’re going to do everything we can.” 

Elliot grimaces as he swallows back the emotion clawing up his throat, then sniffs hard and moves to Kate. She kisses and throws her arms around him, squeezing him as tightly as she can while he sobs silently into her shoulder.

“I’m so sorry, baby,” she says, wearing her own pain as loudly as Elliot does. “I’m so sorry for what you went through.”

“I didn’t go through anything. It was Christian—“ He starts to sob again, while Kate runs her fingers gently over his scalp.

“They’re going to find him Elliot.”

“Yeah. They have to.” He pulls away from Kate, taking a few deep breaths to calm himself, and then he turns to me.

“What can I do, Ana?”

I can’t look at him.

“Well we’re going to start by getting everyone together,” Grace intervenes. “I just got off the phone with Ray and he’s on his way down. He asked me to make you a cup of tea.”

A teacup appears on the table before me, and I actually manage to look down at it. It’s familiar. It comes from a set that Christian bought for my apartment on the 14^th floor when I worked for him as an intern. I’d had to bring them up here with me when I’d agreed to move in with him because he doesn’t drink tea. I remember putting them in the cabinet on my first official day living here and realizing, even then, how much they represented the way he cares about me. The way he’s always thinking about me.

I didn’t speak to him for two years, and he remembered to buy me tea cups.

Tears well in my eyes, but I can’t move to brush them away. I stare at pretty pink flowers on the china that look like the dozens of bouquets he’s sent me over the years, and the tears stream unimpeded down my face until I feel Kate’s fingers reach over to catch them. She leans away from Elliot and wraps an arm around me, but it doesn’t make me thaw. I sit. Still. Staring at the teacup.

I wonder if I look as dead as I feel?

“Mia’s on her way,” Carrick says, stalking into the room and brandishing his cell phone with an erratic kind of energy that is deeply unsettling. “I’ve chartered her a flight out of Boston, she’s going to be here in a few hours.”

“I still don’t think she needs to leave school,” Elliot says. “She hasn’t even been there for a week and if we’ve learned anything over these past few years, it’s that she’s a hell of a lot safer in Cambridge than she is here.”

“Elliot,” Kate hisses in admonishment. Her eyes go wide with an unspoken lecture and her head tilts in my direction, but I’m not phased by his blunt statement. It washes off me just like everything else. There’s no point mincing words or trying to paint this any other color than the dark shade of horror it is.

“I don’t care,” Carrick continues. “I want us all together.” His eyes move over all of us, as though he’s taking a head count, and then his eyes go wide with a newly realized fear. “Where are the babies?”

“They’re at Chri– Ana’s house,” Grace says, stumbling painfully over her words. She walks to her husband and wraps him in an unsettled embrace. “They’re with Mackensie and the rest of her security team.”

“Well, get them here immediately!” Carrick argues. My eyes flash up at him like he’s just threatened me, but I don’t have to break through the parasitic void to fight him because Taylor does it for me.

“They’re most secure at the residence,” he says. “Mr. Grey’s approved emergency protocol says the kids should be put in lockdown. Ana should be there too, but—”

“But she’s not going anywhere,” Luke says from across the room. It’s the first time he’s emerged from the security office since he first got here. Now, he looks exhausted. Kate nods in agreement. 

“Not until Luke finds him.” 

The police officers still wandering through the apartment scoff, and Luke’s jaw flexes irritably. He turns intense eyes on me, communicating something he doesn’t want the rest of the room to know. I’m not even sure that it is, but the message I get from it is that he’s watching me. I don’t know what he’s looking for, but the warning makes me think he sees an avenue through this. One he doesn’t want to put me through. One that he’s afraid I’ll figure out. 

And suddenly, I’m aware of absolutely everything around me. 

“You are going to find him, aren’t you?” Elliot asks. 

Luke frowns. “Of course I am. It’s just going to take me a minute to get through everything that’s trying to stop me.  In the meantime, I could use some coffee if there’s any made.” 

“I’ll get it,” Jade says. 

She’s been sitting in an armchair on the other side of the room, burying herself in her phone and trying to stay invisible in the middle of our family crisis for hours. I was surprised, actually at how fast she got here. Or that she even came at all. Luke called to tell her where he was and that he wasn’t sure when he’d be home. Instead of being upset, she drove straight here, left him to do his work, and came to sit with me. When I wouldn’t talk, she just nodded, moved to the chair she’s in now, and let me be silent, filling the lonely emptiness in the room with her presence. 

She gets up, and Luke pulls her in for a grateful kiss before she heads into the kitchen. Grace starts sobbing softly from the other side of the sectional again, which she tries to hide unsuccessfully behind her hand, and Carrick takes the seat next to her so that he can hold her through it. His eyes bounce between Luke and Taylor. 

“How did this even happen? How did they get in here?” 

Taylor grimaces. “Escala.” 

“What?”

“We own the apartment, not the building. So everything we do, we have to give to the building owner. They have the code to the elevator for liability reasons, and we’re only allowed to have recording cameras in common areas because of an agreement we made that states Escala owns the footage and has the right to turn the cameras off at their discretion. They don’t, so it’s never been a problem. But they can. Whoever came at us, did. Nothing broke through our firewalls, every breach Luke has found came from the Escala side. That’s why the garage footage is gone, but not the footage in the apartment.”

“But he doesn’t even really live here,” Carrick argues again. “He’s only been here a few nights, how did they even know to look for him here?” 

“Probably something to do with this…” Luke interjects. He walks across the room and puts his cellphone on the table. A video starts to play on the screen with a logo for a paparazzi website I’ve blocked on all my devices stamped over the picture in the left hand corner. 

Through the shouts and tightly packed bodies, the shiny black door of the Maybach opens and Christian steps out onto the sidewalk in the same suit he was wearing at my doctor’s appointment yesterday. He looks annoyed as he pushes through the first wave of photographers, and as the angle changes with him, I see the blue glass doors of Escala. There’s a very distinguishable clock on a post next to the door that clearly shows the time of his arrival. 

“Why wasn’t he dropped off in the garage?” Kate asks, rounding on Taylor. His face falls.

“He’d asked me to go get him bourbon. I dropped him off at the street entrance so I could go to the liquor store.” 

Jade returns with a coffee cup that she gingerly passes to Luke. He takes a deep drink, grimacing slightly as it scalds his throat, then wraps an arm around his girl and pulls her into his side. Elliot’s knees bounce anxiously, until he eventually pulls himself off the sofa and begins to pace. 

“There’s got to be something we’re overlooking. There’s got to be more we could be doing.“

“I’m not overlooking anything, Elliot,” Luke assures him. “I’m going to find hi–”

His sentence cuts off with the ping of the elevator, and everyone’s eyes turn toward the foyer as though they expect it to be Christian who comes through the doors. As though they think it would be that simple.

As if they truly believe we’re going to get out of this without devastating consequences.

The steel doors slide open and Ros’s heels begin clacking their way across the foyer into the living room. Grace goes to her immediately, throwing her arms around her while Christian’s best friend begins to word-vomit her sympathies.

“Is there any news?” she asks, nervous eyes darting first to Taylor, then to Luke, and finally Carrick. They all shake their heads, so she turns to me.

Her hand flies up to her chest and her face crinkles with unspoken consolation. She moves toward the sofa as though it were a calling, and slides into the seat next to me. “How are you doing, Ana?”

I can’t even yank my hand out of hers, the way I want to.

“She’s…” Kate begins, and immediately stops as the words fail to materialize. Ros nods, and gets up to hug Elliot and Carrick, but I can’t quite make out the words they exchange with one another. I glance around, waiting for a sign. Looking for clarity. Praying for some epiphany that will put some light at the end of this macabre tunnel. My internal pleas are interrupted by a sudden, discordant jingle…

A phone.

“That’s Ana’s,” Luke voices aloud for me.

Kate leans across the table to dig through my abandoned purse, but when she has my phone in her hands and she looks down at the screen, she frowns.

“It just says ‘unknown.’”

The police officer who interviewed Elliot perks up, then snaps to his colleagues currently going over the security footage at my dining room table. “It could be them,” he says, and it’s like I suddenly come to life. Whatever heavy force was holding me down, whatever thing was choking back my voice… all of it disappears, and I practically leap from the couch to snatch my phone from Kate’s hands.

“This is Anastasia Grey,” I start, and an unfamiliar British accent responds.

“Good evening, Mrs. Grey. Are the police officers with you tracing this phone call?”

I swallow, ensuring my voice won’t shake before I continue. The officer who interviewed Elliot is coming towards me with a black box in his hand, similar to the one that Luke had used to record the call Lincoln made at my graduation. 

“They will be.” 

“Then I’ll keep this brief. Rosaline Bailey entered your apartment a few minutes ago. Would you be so kind as to hand her the phone, please?” 

So they are watching us.

“Ros?” I turn to look at her and her eyes go wide. “No, Christian… What about Christian? Where is he? Is he okay?” 

“I don’t have much time, Mrs. Grey.” 

“I… Look, I’m the one you want to help you, okay? My name is on everything that Christian’s is and I’m willing to do whatever it takes to get him back safely. I can give you anything he can, so just tell me what you want for him, and I’ll give it to you.” 

He sighs. “The only way you can give me what I want, is by handing the phone to Rosaline Bailey.” 

My heart hammers against my ribcage while I hesitate. Each second feels precious while Christian’s fate hangs in the balance, but… this is my only line to the man who has him, which makes it the only line I have to him. It’s not so easy to give up…

“Please,” I beg, my bottom lip beginning to tremble. “Please let me talk to him. Let me just hear that he’s okay.”

“I’m sorry, that’s impossible. Please give the phone to Ms. Bailey.”

“Please,” I plead again, only becoming more desperate the more the man reveals. “Please, just tell me what to do to get him back…”

“Give the phone to Ms. Bailey, Mrs. Grey.”

I close my eyes, fighting against the insurmountable force that tells me to keep the man talking and keep him talking to me, and pass the phone to Ros. She reaches out with a shaky hand, but pauses before regaining her composure and slowly pulling the phone to her ear.

“This is Rosaline Bailey,” she says. For several seconds, I watch the myriad of emotions move across her face in silence. First trepidation, then revulsion, then fear, and finally, anger.

“No, I can’t do that,” she says, so firmly I could scream. There’s another long pause while the man on the phone makes his counter argument, but that’s only met with another denial from Ros.

It’s too much for me to hold back. I lunge at her with the same intense purpose I did with Kate and take the phone back. “I can do it. I will do it. Just tell me what you want.”

The voice sighs impatiently. “You’re not the person who can help me, Anastasia…”

“Like hell I can’t. Just give me the number. Ten million? A hundred million? A billion? I don’t care, you can have all of it! I just want my husband back.” I’m shrieking, on the edge of hysterics, and the man on the phone sighs impatiently.

“I don’t want your money,” he says, and then to my complete and utter horror, he hangs up the phone.

“No!” My scream echoes through the deathly silent room while I go into my contacts and try to call the unknown number back over and over again. Each time the call fails to connect, my anguish blooms a little bit further out of my control. I round on Ros. “What did he want?”

She cowers slightly under the force of my words, which I think has more to do with guilt than fear. She glances nervously at the other faces around the room, then looks directly at the police.

“He wants me to dismantle Endurance. He wants everything we’ve developed and manufactured to be destroyed and all of our data erased. He wants it to be like it never existed and for us to bury it deep enough that I will never exist again.”

Her denial reverberates in my mind and nearly has me falling back on the couch in disbelief. That’s it?

“So do it!” I scream at her. She mashes her lips together and shakes her head defiantly.

“I can’t. We have contracts with governments all over the world and the man has been nominated for a fucking Nobel Prize. This technology is bigger than we are now. This is an evolutionary point in human history and nothing can be allowed to step in its way. Christian knew that before anyone else did, and I guarantee you that the reason they’re calling me right now is because he’s telling them the same thing I’m telling you.”

Carrick blinks at Ros in shock. “What did you say? He’s nominated for a Nobel Prize?”

I hold up a hand in my father-in-law’s face, cutting off Ros’s response. “I don’t give a fuck what he’s nominated for. They don’t give the Nobel Prize posthumously.”

I can feel it coming, the break they’ve all been tiptoeing around. It starts like a crack in the fortified walls in a dam. Small, almost inconsequential. The waves of grief compounding on top of it chip it open further and further until I’m only holding on by a few crumbling bits of plaster.

Luke sees it coming, but he doesn’t come to me. “I’m on it, Ana.” he tells me. “I’m going to find him.” Then he turns around and marches back into the security office. 

On the precipice of a total meltdown, I turn away from Ros and the rest of my family, and hurry towards our bedroom. The door sounds so final when it slams behind me, like an ending I’m not prepared to face.

I fall into the bed, the first great sob of the hysteria pulling in the scent of Christian from the sheets. I wrap myself in them like a cocoon while I shake with a grief so profound it shakes my very essence. The tears stream in endless currents down my face, beyond the point I should have any left. Every part of me feels as though it’s being ripped apart, and then somehow ripped again. It goes on and on, the pain only compounding with each passing second, until eventually, someone comes to check on me.

“Annie?”

The door creaks a little as my father eases it open. He stands in the doorway for only half a second, taking in the devastation before him, and then he moves to the bed beside me. His arms coil around me, as if I could be fused back together with enough pressure.

“He’s going to be okay, Annie,” he whispers into my hair. “Christian is so much stronger than any of us, he’ll get through this. He’d fight the whole world to get back to you.”

“What if he doesn’t win, Daddy?” 

“Nonsense. He changed the laws of physics. Does that sound like a man who loses to you?” 

I take a few breaths against his shirt, and soak in the comfort he’s trying to give me. It doesn’t do much, because there’s something about that sentiment that rings like a warning. But the little reprieve I’m able to take from his love gives me the strength to choke back my tears and at least look up at him. In a way, he seems unfamiliar through the glassy layer of despair that coats my eyes. Everything is distorted. Darker, like some of the light has been taken from the world. But there’s hope staring down at me through my father’s eyes, and every part of me wants to believe in it. Even if I know it’s an empty lie.

He reaches for my face and wipes the tears from my cheeks. “Have you eaten anything?” I shake my head, because it’s all that I can do, and he gives me an understanding smile. “Kim came up with me. I’ll have her fix you something, okay?”

“Looks like I’m two steps ahead of you, Ray.”

We both look up and see Kate standing in the doorway. She holds up a brown paper bag and a large cup with a wide red straw. My dad smiles and claps his hand over the blanket that covers my leg.

“I guess I’ll leave you girls to it, then.” I nod and he leans over to kiss my forehead, capturing my chin between his fingers before he climbs out of bed. “I’m here, Annie. If you need anything, I’m just down the hall. If you want to talk or you want someone to cry on… I’m waiting for you, okay? No matter what time it is, I’m here. Just come find me.”

I try to respond, but in the absence of the unrelenting torment, I’ve gone numb again. It doesn’t matter, he understands me better than anyone in the entire world. He smiles back at me, and kisses me one last time. As he leaves the room, he squeezes Kate’s arm.

“Thanks, kiddo.”

She winks at him, then hops into bed with me and gives me a look like she’s about to let me in on a secret.

“I know you probably don’t want to eat, but hear me out. Elliot went down to Dicks and…” She holds up the bag in front of me. The bottom so coated in grease I’m almost worried it will give out. “Deluxe cheeseburger, large fries, and an extra thick chocolate milkshake.” She holds it out to me with confidence that would normally be well earned, but there’s nothing about consuming way too many calories that appeals to me right now. There’s nothing that appeals to me right now period. There’s only the absence that Christian has left behind and the desperate need I have to bring him home.

“Come on, Ana,” Kate says dejectedly. “You have to eat. It’s not just you anymore, remember?” Her eyes move down to my stomach, and I feel a wash of blame sweep over me. I hang my head.

“He was right, I didn’t see this from his side.” 

“What?” 

“He’s terrified of losing me because it feels like this, and I haven’t felt this. This… this…” I lift my hands, like it’s even possible to demonstrate the enormity of this loss. Of this hurt. “He’s been living with this for days, and I… I ran away. He wanted to be home, I told him he couldn’t be there. He did come home, and I asked him to leave again. I didn’t see this from his side because if I did, I would have done everything I could to help him through this pain. I could have called Flynn. I could have assembled a team of experts. I could have bought a fucking hospital and just moved in for the next nine months, but instead… instead, I told him I needed space. That I needed to be away from him. Because I didn’t understand this pain. His pain… He was here because of me.” 

“Don’t do that to yourself, Ana. He could have done all of those things too, but he got a vasectomy instead. You didn’t know this would happen, and you don’t know that this had to happen here. Maybe it would have happened anyway, and maybe it would have happened where you and Calliope were…”

I narrow my eyes at her. “Do you know the only directive my security team has? Me first. Always me first. So while I was safe at home, behind my gates that are locked with codes no one else has, under the surveillance of my cameras that no one else can turn off, guarded by my entire armed security team, he was here. Without them. If he would have been home last night, Taylor wouldn’t have been alone. He would have had Evan, and Smith, and Harper, and Wyatt… I would have been there.”

“And they would have just taken you too.”

I turn away from her, scowling into the nothingness around me. “I think I would have preferred that. Any imminent threat of danger would be easier than this. Than not knowing what’s happening to him… or what will happen next. I can’t do this!”

“He’s going to be okay, Ana. We’re going to make a deal to get him. Eventually, it will come down to money. We’ll pay it, and we will get him back.”

“No, Kate. They’re never going to give him back.” I turn to her, and lay out the part of this she hasn’t seen yet. The parts I didn’t see until the phone went dead. The parts that keep her sitting upright, while I’m struggling to maintain the functions that are supposed to be done unconsciously. “Why would they give him back? They said they wanted Endurance destroyed and Christian is Endurance. He’s the creator. He’s the visionary. It’s all in his head.” And suddenly, the warning I took from my father makes sense, and it stirs the existential fear inside of me. “He doesn’t lose. He wouldn’t even lose to me, there’s no way in hell he’d let himself be beaten by the people who invaded his home and took the power from him that he put his entire life’s work on the line to get. He’ll just start from scratch and somehow end up with a product that’s better and more impressive than what he built the first time. And then they’ll come back. Or someone else will come…” I let the words trail off as my head hangs in misery. “They’re not giving him back, Kate.” 

As tears fall down my face, she hugs me again. “Annie…” 

“I can’t lose him, Kate. I can’t, I–” A ghost of the words he’s said to me over and over moves through my head, and I feel the weight of their poignancy. “His heart beats, my heart beats… not just correlation, sequential.” 

“Luke isn’t going to let you lose him, Ana. We’re going to find him. And the team of people who kept you safe are going to bring him home.” 

I take a trembling breath, feeling my entire body fill to the brim with pain. Because I don’t know if I believe her. I don’t know what comes next and every second I live in this torturous purgatory waiting for whatever terrible judgement fate plans to hand down gets harder and harder to bear. I can feel myself unraveling as it happens, but I can’t stop it. I spiral down and down until there’s nothing left but grief. 

Kate’s arms hold me together, and she stays there clinging to me until the sun comes up the next morning and my stomach starts to roil. 

I stumble to the bathroom, wiping tears from my face as I bend over the toilet to vomit. But nothing happens. I wretch and wretch and wretch, but I have nothing in my stomach to throw up. It’s painful, and starts a whole new wave of tears that brings Kate to the floor next to me. 

She passes me the bottle of anti-nausea meds that was in my purse. “You have to eat something, Ana. Please.”

I give her a helpless look, but once the contractions in my stomach stop, I nod and take her hand. She leads me out to the living room and we find everyone still spread out, restless and bleary-eyed. The police have left, but Ros is still here. Kim is in the kitchen stirring something on the stove, and Grace is on the sofa with Mia wrapped under her arm. Every pair of eyes around the room turns to me. 

“She wants to eat something,” Kate says, answering the unspoken question in their gazes. 

“Good,” my dad says. 

“I’m making oatmeal,” Kim calls. “I’ll bring you some.” 

I nod to her, numbly, then shuffle towards the empty place on the sofa that my dad creates for me. Mia gets up like she wants to come cuddle into my side, but she stops when a trilling jingle sounds from the other side of the room. Automatically, I look down at my phone, still on the coffee table, still plugged into the device the police gave me, but it’s silent. Ros is the one who dives into her bag, and when she looks at the screen her nervous eyes shift to Taylor. 

He pulls himself off the couch, groaning in pain but not letting it slow him down in the slightest, rips the device out of my phone, and brings it to Ros. He slips it into the charging port, then nods for her to answer the phone. 

My breath catches in my throat. 

“Hello?” Her voice is shaky and her eyes dart nervously back and forth, then widen very suddenly. “Christian?!” 

I launch myself at her faster than I think I’ve ever moved in my life. I watch her cringe as she listens to whatever he says, then shake her head as she answers. “No, she’s right here, she’s fine. Yeah, Calliope too. They’re both okay. They’re safe. What about you?” She pauses for a moment, listening very intently, but whatever is happening on the other end of the phone only seems to confuse her more. 

“Christian?” she suddenly calls in panic, and I react before I realize what I’m doing. My hand darts out and snatches the phone from her, and I bring it to my ear with the whispered pleas for him to be okay already tumbling from my lips. 

“Christian! Christian!” I call, but the line’s gone dead. There’s nothing but silence, and my wild eyes snap up to Ros. “What did he say?!” 

She shakes her head. “He said don’t do it. He asked if they had you or Calliope, and then he told me not to do a fucking thing. Then there was shouting and…” She cringes again and looks away from me, and I crumple to the floor under the weight of this whole new wave of pain. Both Ros and Kate bend down and place soft hands on my shoulder, whispering reassuring words… but the only thing that breaks through the sorrow is the voice of my former CPO. 

“I’ve got him,” Luke says, and when my head jerks up toward him, I see that he’s talking directly to me. He holds my gaze for just half-a-second, letting me feel the truth behind what he just said, then his eyes move around the room. “I know where he is, and I’m going to go get him. Who’s coming with me?”

Next Chapter

That night, I wake abruptly as though I’ve just escaped a nightmare. My heart is beating wildly in my chest when I sit up straight in bed. My breath comes too quick and shallow for me to calm myself. I try to grasp onto the remnants of my dream slipping away like wisps of smoke, but there aren’t any frightening images in them. I’d been dreaming of Christian and a summer day on our yacht in the middle of the sound.

A new fear moves to the forefront of my mind, and I reach down to my stomach in alarm. There isn’t any pain though, or even queasiness. I’m not bleeding. I’m not uncomfortable. I feel fine. The darkness around me is still, except for Kate breathing peacefully in the bed next to me, and nothing seems to be disturbed.

I glance over Kate to the alarm clock on Christian’s nightstand. It’s 2:37 AM, and I groan. As I fall back into the pillows, I reach over for my phone out of habit to check any notifications that might have popped up while I was sleeping. There’s a missed call and a voicemail from Christian he’d left just after 1 AM. With a cautious look at Kate, I press play on the message, and pull my phone to my ear.

It’s quiet, and it stays that way long enough that I think for a moment he must have butt-dialed me. My fingers moves to delete the message just as his voice comes through the phone and the sound is so rough and broken, it grates against my eardrums like sandpaper.

“You promised me forever,” he slurs. “All I’ve ever tried to do, all I’ve ever wanted, was to love you enough to deserve forever.  And now I’ve fucked it up and I’m going to lose you–No.” He changes direction quickly, and I can almost hear him shaking his head. “I won’t lose you. I won’t. Your heart beats, my heart beats.” Another long beat of silence. “I’ll make fucking sure of it.”

The message ends with a click and my heart starts beating violently in my chest. The morbid tone of his words lingers in my ears and brings goosebumps to the surface of my skin. I quickly dial his number and wait anxiously for him to answer, but I get his voicemail. 

I try to tell myself that’s a good thing. It means he’s gone to sleep and he’ll wake in the morning with a much clearer head. More painful, but definitely clearer. 

With a text to remind him how much I love him and a request for him to call me when he wakes up, I set my phone back on the nightstand and try to get back to sleep. It’s pointless though. The worry I feel over Christian’s voicemail plagues me through the rest of the night, pulling me down into constantly fluctuating waves of tears, until the sun comes up and the alarm clock chimes shrilly from the other side of the bed.

“Mmmm,” Kate moans, stretching her whole body before she even pries her eyes open. “Morning, Annie.” She turns to me, the ghost of pleasant dreams still present on her face. When she sees my puffy eyes and tear-stained cheeks, it all melts into concern. “What’s wrong?”

I reach up to wipe the moisture from my eyes and take a misery filled breath. “Christian called last night. He didn’t sound good.”

“How not good?”

I shake my head, and she frowns.

“Well, Elliot’s with him. If there’s one person who knows how to get Christian through his bullshit, it’s him.”

“Yeah. Yeah, you’re right.” I pull back the covers and get out of bed, but stop when Kate calls my name. I turn inside the doorframe to the bathroom.

“What did he say?” she asks. 

“Nothing, it’s fine.”

But it’s not fine. Nothing about this is fine and I can’t do this anymore. This is going to end today. When Christian comes home from work, we’re going to have it out. And no matter how ugly it gets, I’m not going to run. I’m not going to back down. He’s going to see it my way if it kills him, because what we’re doing right now, is slowly killing me.

The gradual roll of my morning sickness begins to rear its ugly head, so I go to the medicine cabinet before I hop in the shower. I expect my nausea lozenges to be on the 2^nd shelf waiting for me, but they’ve been replaced by an orange prescription bottle. The label tells me it’s the medication Dr. Baker prescribed for me during my visit yesterday. I’d completely forgotten about it and hadn’t called Abby to have it picked up. Christian must’ve had Andrea do it, and holding that bottle in my hand makes me only more resolved about my plans for tonight.

We can do this. We love each other. There’s nothing we can make it through.

No matter what.

After my shower, I pick one of Christian’s button down shirts from his closet and tuck it into a high-waisted pencil skirt so that it billows over the top. It smells like the cleaners, rather than my husband, but I can almost feel his touch being wrapped in the fabric. Like the empty sleeves are the same as being held in his arms. The sense of comfort I glean from it gives me a reassuring kind of certainty that keeps my head held high while I move around Kate in the bathroom, then go get Calliope ready for the day.

When we get to GEH, there’s a tiny glimmer of hope in the back of my mind that Christian might be waiting for us. He hasn’t seen Calliope in over a day and that’s always really rough on him. But the only person who greets me once we step off the elevators on the seventh floor is the receptionist who mans the desk in front of Calliope’s daycare. She smiles and greets me the same as she always does, and Calliope runs to play with her friends the moment I set her on the rug of the playroom just like it was any other morning. I watch her for a few minutes while I try to call Christian again, then call her over for a kiss goodbye when I immediately get his voicemail.

“Mary,” I say to the receptionist as I come back into the hallway.

“Yes, Mrs. Grey?”

“If my husband comes down here to see Calliope, will you let me know?”

“Sure, you’re at Grey Publishing now, right?”

My face falls. Good news travels fast, I see. “Yeah.”

She smiles, despite my less than enthused reaction, and makes a note while I head for the elevators with my security team. My Phoenix team is already assembling for the meeting that’s now become part of our daily routine, so I let them know I’ll just be a few minutes and duck into my office. Christian’s phone once again goes straight to voicemail, so I start to compose an email just in case he’s without a phone charger but is checking his email on the computer at Escala. He doesn’t respond within the five minutes I give myself to check my other emails, so before I duck out for my meeting, I pick up my phone and call upstairs.

“Good morning, Christian Grey’s office. How may I help you?” It’s Andrea who answers, instead of Oliva, and her voice is disrupted by some kind of chaos going on in the background. 

“Hey it’s Ana. Can you transfer me to my husband, please?”

“Uh, I wish… he’s not here. I’ve called him like 50 times but his phone is off. We’re getting bombarded with calls and he’s complete M.I.A.”

My brow furrows. “Calls about what?”

“You didn’t hear? Mr. Grey has been nominated for the Nobel Prize in Physics for the Endurance project.”

“What?!”

“Jacqueline is trying to get a statement, Ms. Bailey has been fielding calls from government officials and scientists all morning, and I can’t get the man on the damn phone.”

I blink in shock a few times, only slightly processing what she’s said. The Nobel Prize? The words run like a ticker through my head until I can absorb them properly, and for some reason, the realization makes me think of Carrick. Of all the times Carrick bemoaned his lost legacy when his son dropped out of his alma mater. Now that son could be a Nobel Prize winner.

Talk about a fucking legacy.

“Ana?”

“Sorry… I’m just, uh… shocked a little.”

She laughs. “Is that why I can’t reach your husband?”

“Maybe. He… had a rough night last night, I think he’s probably sleeping in.”

“Well, when you hear from him, please tell him to call me. We’re drowning up here.”

“I will. And if he calls you first…”

“Oh, I’ll yell at him.”

For what feels like the first time in days, a genuine smile crosses my lips and, if I could, I would reach through the phone and hug her. “Thank you, Andrea.”

“No problem. Talk to you later, Ana.”

She hangs up the phone and I have to take a breath to stall the new giddy fluttering of my heart. The rush of pride and amazement and sheer happiness I feel over this new piece of news is almost too much for me to handle, but in a way that gives me an enormous amount of relief. It’s a stark and forceful reminder of how much I love that man and how much he means to me, and it warms me from the inside like a fire crackling merrily through a snowstorm.

I pull out my phone and start a new text.

Congratulations! I love you so much and I’m so proud I can’t even put it into words. Call me ❤

I check my phone about every 15 seconds during my Phoenix meeting, which makes it difficult to follow everything my team is telling me. The general direction we’re moving in on Hailey’s book is exactly what I want, but there’s a palpable resentment shining through the window of the conference room with each and every glance from the GP team. It seeps into the conversation surrounding Phoenix until the former GSP team is engaging in nothing but trash talk about their new co-workers.

The silence from Christian makes their catty banter grating.

“Can we stop with the tribalism, please?” I ask, looking up from my phone again. “You’re all the same team now and I need you to act like it.”

Stevens rolls his eyes, while Jacki glares through the window at the persistently antagonistic stares. “They’re the ones making this difficult.”

“No, this is just difficult. It would be less so if we could act professionally.” I glance around the table with an accusatory stare that has each of them expressing some variation of guilt. Now properly chastened, my team picks up with the conversation about edits being done on chapter three, while I turn to look at a new commotion through the window. The bitter looks from the rest of my team have turned curious and moved to reception, where Ros is speaking with Claire. A second later, the phone in the conference room beeps.

“Hey, Ana. Ms. Bailey is here to see you.”

“I’m on my way out.” I push away from the table and ask my team to continue working, then step out of the room. There’s no sense of warm greeting from Ros as I approach reception. She looks annoyed.

“Hey, what’s up?” I ask.

“Is your husband planning on coming in today? Or, you know, responding to a fucking email?”

I frown. “You haven’t heard from him yet?”

“Have you?”

“No.”

She lets out an irritated huff and shakes her head with dismay. “We have an Endurance call with the Prime Minister of New Zealand in forty-five minutes and I do not know enough about the technology to step in for Christian. I need him to come into the office.”

“Okay, I’ll get ahold of him. Hold on.” Taking a few steps away, I once again pull out my phone, but this time, I call Taylor. It rings several times before finally picking up.

“I’m sorry, but the person you have called has a voicemail box that has not been set up yet…”

I hang up and feel a strange sense of foreboding come over me. Ros starts to speak, but I move past her. Several questing glances come my way as I move through the office. The only thing I focus on is the man sitting at the desk next to my door.

“Evan, have you heard from Taylor?” I ask.

He glances up at me, frowning, but not looking alarmed. “Not today.”

“Have any of you?”

The other members of my security team glance between one another, the no clear on each of their faces, and a chill moves up my spine. I turn back to Evan.

“I need you to take me to Escala.”

He looks as though he doesn’t believe me. “Escala? Are you… sure?”

“Yes. Now.”

There’s no argument. He picks up his jacket and follows me to the car, along with the rest of my security team. I promise Ros I’ll call her the second I find him, then wait until we’re in the car before I call Elliot. I get his voicemail, and Kate’s, which puts me in a kind of tailspin until I finally call Luke, just to have someone to calm me down.

“Hey, hold on,” he answers in a rushed voice that gets louder as he talks to whoever he’s with. “I need you animals to keep it down while I take this super secret, private phone call with the CEO’s wife.” The joke in his voice is met with the muffled sound of laughter.

“Careful though,” I hear Welch say in the background. “I’ve known Grey for years and there’s nothing that triggers that man more than someone coming onto his wife. Did you hear about the guy who got fired because he glanced at her ass when she was walking out of his office?”

“Did you hear about the eight billion times I got fired because she can’t keep her mitts off me?” He laughs as his attention returns to me. “What’s up, Ana?”

“Why wouldn’t Taylor be answering my calls?”

The merriment in his tone disappears like a snap of his fingers, turning heavy and serious with the very next word out of his mouth. “What happened?”

It takes almost the entire drive to Escala to get him caught up on everything that’s happened since I last spoke with him. He doesn’t say anything when I give him the bad news we’d gotten from the doctor or when I tell him about Christian’s tirade through our apartment the night before. He just listens until my car dips into the shadows of the parking garage, and I let my darkest fear escape.

“You don’t think he’d hurt himself, do you?”

“No,” Luke says, emphatically.

“I keep having this horrible thought that he got into his car while he was drinking and…”

“There’s no way. He loves that car way too much.”

“Luke…”

“Ana, I’m sure he’s fine. He would never do anything that would separate himself from you, no matter how low he got. He’d never leave you.”

“Yeah.” The word comes out in a breath, but it’s firm. I believe him, and I cling to that belief as we pull into a parking spot and Evan turns the key out of the ignition. “We’re here, I’ve gotta go.”

“Keep me updated, okay?”

“Yeah. Bye, Luke.” I hang up and toss my phone back into my purse as I follow my security team through the garage. Christian’s Lamborghini is parked exactly where it should be, which at the very least, assuages the worst of my fears. It’s the not knowing what I’m about to walk into that plagues me the entire ride up the elevator.

But the uncertainty turns out to be so much better than the reality.

At first, I think the scene that greets us through the opening elevator doors is just a horrible, PTSD flashback. The table in the center of the foyer has been knocked over and is now lying in a pool of water, surrounded by broken china and scattered flowers. There’s a body shaped indentation in the drywall opposite from us, and on the metal edge of the elevator, there’s a smudged, bloody handprint. As though someone had tried to cling to the wall and had been dragged inside.

The truth of what’s in front of me sinks in only when my security team starts to react. Evan shouts orders to get me back to the car and several hands reach out, either for me or for the elevator buttons. In a panic, I fight through them all and run into the apartment.

“Christian!” My voice echos through the empty foyer, but I hear a weak groan respond from the living room. My heart thuds with relief and I sprint towards the sound. The thud dies when I find it’s source is Taylor.

He’s beaten. Badly. The bruises on his face are dark enough that they have to be several hours old and the blood on his face and shirt has dried, making his appearance shockingly more gruesome. His right wrist is handcuffed to the breakfast bar, and his body lies lip against the wall.

I run to him just as the calls of alarm from my security team echo behind me. He groans when I take his battered face in my hands, but there’s life in his eyes.

“Where’s Christian?” I manage to say. He turns to look at Evan, now towering over me, moaning with pain at each movement. The word he barks out is barely recognizable.

“Cameras.”

With a nod, Evan and Smith move back into the foyer towards the security office, while Harper and Wyatt start administering first aid for Taylor. I watch them in a daze, my mind repeating the same question over and over again.

Where is he?

“Christian!” My voice doesn’t echo this time, but it sounds hollow. I scramble back to my feet and move toward our bedroom, frantically pulling back the blanket on the bed even though it’s clearly empty, before tearing through our closet and bathroom. He isn’t in his office, he isn’t in the library, he isn’t in the bathroom, or the laundry room… He isn’t anywhere. I call his name again and again as I move through the downstairs, but there’s no answer. I’m just about to start upstairs when I hear a distant call of triumph from the security office.

“Found it,” Evan says, and I start at a dead run for the foyer. I skid through the door to find Smith seated behind the main display screen for the security cameras, rewinding through the footage.

“What is it?” I ask, panting slightly as I come up behind his chair.

“Someone put the override code in at 2:26 this morning,” Evan explains, and the moment he does, the footage stops. I watch in horror as the elevator doors shown in the stream from the foyer roll open and a group of six men, all dressed in identical black with masks covering their faces, file into my apartment. We can follow them through the 2^nd second camera in the living room, where they break into two groups. Three of them head upstairs, the other three are confronted by Taylor.

He’s not ready for them. He’s barefoot and dressed in a t-shirt and flannel bottoms. There isn’t a gun in his hand. Against the three hulking figures, dressed in tactical gear and fully prepared for the fight, he never stood a chance, and the fight isn’t pleasant to watch. They surround him almost immediately and the blows he takes are horrifying. The brutality continues for over a minute, until the other group rejoins the first, and they all drag Taylor to the breakfast bar where he’s currently handcuffed

Once they have him secured, the six of them move together into the hallway that leads to my bedroom.

There aren’t any cameras in our room, so I have no way of knowing what happens to Christian until several minutes have passed and they’re dragging him into the hallway. He looks dazed and unsteady as he tries to get the men off him. But once he sees Taylor, something changes in him that makes him more alert and more coordinated. Maybe it’s fear, maybe it’s adrenaline, maybe it’s fury, but as Christian starts to fight the scene devolves into an absolute nightmare.

I’ve seen Christian angry. I’ve seen Christian fight. But I’ve never seen him in a rage like he is on the screen before me. The violence between him and his attackers is terrifying and almost too sickening to watch. They try to overwhelm him in the same way they did to Taylor, but he moves quicker and avoids being closed in. Somehow, he manages to maneuver in a way that keeps the match-ups one on one, and in those scenarios he has the upper hand. As they adapt though, the match-ups start becoming more and more uneven until it’s just six on one.

The harder he fights back, the harder they do. And it makes what they did to Taylor look kind.

The crack on the wall I’d seen when we came in happens when Christian grabs one of the men trying to subdue him and launches him against it. But while that man falls unceremoniously to the floor, another man comes up and grabs Christian from behind. They struggle with one another until another masked man takes advantage and punches Christian, hard, across the jaw. He stumbles into another man who shoves him roughly further into the foyer, sending him tumbling over the table I’d seen lying on the floor.

Christian rolls through the broken bits of the vase, bloodied and clearly in pain. It doesn’t stop them. Two of the men grab him by the arms and wrench him off the floor enough to drag him back to the elevator. With a last, desperate effort, he grabs hold of the metal edge on the elevator and clings to it for dear life. But his hands are slick with blood, and they slip when the men holding onto him yank harder.

Then the elevator doors close, and he disappears.

I only realize after I nearly collapse on the floor that I’d been holding my breath. 

“Mrs. Grey,” Evan says, moving to grab onto me while I wobble unsteadily in front of the monitors. I can barely feel his arms around me. Barely hear the calls he makes for someone to bring me something to drink. 

Still unsteady on my feet, I turn to Smith, and blink at him. “What do we do now?” 

“I-uh…” 

“We find out where they took him,” an unexpected voice interrupts from behind me. I turn and see Luke hovering in the doorway, looking ashen faced as his eyes practically beg for me to understand how much he feels the pain I’m still too numb to experience, and that he’s here to do whatever he can to stop it. 

“Sawyer,” Evan says, mirroring my surprise. I find my balance as Luke moves into the room, so Evan’s hands fall from my arms and we part to make room for my best friend. He looks down at Smith. 

“Get out of the way.” 

“Sawyer, you’re not–”

“Get out of my fucking way.” Smith blanches under the threat in Luke’s voice, but he doesn’t move until Evan intervenes. 

“Let him in,” he says. With a slightly resentful roll of his eyes, Smith gets up from his seat and Luke slides in to replace him. He doesn’t hesitate. His fingers start to fly over the keyboard, and boxes pop-up on the screen in front of him that fill with code that he seems to understand more than I do. 

“They got the footage in the garage,” he says robotically, so focused on what’s in front of him that I can’t be certain if he’s communicating with me or just mindlessly parroting what he sees. “They had the code for the elevator, so that probably means they have access to the security systems Escala has in place. And if they do, they know she’s here right now.” 

“Then we’re in code black,” Evan says. He turns to me. “Mrs. Grey, I’m going to need you to return to the main residence immediately.” 

He waits for me to respond, but I don’t. Not even when he calls my name three more times. While Luke continues whatever he’s trying to do through our system, I stare at the paused security footage that has just unravelled my entire world. It’s not the elevators that represent the last place I saw him, or even the trail of blood that leads there that has my attention so captivated. It’s the time stamp in the bottom right hand corner.

2:37 AM.

Next Chapter

“Look, I’m not happy about this entire situation. I’ve been with Greenwich since day one and now… what? I never applied to work at Grey Enterprises Holdings. No one in the New York office did, and we’re not stoked about it.”

The way he says Grey Enterprises Holdings makes it sound like something sonomous with Nazi Death Camp. There’s animosity in every word he’s said to me, and that’s become something of a pattern with my employees in New York. And several from Grey Publishing. There’s a possible mutiny brewing beneath me, and I’m too sick to put a stop to it.

“I hear you,” I start, my voice already breaking with each nauseating contraction in my stomach. “But can you just hold on one second, Mitch?” My finger barely has time to swipe against the mute button on the screen of my phone before I lean into the toilet and lose my breakfast. The floor is cold and too hard through my stockings and my toes are pinched past the point of pain in my slightly too tight Jimmy Choos. I’ve been trying to leave for the office for over an hour, but I can’t stop throwing up. No matter how many nausea lozenges I suck on, no matter how many crackers I force down, no matter how many minutes I lay down sipping water… I always end up sprinting for the bathroom. This happened once on a weekend I was home with Christian while I was pregnant with Calliope, and I’d ended up in the emergency room for dehydration.

If that happens today… I don’t even know what Christian will do.

“Mrs. Grey? Are you there?”

“I’m sorry, Mitch,” I say, pulling my head out of the toilet and unmuting the phone. I slump back against the wall and place a cool hand over my clammy forehead. “I’m listening.”

“Are you, though? Because it seems to me like you’ve just come in here like a bulldozer and flattened everything us lifers have built! You ran off Scott, you closed our press… now we’re not even Greenwich anymore? We didn’t sign up for this!”

“Neither did I. Believe me, this was not in any of my plans. But it was Carmen’s decision to sell, and I can’t do anything to change it. I’m going to do everything I can to make sure there is as little disruption in this process as possible, and no one loses their job. That’s the best I can give you, and if that’s not enough, I’ll be happy to write you a letter of recommendation.”

A bitter huff sounds through the phone, and I glance up at the ceiling, praying he’ll hang up before I hurl again.

“The amount we’re expected to deal with right now better be reflected in our compensation once annual raises start coming around…” he grumbles.

“That’s actually one of the positive things about this transition. As an entity of Grey Enterprises Holdings, we’re now much better funded. I expect that will be reflected in salaries going forward.”

His strife draws out for several more minutes, and I do my best to talk him down. By the end of the conversation, I’m at least sure he won’t quit. But even that small victory doesn’t stop me from once again falling face first into the toilet the moment I set the phone down.

“Ana?” Evan calls from behind me. I turn and see him watching me wearily, his frown deepening as he closely examines the color of my cheeks. “You alright?”

“Oh, yeah. Having a great time.”

He cringes. “Sorry… I just came up here to see if you were still planning on going to your doctor’s appointment. We should be leaving shortly.”

“Oh, shit…” I let my head fall into my hands, the general misery so close to overwhelming me I almost tell him to cancel. But then I remember that Christian said he would be there. So I have to put on a brave front to communicate to him that I can handle this and that his reaction to this pregnancy is completely overblown.

It’s that resolve that pulls me off the bathroom floor. I hurriedly take yet another nausea lozenge from the tin on my counter, then hand it over to Evan. Downstairs, Harper gives me a bottle of water to sip on the drive, and I cling to it for dear life.

All of that ends up on the asphalt of the parking lot in front of my OBGYN’s office when I step out of the SUV and immediately double over.

“Wyatt, is that a photographer?” Evan asks, bending to pull my hair away from my face and gesturing to the bushes at the front of the medical complex. I follow his gaze and see the movement that drew his attention. As Wyatt sets off to investigate, Smith and Harper move to surround me, shrouding me from view while keeping me in a claustrophobic bubble. I groan and hold onto Evan while he moves me around them and guides me through the front doors of the building.

Christian isn’t there waiting for me.

We check in at the front desk and I sit in the waiting room with my CPO, just like I did back in Boston. It’s painful this time. Not just because I’d prefer the CPO I had then to the one I have now, but because he doesn’t have to be here at all. This time, I should have Christian next to me, and I don’t. Not even after he promised he’d be here. Every second that ticks past seems to come slower and slower, but my eyes stay trained on the door. With each and every one of them, I can hear the words he said to me yesterday as clearly as if he was saying them in front of me right now. “I’ll be there.”

Well, where the fuck is he?

“We’re ready for you Mrs. Grey.”

My eyes shoot up to the friendly looking woman in magenta colored scrubs, standing at the door with a clipboard in her hands. She smiles at me expectantly, but my eyes move back to the door one last time. Then I reach into my purse for my phone. There isn’t a text from Christian, so I send one of my own.

You said you’d be here.

“Anastasia?” The nurse presses me. I toss my phone back in my bag, take a deep breath, and smile at her.

“Yes, sorry.” She sweeps her arm through the door and directs me to a room at the end of the hall. It’s oddly relieving walking into the examination room without my security team hovering over me. The nurse directs me to take a seat on the table and asks several questions. Then she leaves me for a few minutes to let me change into a paper gown. I take the time before the doctor arrives to check my phone for Christian’s response, but there’s nothing.

Only a ‘read’ receipt.

“Mrs. Grey?” I glance up at the knock on the door, and Dr. Greene steps into the room. She beams at me with all the summer light of August as she plops down on a stool and rolls her way across the room. “I hear you might be pregnant?”

“Yeah, I took a test and it was positive.”

Somehow, her smile brightens. “Well, we’re going to take another one, and if that one comes back positive, we’ll get you an ultrasound.”

“Okay, tha—“ I’m cut off by another knock on the door, which Dr. Greene acknowledges with confusion.

“Yes?”

A balding man who wears a suit beneath his white coat enters the room, looking embarrassed before he even starts to speak. “I’m sorry, Dr. Greene, but Mrs. Grey is actually going to have her examination performed by her… uh, personal physician.”

I raise an eyebrow at him. “Personal physician?”

He steps back and Christian walks into the room, followed closely by… Dr. Baker. My OBGYN from Boston.

“Good afternoon,” Dr. Baker says, her overly polite handshake a clear play at breaking the awkward tension in the room. “I’m so sorry that this is happening.”

“But it is,” Christian says, leaving no room for argument. He holds the door open and glances at Dr. Greene. “If you wouldn’t mind…”

The look of shock on Dr. Greene’s face is palpable. Her eyes move to the man in the suit, but he shakes his head in return. Straightening her jacket, she turns the same cheery smile on me and takes my hand.

“I’m sure you’re in very good hands, Mrs. Grey. Excuse me.”

Dr. Greene gets off the stool and marches proudly from the room. Once the door closes behind her, I turn wide eyes on my husband.

“You have got to be kidding me?”

“Don’t,” he snaps back, his voice a warning. I grind my teeth together and turn to Dr. Baker.

“I’m sorry.”

“Oh, it’s alright.” She lowers herself onto Dr. Green’s vacated stool. “How are you feeling?”

My eyes move nervously to Christian, only to find him staring intently back at me, clearly ready to analyze everything I say.

“The morning sickness has been… a lot,” I tell her, trying to downplay any negative as much as possible. She nods and flips through the files she must have brought from her own records.

“That was true with Calliope too…” She flips through her papers again and starts reading through her notes, reciting the medications that had worked for me in the past. She’s not even able to get her prescription pad out though, before Christian is cutting her off.

“Tell her what you told me.”

“Mr. Grey, perhaps we should…”

“No! Tell her what you told me.”

Dr. Baker takes a deep breath and swivels on her stool to face me again. There’s hesitance in her eyes that wasn’t there before, and it makes me feel cold.

“What?”

“Mr. Grey called to talk to me about your history, and how it may affect this pregnancy…” She pauses, as though she’s uncertain how she should continue, and I take a bracing breath.

“And?”

“Well, generally, women who experience a placental abruption during their first pregnancy are at high risk for reoccurrence for every pregnancy thereafter.”

“How high is the risk?”

“It’s about 1 in 10.”

I take a much easier breath and look between the doctor and my husband like they’re crazy. “That’s only a ten percent chance it’ll happen. That means there’s a ninety percent chance it won’t.”

Christian turns yet another insistent look on the doctor, and she frowns. “It’s just that, it’s such a rare complication to begin with that the jump in probability is, medically, staggering. That doesn’t mean you can’t have a healthy pregnancy. It just means…” She pauses, like she can’t decide whether or not she’s actually trying to scare me or encourage me. “You had a very traumatic delivery the first time. There will be some damage and scarring to your uterus that could make any future complications you do experience… more severe than they were in the past.”

Christian stiffens, and my mouth goes dry.

“Oh.”

Dr. Baker smiles again, picking up the mood of the room in the same skilled way Dr. Greene did. “But we shouldn’t panic until we know all the facts. Why don’t we take a look, huh? You wanna lay back for me?”

I do as she asks, and place my legs in the plastic stirrups on either side of her. She wheels the ultrasound closer to me and pulls a long line of blue gel across the probe. Once it slides inside of me, my eyes immediately dart to the monitor it’s connected to, and Christian’s hand wraps around mine. I flinch a little as the wand moves around, but any discomfort vanishes from my mind the moment I see the small flicker amongst the static in front of me. When Dr. Baker turns up the volume, and the sound of a thrumming heartbeat fills the vacant silence around us, Christian’s hold on my hand tightens.

I turn to him, and feel the first sense of hope I’ve been able to conjure in days. His eyes are stuck on the monitor and the crease in his brow isn’t from anger or defensiveness. It’s discovery. For a long breath, Christian stares at the flicker as though he’s seeing the sun rise after a night he thought would never end. There’s awe. There’s surprise. There’s want…

And then he looks at Dr. Baker and his eyes cloud over again.

“What’s wrong?”

My gaze shoots to Dr. Baker only to find her carefully composed demeanor now colored with concern.

“It seems…” She shakes her head and stops, moving the wand around again and narrowing her eyes as she leans in to examine the screen. When she finds whatever it is she’s looking for, she turns a grim look on Christian. “I see two heartbeats.”

“What?”

She points to the monitor, circling her finger around one black circle, then another. “It’s twins.”

Twins?

My mouth drops open as what she’s showing me comes into focus. Two tiny disturbances in a field of static gray that each flicker with their own unique signs of life. It takes a careful ear, but listening to the sound from the ultrasound machine closely, I start to hear the difference between the two heartbeats.

“Oh my god,” I breathe, reaching out to touch the screen.

“What does that mean?” Christian asks.

“It means… Well, pregnancies with multiples present risks all their own. With Ana’s history…” She pauses in the same way, like she’s preparing to give devastating news. “It makes the risk of a placental abruption much higher.”

“How much higher?” I ask, before Christian can go on whatever rant he’s got on deck. “20%? 30%? 50?”

The doctor worries her lip a bit with her teeth, then takes a deep breath. “I’ve never seen a case where a woman with your history became pregnant with multiples and had a normal pregnancy.”

“No,” Christian says, dropping my hand and storming away from the bed. He begins to pace, his hands up in the air as if he doesn’t really know what to do with them. “No. No. No. No. No.”

I block him out and turn to the doctor. “So, you’re saying this pregnancy isn’t viable?”

“I’m not saying it isn’t viable. I am saying it’s high risk. Extremely high risk.”

“So what does that look like?”

“Well, let me take some measurements.”

She starts to drag her cursor across the screen, drawing lines that measure the size of the babies. Christian returns to my side, but his jaw is locked, his body is seized with stress, and there’s a dangerous fight brewing in his eyes. He shakes his head the entire time Dr. Baker works, so I do my best not to look at him.

“I’d say you’re about nine weeks, and based on the size of the fetuses, I think you’re looking at permanent bed rest starting around four, maybe five months.”

So only two months from now…

“And that will let me carry them to term?”

“I can’t give you any definitives, but if you intend to move forward with this pregnancy…” 

“I do,” I say before any other suggestion can be made. 

“Well, then… I would probably account for an early delivery in your birth plan.”

“Will I be able to carry them long enough for them to survive?”

“I don’t know.”

“What about her?” Christian interjects again. Dr. Baker turns to him, a questioning eyebrow arched high over her amber colored eyes. “You said that the damage from Calliope’s delivery could make all of this worse, and the only thing that could be worse than her almost dying, is the absence of ‘almost.’”

Her lips press together as she weighs the advice she has to give. “We know what to expect this time and we can plan in a way we couldn’t before… I’m the best, and I’ll do everything I can.”

“That’s not good enough.” He turns again, moving all the way to the far side of the room. His back is turned to us, his hands on both his hips, his breathing exaggerated. “Dr. Baker, would you give me a moment alone with my wife?”

“Of course, Mr. Grey.” She gives me a reassuring kind of smile and squeezes my hand before she makes her exit. I keep my eyes focused on Christian, waiting for a tirade that doesn’t come. He just stands there, looking at the wall.

“I don’t know what to say to you, Christian…” I begin, nervously. He lets out a defeated sigh, then turns back to look at me.

“You know, I know what Kate is going to say to you on your deathbed. It’s a beautiful speech, you’re really going to love it..”

My throat tightens, and I swallow automatically. “Stop…”

“I know what your dad’s face looks like the moment he realizes he’s lost you forever. I know what my mother’s tears sound like, I know what color Mia’s complexion turns… You think I’m being callous, but it’s only because all of that is very real to me. I’ve been trapped in that moment every time I’ve gone to sleep this week, and I’m telling you, Ana… I can’t live through that again. I can’t lose you.”

“Christian…” My eyes start to fill with tears and words fail me. Stuttering sounds croak their way from my throat like a broken muffler, but I can’t turn them into sentences. What is there to say?

I think he senses my moment of weakness, because he flies across the room and takes me by the hand.

“Please,” he pleads. “Ana… please. You can put it all on me. You can hate me for it. You can punish me for it. I can live through that. I can’t live through losing you. Please, don’t do this.”

I turn away, unable to bear the unusual supplication in his gaze. Dr. Baker’s insights have suddenly painted this whole scene a new color that my eyes haven’t quite adjusted to yet. I don’t even know what I’m thinking right now, and Christian’s pleas on top of my own uncertainty is overwhelming.

“I need to think about it,” I mumble. His calm and subjugated demeanor evaporates, and he shoves away from the examination table.

“Think about what? Did you hear what the doctor just told you? You can’t do this, Anastasia.”

“That’s not what she said…”

“That’s exactly what she fucking said! You can wade through the margins looking for as much hope as you want, but she was very clear about what we should expect. It’ll be worse than it was last time. You’re not going to make it through this, and I will never accept that.”

“Well then let’s talk about things that we’ll never be able to accept, Christian. What do you think it’ll do to me to wake up everyday knowing that I made the choice to end the lives of my children?”

“They’re not our children.” He growls the menacing words through clenched teeth, the same uncontrollable rage boiling to the surface I saw last week before I ran to my dad’s, and it once again has me moving away from him. This time though, he stops and takes a moment to breathe, rather than let his anger explode out of control. Still, when he speaks again, it’s through clenched teeth. “What about Calliope?”

“That’s exactly what I’ve been telling you!” I reach down for my stomach. “This could have been Calliope. It was Calliope. And I wouldn’t trade her to take everything that happened back, even if it had been worse. I wouldn’t even consider it. Not for a second.”

“That’s not what I’m talking about. I mean, if you don’t…” He chokes slightly over his words, so he has to swallow and change direction. “Calliope is here, real, and she needs you. You’re her mother and right now, what you’re talking about could leave her in this world without you. I lost my mother at four and all that I have left of her are a couple flashes of a hairbrush. Calliope’s not even two, Anastasia. She’ll have nothing. She won’t even remember you.”

That hits me harder than anything he’s said so far. The pain in the last part of that statement is almost unfathomable, and I have to turn around again so he doesn’t see the tears welling in my eyes. Half of me expects his touch, though it never comes. He lets me cry softly to myself, letting me feel everything he just said to me.

“This is real too,” I say at last.

“What?”

“I saw you during the ultrasound, the moment you saw the heartbeat. This is real. You can pretend it isn’t all you want, but it is. I heard what Dr. Baker said, I hear the pain in your voice… but that does not make this an easy decision for me.”

“I don’t expect it to be easy. I expect you to be rational.”

I blink, then look away again. I can feel the fight inside me dying away and the feeling that takes its place is dark, like a cloud rolling across a clear blue sky that bleeds the color from everything around me. I feel an echo of oppressive hopelessness swirling menacingly over me, calling me into it’s deadly depths like a misplaced lighthouse in the middle of a storm.

It’s everything I fear, and I feel it creeping towards me with a kind of inevitability that can’t be stopped, except by the warmth and light emanating from my womb.

“I need some time to think about it,” I say, numbly.

His head rolls back with frustration, but he doesn’t scream at me anymore. He clenches his jaw, pulls his lips tightly together, and starts to nod.

“Fine. I’ll go back to Escala tonight. But I’m coming home tomorrow, and we are going to make a decision.”

I nod. 

“I don’t plan on changing my position.”

“I know.”

He swallows, then starts toward me. I nearly trip and fall to the floor in my hurry to be engulfed in his arms. He holds me so tightly against him, it’s like he’s ready to fight a tug-of-war against death to keep hanging on.

“I love you, and I won’t survive without you.” He leans his forehead against mine. “Your heart beats, my heart beats. Please remember that.”

I nod, and his lips melt into mine.

An hour later, I’m home and am greeted with the sounds of Calliope’s misery filled cries the moment I come through the door. Mackensie has her in her arms, while Gail hovers over them with her favorite pink elephant in hand, but my baby just wants to scream. Big alligator tears roll down her cherry red cheeks, and the sight of them makes my nipples ache.

“Oh, Calliope,” I say, reaching for her the moment I step into the kitchen. Her gray eyes lock with mine, and she nearly throws herself from Mackensie’s grip in an attempt to get to me. I catch her just in time to keep her from tumbling to the floor, while she suctions to me like an octopus wrapping around her prey. Her tears stop almost the moment I have her, replaced instead with a whimpered ‘mama’ that she repeats into my blouse over and over again.

“She’s been like that since you left,” Kensie says, drooping onto a barstool and laying over the top of the counter. “I’ve tried everything.”

I reach up and place a hand on her forehead, then kiss both of her cheeks. She doesn’t feel warm, and now that she’s in my arms, she’s fairly pacified.

“She misses her Daddy,” I say, hugging her against me and swaying back and forth.

“Should I take her to Escala?”

I shake my head. “No, I want her with me. Go ahead and take the day, Kensie. I’ve got her.”

“Are you not going into work?”

“Not today.” I lean back so I can look at Calliope’s face, and brush away a few stray hairs that have stuck to the tears on her cheeks. “She can hang out with me in my office here.”

“Alright,” Kensie says, though her tone expresses a great deal of reservation. “I’m just going to hang out in the staff residence then, if you need me.”

“Thank you.” I give her a kind, but dismissive smile, and start towards my office. Calliope’s playroom is just across from me, so I set up the baby gate at the end of the hall to keep her where she’s supposed to be, then keep both doors open for her to move between the rooms freely. Her toys end up scattered over the pretty rug on the floor that keeps my office from being too oppressive and masculine, the way Christian’s office feels. I find myself distracted on most of my phone calls and ignoring more emails than I probably should, but I can’t bring myself to care. I know what a dire position we’re in right now, I know that Phoenix is still in it’s baby stages and needs my nurturing to get it where it needs to be, I know the promises I’ve made… but the only thing that feels good right now is Calliope.

She makes the storm clouds part, she breaks through the darkness shrouding my thoughts like golden sunlight.

She’s what I’m fighting for, she’s what I have to lose. And yet, the battle waging between Christian and I, between my fear and my hope, and between reality and possibility doesn’t touch her. She is joy, and nothing can dampen that.

After yet another lonely dinner, Calliope and I move into the living room. I build her a squishy bed of pillows and blankets on the floor and turn on The Little Mermaid while I read through the edits Stevens has submitted for Phoenix. It’s a good arrangement, until Calliope starts trying to sing along with ‘Under the Sea,’ and everything else, work included, disappears.

I push my laptop to the side and move closer to her, brushing the tip of my nose against hers again and again until she starts to giggle. The sound makes my heartbeat quicken.

“I love you so much, Calli-lily,” I tell her. She lets herself fall forward so that her lips mash into mine, and I pull her into my lap while I smother her with kisses. Her laugher chimes around me like a bell that wards away the demons, clearing my mind and calming my soul. I lean back against the couch and stare into the eyes that mirror so perfectly the ones that own my heart. “Do you want to be a big sister?”

“No,” she replies, with the same kind of causal dismissal she would use if I offered her more peas or a cup of juice. I don’t know if it’s the exhaustion, the stress, or the start of a complete mental breakdown, but her response makes me laugh so hard, I nearly lose my grip on her. She laughs back, clearly having a fabulous time even though she has no idea what’s going on, and it only makes the warmth surrounding her glow brighter. I squeeze her as hard as I can.

“You really are your father’s daughter.”

“Daddy?”

“Yeah. Just like Daddy.”

My fingers find their way to her sides and I start to tickle her just as an unexpected commotion erupts in my entryway. I look up, hoping the beep from the security alarm is a prelude to Christian’s entrance, but instead, it’s followed by raised voices. Harper, who has spent the last hour silently camped out at the kitchen table, gets up with her hand on the holster attached to her hip. I nervously start to take Calliope in my arms, preparing to dart to the basement, then stop when Kate, clinging tightly to Kennedy, storms into the living room looking as though she’s just been through an ordeal.

I perk up immediately.

“Kate?”

She lets out a huff and moves Kennedy higher up on her hip, pointing over her shoulder to the four hulking figures hovering in the shadows behind her. “That’s a little much, don’t you think?”

“Oh, yeah. Well… Christian.”

She nods her head in agreement, but rolls her eyes as she moves next to me on the couch. After placing Kennedy in the pillowy bed next to Calliope, she kisses my baby on the forehead and plops down on the couch next to me. There’s an accusation in her eyes that I don’t understand.

“What?”

“Your husband is having a breakdown in your apartment.”

“What?!”

She shrugs. “Elliot is over there right now trying to talk him off the ledge, but apparently he’s completely fucking losing it. And there’s lots of alcohol involved so, you know, only good things can happen from this point forward.”

I shake my head in disbelief and start to get off the couch, but she reaches out and wraps her fingers around my wrist to stop me.

“Ana. I know you had a doctor’s appointment this afternoon and now Christian is on a rampage.” She hesitates, which is unusual for Kate. “What happened?”

I collapse back into the sofa, fighting against the pinprick sting of tears at the corners of my eyes. The darkness my afternoon with Calliope managed to keep at bay, starts to seep through the cracks in the armor around me, and I feel myself falling into the pain-filled chasm Christian and I have found ourselves on opposite sides of once again without any idea how I’ll ever climb out.

“It’s twins,” I tell her, and the concern on her face is instantly replaced with joy.

“Twins?! But Ana, that’s amazing!”

I give her a dark glare that drains away her relief like water through a sieve. “It’s going to be like last time. The doctor told me that I was already at high risk for another placental abruption, twins makes it a certainty. And the scarring from my first abruption could make this one worse. Much worse.”

In the exact same way I watched it happen with Christian, then Luke, then my father, a look of abject horror sweeps across her face. Her color fades, her mouth drops open, and her eyes reflect a kind of terror I can’t let myself feel. She blinks wildly for a few minutes, processing what I’ve said and somehow coming up more lost.

“He flew in my doctor from Cambridge,” I continue. “I thought maybe she was overreacting or letting my history cloud her actual, medical opinion, because everything she told me just got worse and worse. But I stopped by my regular obstetrician’s office and when she looked at the charts… well, she didn’t even give me the slim ray of hope Dr. Baker did. She told me the risk is so bad that the states with the strictest abortion laws have exemptions for this situation. ‘Danger to the life of the mother.’” 

The quote tastes bitter on my tongue.

“Jesus.” The word is filled with hurt and disbelief, in the exact same tenor that resonates inside of me. She curls into herself a little as she pushes back into the cushions, then blinks back at me with a kind of sympathy that tells me she doesn’t have the sage words or wisdom to guide me forward. “What are you going to do?”

A tear breaks over my waterline, and I dash it away before more can follow. “I don’t know. I hear what the doctor’s are telling me, I understand what it means, and I can feel what it’s doing to Christian… but I just can’t do it.”

“You’re pro-choice…”

“Yeah, choice. I don’t choose this. I don’t want this. I—“ My eyes fall on Calliope, who has started drifting off with her cousin, and the argument inside of me changes. I don’t know how, I don’t know what to… and the frustration I feel in that confusion breaks the last of my self-control. I dissolve into all consuming tears, and Kate wraps all the way around me.

“I know, Ana. You’re a mother protecting her children. Of course you can’t.”

“Am I though?” I shake my head and pull away from her, tears still streaming down my face as I unload everything on her that I can’t carry alone anymore. “What if I don’t survive, Kate? What if it happens exactly the way it happened last time, except I don’t wake up? I’ll leave Christian absolutely devastated, alone, with three kids under the age of two. Even if it’s just Calliope… He’s twenty-four, he could live another seventy years. I couldn’t even fathom having to live through that amount of time without him. How can I risk putting him through that?”

There’s a vision that runs through my mind then, one I’ve seen over and over again since I took that pregnancy test. Christian and I tossing the kids into the rust colored piles of leaves beneath the giant trees in our backyard. It suddenly disappears. There’s no laughter from my daughter, no blissful happiness behind the smile of the man I love. It’s just gone. A picture of Calliope’s graduation takes its place, but as I disappear from the image, the pride on Christian’s face changes to regret and longing, while Calliope smiles through a deep kind of sadness I can feel the permanence of.

“So… are you going to terminate the pregnancy?” Kate’s nervous voice breaks through the picture. I bite my lip while the images dissolve from my mind and slowly shake my head.

“I can’t. There’s absolutely no way I could go through with it, and even if I could, I’d never be able to live with myself.”

She nods solemnly, then wraps her arms around me again. I sit in her embrace for a few long, silent moments, then I bury my face in her shirt and let myself fall apart.

Next Chapter

Christian really didn’t come home Sunday night, but my security team was there waiting for me. Even Woods, who I thought might get the axe once Christian realized he’d been the one to let me go. The moment Calliope and I came through the door, we were shut down tight. Wyatt stood behind me while I fed Calliope dinner, Harper hovered in the room while I set her in the bath, and Smith spent the night acting as a century outside my bedroom door. 

The moment I wake up, all four of them take shifts shadowing me so that I’m never left alone. None of it phases me or even feels off… until we pull up to my office and find Taylor there waiting for us, pushing the paparazzi back. 

And he isn’t alone. 

Luke is standing on the opposite end of the courtyard, holding the line from the other side, which surprises me because I fully expected Luke to be put on the security team’s persona-non-grata list for a while after he helped me evade my handlers. But he would only be here if Taylor called him. And Taylor would only call him if there was a reason…

He doesn’t look at me when I get out of the car, and when I turn to eye him speculatively, I notice there’s a gun on his hip. Taylor has one too, so I turn to the people filing out of the SUV behind me and, sure enough, I realize for the first time that every single one of them has a weapon holstered somewhere on their body. 

Suddenly, the casual brush off Luke gave me in the car back in Montesano feels like a dire warning, but I can’t get his attention while he’s busy pushing back on aggressive photographers. Harper takes hold of my elbow and drags me inside while Woods, Smith, and Wyatt form a protective bubble around me. Luke and Taylor wait til we’ve got a wide berth, then take the car to park. I’m ushered into the building so aggressively that I don’t even have the time to demand to know what the fuck is going on before they push me into the elevator.

“Owe!” I whine, wincing as Wyatt jumps away from me and the toes he’s just crushed beneath his boot. The elevator is too full with all five of us crammed inside, so he bounces off of Woods and steps on me again. 

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Grey. Here, let me…” He tries to back away but he’s blocked by Harper. She tries to shift around Smith, but by the time they’ve reshuffled, I’m merely pressed up against Woods instead. 

Thankfully, the doors open.

The four of them file through the doors in front of me, then stand to the side to let me lead the way into my office. The elated faces that greet me when I come through the doors make my heart thud uncomfortably in my chest.

“Hey, boss!” Stevens grins. “I gotta say, you were right. I flew through my Phoenix chapters this weekend. I couldn’t put it down!”

It takes me a moment to breathe through the residual chaos beating furiously in my chest before I understand what he’s talking about. 

“Oh. That’s great,” I reply, weakly. His brow furrows at my less-than-enthused response.

There was an email from Christian waiting for me in my inbox this morning, giving me explicit instructions on how I’m supposed to start this transition. He imagines we’ll be fully moved into the fourth floor of GEH by the end of today. And somehow, that’s only the second most ludicrous demand he’s made this week.

“I need everyone to meet in the conference room,” I announce to the room, failing to hold any strength in my voice that might assuage the concern that’s reflected back at me. When no one moves, I stand to the side and sweep my arm towards the door, and the uneasy quiet breaks with the commotion of their migration. I pause just briefly before I follow them in to slip a nausea lozenge in my mouth, praying it will carry me all the way through this meeting.

But it’s not just pregnancy that has me ready to throw up right now.

The nervous chatter around the table seems to center mostly on Phoenix. That something happened and Grey Publishing took it back. They’re right, but not in the way they think they are.

“What’s going on, Ana?” Jacki finally asks.

I take a deep breath. No need to sugar coat it.

“We’ve been bought out. Starting today, we’re being absorbed into Grey Publishing.”

There’s silence, then uproar.

“I knew it!” Roberts shouts. “I knew it the moment you walked in here. She’s a plant. She always was. That’s why Grey built the app, he was building it for himself! She ran Scott out of here, and made things real nice and easy for her husband to come in here and take out the competition.”

I hold up my hands defensively. “Look, I know how this looks. But I swear, this was done above me. Carmen agreed to the sale last Friday, and the contracts were signed before I even knew about it.”

“Yeah, we’ll be sure to find comfort in that from the unemployment office,” Stevens sneers.

“No one is losing their job,” I assure them. “We’re all moving together.”

“Moving?” Jacki asks.

I nod. “You have until noon to pack up your desks and move your belongings to the GEH building. We’ll be on the fourth floor. I’ve been told Grey Publishing is making room for us now.”

“And then what? We just… continue on? What am I supposed to tell my authors?”

“That their contracts are still valid and this acquisition means they have a much more powerful press and better funded marketing arm behind them.” I pause for more questions or comments, even complaints. But the only thing I get are bitter looks. I lean over the table, pressing my palms to the cool wood. “We have a meeting scheduled with the New York office and GP at 1PM to discuss our strategy going forward. I suggest you start packing.”

“Does this mean that GP is going to take over the Greenwich Library?” Steven asks before anyone can move.

“Yes.”

“And Phoenix?” Jacki adds. “They get that back too?”

“They get everything. Our press, our warehouses, our inventory, our front list… all of it. We are now wholly part of Grey Enterprises Holdings.”

“So, we didn’t win,” Rogers grumbles. “You made that big show here last week about how we’d finally come out on top. But we didn’t. Grey always wins in the end.”

That hits me in the gut. Not just because this was a battle and he did win, but because I’m fighting another battle with him now. He can’t always win, and I try to convey that to my team now.

“Because this was the only way they would survive.” I stand up straighter and try to force my face to reflect the sincerity of what I’m about to say. “I want every single one of you to know how proud I am of everything we’ve achieved here. This sale is because all of you worked so hard that it scared the most powerful name in Seattle publishing. So, if you think I’m going to go in there and let them change what we do, then I’m afraid you’re about to be very disappointed.”

Stevens nods. “Alright. Let’s go, I guess.”

I offer the room a weak smile as each of my employees pushes away from the table. Abby follows me to my office to tell me that she’s scheduled my OBGYN appointment for tomorrow afternoon, and stops the same way I do once we come through the door. My security team is spread out across my office, loading my things into boxes.

“What are you doing?” I demand. Evan shoots a guilty look at me.

“Sorry, Ana. Mr. Grey’s orders. He doesn’t want you lifting anything.”

I want to scowl, but I can’t help but feel a small amount of hope, that maybe, this means he’s coming around. Not happy about it, but at least starting to make accommodations…

That’s something, right? 

Abby joins me at my desk to help me start packing the little things I have tucked inside, and the personal items strewn across the top. With so many helping hands, I’m done much more quickly than the rest of my team, so I meander through the office, lending help where I can.

Most of my staff travel into the city on the train, so there’s a kind of caravan we have to organize between the few cars we do have. My security team makes several trips to the office before anyone actually leaves, transporting boxes and office equipment. It’s just before noon before we start figuring out how to move people.

“I can take five,” I offer, simultaneously sending a text to Woods to leave the rest of my team at GEH to free up seats. He isn’t happy about it, but with Taylor and Luke back on paparazzi duty, he eventually relents and returns to GSP with an empty vehicle. Every spot is filled. 

I slide into the front passenger seat, while Woods moves Calliope’s car seat to the trunk. There are impressed comments about the quality of the leather on my seats or the gentle purr of the powerful engine as we weave through the streets to our new building. It makes me feel a little self-conscious. Like I’m reminding them how close I really am to the force that’s displacing them.

That this is all my fault.

But when we finally get to GEH, all the resentment I felt back at GSP melts away into awe. We step through the main doors and wide eyes bounce around at the state-of-the-art lobby. I’ve been here so many times that it’s all very unimpressive to me now. But seeing it again through their eyes reminds me of the remarkable things that have happened here, that we’re now a part of. And the remarkable man behind all of them.

My heart seems to skip a beat, then stutter unevenly as I start towards the elevators.

We’re greeted with celebration when we come through the main doors of Grey Publishing. There’s a banner over reception offering welcome, gift bags with Grey branded swag, and plenty of desk space already cleared out to accommodate everyone. They even have their technology all set up and ready to go, complete with full GEH user profiles.

Which is I guess what happens when you go from having John in New York handle all your IT, to Welch.

“Ana, we’re so excited you’re here!” Claire beams the moment I’m in range of a hug. She throws her arms around me, and pulls me against her. “If I had to pick one person to take over for Elizabeth, I’d want it to be you.”

“Take over?” I blink around at the staff, noting the happy recognition that comes back to me every time I lock eyes with one of the old SIP hold-overs. Elizabeth isn’t anywhere. “We won’t be working together?”

Claire shakes her head. “No, she cleaned out her whole office last Friday for you. Take a look for yourself.”

I follow the same carpeted path I took a few weeks ago when I’d come to get the Grey Publishing contract out of her. Sure enough, the office that had been so crammed full of books and various plants then, is completely stark now. Nothing is left but the furniture, a computer, and a giant bouquet of pink peonies waiting for me in the middle of my new desk. I stumble towards them numbly and pull the card from their petals. It’s written in Christian’s handwriting.

I miss you.

My lip starts to tremble and my heart races against my ribcage. I stare down at the indents his pen made in the paper, tracing them with my finger as if feeling them will let me feel him too. It’s an empty kind of hope that makes me feel worse, until I hear a soft knock on the door behind me.

When I turn, he’s there.

“Hi,” he begins, wary. I have to take a breath before I can respond.

“Hi.”

“Your uh… security team told me you weren’t able to keep anything down this morning.” He fidgets nervously with something in his hands, which draws my attention to it for the first time. It’s a take-out carton. “I thought you might be hungry.”

My stomach growls, and he almost smiles. 

“Thank you,” I reach out for the cardboard container and when our fingers brush, there’s a jolt of warm electricity exchanged between us. It doesn’t spark and make me jump away, it makes me want to move closer. It makes it feel impossible to pull back. I think he experiences the sensation in the same way, because his hand lingers against mine far longer than necessary before he pulls it away. And when he does, he looks almost tortured. 

With a step back, I hop up on my new desk, pop open the lid of my container, and dip my chopsticks into the noodles. 

“Did you fire, Elizabeth?” I ask, keeping my eyes on my food.

“No. She received an offer for an editor-in-chief position at a much higher volume publishing house. She was very excited to hand me her resignation last week.”

I frown, knowing in my gut that it’s not a coincidence that his current editor-in-chief just happened to find a better job at the exact same time Christian wanted to give his wife this one. And, honestly, her absence isn’t extremely welcome. With the explosion of the Greenwich Library that damn near always keeps my email in a gridlock, it’s become clear that I’m going to need to split some of my responsibilities. Elizabeth would have been a great partner.   Without her, well, I guess I’m back to having no one…. 

He takes a few steps towards me while I eat and mull over this new information, then he places a finger beneath my chin and tilts my face up to his.

“How are you feeling?”

It’s difficult for me to respond at first. His touch once again sends tingles over my skin that I just want to stop and let myself feel. I want him to lower his lips to mine and tell me that he understands me. I want to collapse in his arms and hold him while I paint the picture of the future I see for us now. The one that makes it all worth this risk… Maybe if he sees it, he’d understand.

Instead, I place the noodles on the desk next to me and look up at him with lost eyes.

“Fine. I—uh… I have a doctor’s appointment tomorrow. They’re just going to do labs and some tests, but I’m going to get an ultrasound.”

He nods, solemnly. “Okay. Just have Abigail forward it to Andrea so she gets it on my calendar, and I’ll be there.”

“You will?”

His face crinkles with pain. “Of course I will. Ana, I love you. I’m always going to be there for you.” He steps closer, moving his body between my legs, and rests his forehead against mine. For a moment, he just stands there and lets his declaration simmer between us. Then he starts in an agonized whisper, “Please, just… try to see it my way. Try to see what you’re asking me to risk.”

The next breath I take feels heavier than just air. Like, I’m breathing in his torment. A flash of my father’s face moves through my memory from when I told him I was expecting. Even Luke had flinched.

“I do,” I breathe back. “It just… doesn’t change anything.”

His body deflates slightly with the defeated breath he lets out, so I reach around and pull my body against his, holding him as tightly as I can. He shakes his head a few times, then makes a resigned sound that ends with his lips crashing into mine.

It isn’t an admission of defeat, or an attempt to sway me to his side. It’s a temporary truce that has to happen because he simply cannot go on not touching me. Not kissing me. Not loving me…

And I fall into it just as hard as he does.

We wrap around each other in every way we can, pulling against the other in a constant attempt to drag them closer. His tongue tangles with mine in the way his fingers tangle in my hair. My ankles lock together behind his hips as if they’ll hold him there forever. I let myself pour every ounce of the longing I’ve felt for him in these endless days apart. 

When he finally pulls away, we pant together in silence for several long seconds, then he reaches up to cup the side of my face.

“There must be something wrong with your sense of self-preservation.”

I let out a humorless laugh. “You know what it’s like to love someone more than your own life.” A hand drops to my stomach, and he follows it with his eyes. Then he shakes his head, and pulls that hand away from my body and into his.

“Come on. We’re going to be late.”

We’re the last to walk into the much larger conference room where my team is gathered. Normally, I hate that. But Christian doesn’t seem fazed. He pulls out a chair for me at the head of the long, rectangular table, then steps into the open space at my right and looks around the room. The faces of my employees from New York on the huge screen against the wall show mostly confusion, which Christian acknowledges with an air of surprising humility.

“Good afternoon. On behalf of Grey Enterprises Holdings and Grey Publishing, I would like to extend our warmest welcome. The accomplishments of the Greenwich team are truly remarkable and it is my hope that we will continue to build on those successes going forward. And I don’t think there is a person I’d have more confidence in to ensure that success than your new editor-in-chief, Mrs. Anastasia Grey.”

He gestures for me to take over, but as I rise and he takes the seat next to me, there’s a cough from one of the Grey Publishing employees across the table.

“You’re wife,” he says beneath the obnoxious, fake hacking. Christian’s eyes flash dangerously in the man’s direction, but it’s Claire and Jacki who leap to my defense

“Shut up, Jason,” Claire snaps.

“Yeah, who even are you? Because she’s a best-selling author,” Jacki adds.

His eyes widen in surprise, and he holds his hands up in surrender. “Jesus. Sorry for having a little loyalty to Elizabeth.” Steven’s leans across the table, mouth open like he’s about to say something, but I hold up a hand to stop him.

“It’s alright. This is a very sudden change and we’re going to have some growing pains. But I hope, Jason, that I’ll earn your trust the same way that Elizabeth did.”

“Uh… yeah.” He recedes slightly in his seat, his face turning the lightest shade of pink. Several smug pairs of eyes from the GSP team turn to me, while the Grey Publishing staff I don’t know looks at me with a new curiosity. I turn to Christian, expecting him to leave, but he leans back in his seat and stares back at me with rapt attention.

“Alright,” I begin, turning away from him and trying not to feel his evaluating eyes. “We’ll get started with the Greenwich Library…” I hesitate, feeling my shoulders droop as I realize how difficult this acquisition is about to make my job. “Which I suppose will have to be rebranded… As of eight o’clock this morning, we’re at 203,000 subscribers and 14,000 active titles. Our top downloads now are the Meghan Michaels title, the new tell-all from that madam out of Kirkland, and… get this,” I give my team a sardonic look. “The Black Rose.”

“Are you kidding me?” Stevens asks. I shake my head at him, subtly letting him know that I’m not.

“Oh, no. Turns out that if you don’t make them pay for it upfront, it’s not contrived anymore. It’s just complicated… which, I guess is a good thing now? I don’t know.” I shake my head irritably. “Either way, Daves is pulling in significantly more downloads through the library than he did through the traditional press.” 

After a brief rundown of everything we have on the New York and Seattle office front list, and some intensive discussion on Phoenix that makes most of the Grey Publishing team start grinding their teeth, I turn to Jacki.

“Where are we at on your romance sequel?”

“Close. She’s got two chapters left and I’ve made her promise to have them for me by October. We’re going to miss the Christmas rush, but I think it might actually time well with the Phoenix release.”

“Excellent.” With a smile and a check against the last item on my list, I turn to Claire and ask for the Grey Publishing front list. She passes me a single sheet of paper with two titles listed at the top. I turn towards Christian dubiously, and he gives me a now-you-know-why-I-had-to-buy-you-out kind of look. With a very fulfilling sense of superiority, I turn to the editors representing the titles that are here and get as many of the details as possible, offering my support for whatever they need going forward.

There are a few housekeeping items I touch on, and procedures that will be changing going forward. There’s no point in keeping both Claire and Penny as receptionists, so I assure both of them Christian and I will have answers for them by the following morning. Then the team files out of the room to work on all the actionable items I’ve left them with, and Christian and I are once again left alone.

“You’re incredible,” he starts, the compliment marred by the weighty conflict he isn’t speaking aloud. “You really are a natural leader, Anastasia.”

I nod my gratitude while I take my things into my hand, then give him a resigned kind of look. “I can’t manage the library app and the operations of what is now the equivalent of three branches all on my own. I’d like to promote one of my editors to take over those responsibilities for me.”

“Do you have someone in mind?”

“Jacki. I trust her taste and her vision. She’s organized, she knows what she’s doing, and she’s ambitious. She’s the only one I know would make the same decisions I would. Penny can take her place on the editing team and Claire will remain as receptionist.”

“What qualifies Penny to be an editor?” 

“An English degree from Santa Clara. She took the receptionist job because she was waiting for an opening.” 

He nods. “Alright. Make whatever offers you want. Anything you need, it’s yours. You have my complete support.”

I breathe that in, but it doesn’t bring me any relief. Outside of Grey Publishing, that hasn’t proved to be true.

“Yeah,” I mutter, bitterly. “Thanks.”

“Ana…” He gets out of his chair, slowly, like he’s trying to buy more time to figure out how to say the things he’s already told me a hundred times in a way that will make me finally understand. “What if it were me? What if I had some disease that the doctors could just… cut out of me to save my life, and I refused? What would that do to you?”

“This isn’t a disease, Christian.” And honestly, the comparison is one of the more painful things he’s said so far. But if he’s going to deal in hypotheticals, so will I. “What if it was Calliope?”

“What?”

“If you could go back in time and tell your past-self exactly what would happen when Calliope was born, would you be telling me then what you’re telling me now? Would you throw Calliope away too?”

“That’s not fair…”

“That is exactly how it feels to me, Christian. This baby is not a concept or a thought experiment. I can feel it. It’s a baby that makes me sick every morning, and so tired I can barely walk straight. It’s a baby that makes my boobs hurt, and it’s a baby that has me breaking down into tears every fifteen minutes. Our baby. Just like Calliope is our baby.”

His jaw sets in an angry line. “I don’t know this baby. I don’t love this baby. But I do love you, and there’s no one in the world I would trade you for, Anastasia. Your heart beats, my heart beats. That’s not just correlation, it’s sequential.”

Defiant tears begin to echo behind my words. “You don’t know that this will be like it was with Calliope, Christian.”

“And you don’t know that it won’t.” There’s a finality to his words that tells me this argument isn’t going to be productive, so I let my head hang in defeat and start to turn. He calls me back.

“I’m going to take Calliope home with me tonight.”

I swallow to relax the tightness that suddenly grips my throat, wishing I was anywhere but here so I didn’t have to fight so hard to keep it together.

“That’s fair, ” I croak back. 

His face turns hard and the tension in his jaw pulls so tight, it almost pulses. “You know, this is what divorced couples do. Make custody arrangements…”

“We’re not getting divorced,” I reiterate. “That’s not how this ends. I’m not leaving you, Christian. No matter what.”

His eyes move down to my stomach, a look of disgust shrouding his face. “Aren’t you, though?”

He turns and leaves, and I have to sit in a chair to keep myself from collapsing on the floor. I can feel the fight inside me start to waiver as the exhaustion overcomes me again, but I can’t let myself lose it. I have to fight this battle. I have to fight for my baby. I just don’t know how to do it against the man I love. I don’t know how to withstand this pain. His pain. 

I reach up and press my fingers into the hollow of my neck, feeling my pulse and finding my heart racing. Despite my insistence that this time it could be different, that it will be different, I’m still wary of my symptoms. A thundering heartbeat is a little concerning given my history, so I take a deep, calming breath, and try to release the stress lingering in my body. I decide that the best way to do that is to go home and finish my day in a pair of sweatpants, where I can break down and cry if I have to.

After gathering everything I need and packing it into the bag that reminds me of Christian, I summon my security team and start for home. Or the empty building where my stuff is anyway. It becomes very clear once I’m wandering through the empty rooms that seem to echo in the eerie quiet, that it’s not home without Christian and Calliope.

And suddenly, I understand exactly why Christian had to leave. The hours of work I try to bury myself in are only just enough to shake the overbearing feeling of abject loneliness. So, when eight o’clock rolls around and I can’t force myself to stare at my computer screen any longer, I finally pull out my phone.

“Are you grounded for life?” Luke answers.

“Not any more than I already was. What are you doing?”

“Oh, you know. Really important things. Like… seeing how long I can sit on the couch before I start to become part of it.”

“Where’s Jade?”

“Working. She won’t be home until after three or so.” He sighs. “So it’s just me and me, having some good old quality me time.”

“Yeah, me too. Christian took Calliope to Escala tonight.”

“You guys still haven’t worked it out?”

“No. I don’t think that we’re going to be able to. He said he’ll come to my doctor’s appointment tomorrow, but not because he’s changed his mind. He’s already convinced himself this is a death sentence.”

“I mean… is it?”

“No!”

He pauses, like he has to rehearse what he wants to say next so that it comes out right. “Ana, maybe, before you go to war with Christian, you should hear what the doctor tells you. I was there last time, and she warned you–” He stops again. “Look, I know you think that you can get through this if you’re just on your best behavior… but it doesn’t always work out that way. It didn’t last time, no matter what you tried. And we really did almost lose you.”

“I know that, Luke. Don’t you think I know that?”

He sighs. “Yeah, I guess you would.”

There’s a heavy silence that falls between us while he wades through his emotions and I try to form the feeling swirling in my gut into words. 

“Luke…” 

“Hm?” 

“Why were you at my office this morning?”

“Because Taylor asked me to be.” 

“Why?”

He takes another long breath, which tells me he doesn’t want to answer, that that immediately makes me wary of whatever he is about to say. 

“Please don’t lie to me.” 

“Taylor didn’t want you to be held up by the paparazzi. He wanted you in the building as quickly as possible.” 

“Because?”

Another pause. “Think about it, Ana. I’m sure you’ll get there.” 

“Because someone was coming for me?” 

“And he found out about it three days ago. He came to talk to me late last night and we put his plan into motion before you even woke up this morning. It went exactly the way that he planned it would, we got the guy, we took care of it.”

“Who was it?”

“I don’t know, some dude who wanted to hock your wedding ring on the black market.”

“My wedding ring?!”

“It’s a ten million dollar diamond, Anastasia… But he was an amateur, working alone, and very, very carelessly. We were prepared for him. No need to worry.” 

“All I do is worry…” 

“I know, and it’s stupid. I don’t know what more I can say to you except that no one is ever going to get to you or Calliope. Ever. Your husband is a powerful man, and all of that power is constantly being directed into keeping you safe.” 

I swallow, as I’m reminded of the double-edge to that sword, and how his concern for my safety has that sword currently held at my throat. “Yeah… okay.”

“Do you want me to come over? Keep you company?”

“Would you?”

“Be there in a few minutes. Just tell your security to stand down, huh? I’d like to avoid stray gunfire, if I can.”

“You know they don’t listen to me.”

“And that’s part of the reason you’re so safe.” He laughs and promises he’s on his way before the phone goes dead and leaves me alone in the ghostly shell of my house. I can’t bring myself to sit and wait. 

The emptiness that fills the rooms around me is too oppressive. Instead, I wander aimlessly until I find myself in Christian’s office. With a careless drag of my finger, I walk along the edge of his desk, eyeing the immaculately neat piles of things that weren’t important enough to take with him. His laptop is missing, leaving a defined empty place in front of his chair. I squeeze the shiny, espresso colored leather wrapped around it and let my eyes wander to the framed picture displayed proudly on the corner of his desk.

Our wedding day.

“He’s not in here,” Luke says from the doorway, calling my attention. I look up and give him a sad smile.

“Almost feels like it though.”

The way his face morphs at those words tells me that he feels the pain roiling through me as acutely as I do, and the empathy that shines back at me through the blue eyes I’ve grown to trust so much draws me into his arms.

“It’s going to be alright, Ana.” He squeezes me. “You two will get through this like you’ve gotten through everything else.”

I sniff against his shirt, unsure of how much I believe those words anymore. A few days ago, absolutely. But Christian Grey is an intractable force, and I’m just now being confronted with how absolute that really is…

What happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object?

“Come on,” Luke says, rubbing a hand over my shoulder. “Let’s go watch an awful movie that I’m going to hate.”

I laugh and let him drag me out to the living room.

He pops some popcorn and even throws a few bags of the Scooby-doo fruit snacks I would have committed murder for while I was pregnant with Calliope on a tray, while I build us a fortress of pillows on the couch. He grabs the remote before I can, but goes straight for It Happened One Night, and hits play. I give him a knowing smile that makes him roll his eyes, but not a single word of complaint breaks through his lips as we settle into the opening scene.

“You wanna know the real problem with this movie?” he says about half-way through. He sits up straighter and moves the bowl of popcorn off his lap like he’s about to give a Ted Talk. But his speech is interrupted by Woods, Shaw, and Wyatt, who suddenly file into the living room.

“What’s going on?” I ask. My answer comes from the beep of the alarm that says an exterior door has been opened. Luke automatically reaches a protective hand back and angles his body between mine and the door. It drops though, when Christian walks into the kitchen with Calliope on his hip.

His eyes narrow on the space between Luke and I on the couch, which makes Luke shoot me an irritated look before he scoots away. I look at Christian.

“What are you doing here? Calliope should have been in bed hours ago.”

“You’re telling me,” he says, adjusting the wide-awake baby with tear-streaked cheeks on his hip. “She didn’t have her elephant.”

“Oh. I’ll go get it for you.” I start to unravel the blanket from around my lap, but Christian moves through the kitchen and waves me off.

“I know where it is.” He exits through the archway, toward the stairs, and Luke turns to face me.

“He’s not just here for the elephant, is he?”

I take a cautious breath, trying not to let myself feel too much hope behind my response. “No. I don’t think so.”

He nods and leans over to kiss my forehead, holding a hand back to stop my security when all three of them take a step closer to me. Then he turns back to me to roll his eyes and peels himself off the couch. I go after him, walking him to the door with my security team following half a step behind me the entire way. I give each of them an annoyed look before I tell them I’m off to bed and start after Christian.

He’s in Calliope’s nursery, standing over her crib, placing her stuffed animal close enough that she can see it, but far enough away that it won’t suffocate her in the middle of the night. He reaches in and strokes the top of her head lovingly, then turns to look up at me. 

And then, he changes. There’s no fight or obscured sense of betrayal in the way he looks at me. Only longing. Even from all the way across the room, it’s almost powerful enough to make me give in.

I look away, and he appears in front of me.

“Christian, I can’t…”

Just as they had this morning, his lips cut off my protest. I feel his hands curl around my face, holding me in the kiss that grows deeper the moment I start to kiss him back. While I melt into him, his hands drag down my body, gently caressing my cheeks, neck, shoulders, arms, hips… all the way down to the backs of my thighs. I push up when he lifts me in his arms, and wrap my legs around his waist. Then I lower my lips to his again, and keep them there while he makes his way back to our bedroom.

Our clothes fall to the floor without any words. His careful fingers gently pull my t-shirt over my head, then roll my leggings over my feet. He draws the tip of his nose up the inside of my thigh. His tongue sweeps gently across the curve of my neck. His eyes take in every inch of my skin, as though he’s experiencing my body again for the first time. Or maybe, just really taking the time to appreciate it.

I could melt in the wonder that looks down at me. I could swim forever in the depth of the love he demonstrates through each sweet touch of his lips. When my panties find their way to the floor and the tip of his erection brushes my clit, my body starts to yearn for him. Not in the greedy, heady way it does when my mind is drunk on sex and desperate for release.

I just need him to touch me.

I need him to envelop me.

I need him to consume me from the inside out, until every doubt I’ve felt over the past few days has been burned away by his unrelenting passion.

I need him to love me and I need him to feel how much I love him back.

He slides inside of me, and I moan for each and every inch of him. His wandering hands return to my face. His gaze holds mine. Only then does he move. Slowly. In a metronomic pace that’s so even and vital it could be a heartbeat. And the moment the comparison falls into my thoughts, I realize that’s exactly what it is.

A heartbeat. His heartbeat. This is why it beats, and this is what each and every one of those beats means.

Your heart beats. My heart beats. 

Next Chapter