Chapter 36: dark,

RAVEN

As the nurse begins to draw blood, she avoids eye contact with me. If it was any other circumstance, I probably wouldn’t think twice about it. I’d likely believe she was scared of where she is, or who she’s doing this for. However, considering she isn’t our normal nurse, I think it’s because she’s been told not to inform me of anything.

“What is this blood test for?” I inquire, as she switches out the vial to begin filling another. I want to tear it out of my arm and smash the damn things against the wall to stick it to Cain, but I don’t. There isn’t much use. If I did so, they’d just fucking tie me down and get the sample anyways.

“Don Cain wants to ensure that you’re not pregnant.”

I’m shocked she’s allowed to tell me that much, but the sound of it has me rolling my eyes. Of course that’s why she’s here. “I’m not pregnant,” I assure her. “I just had my period. He knows this.” I only just lied to him about having bad cramps to help cover for Luca.

“I’m just doing what I’m told. He asked me to take your blood and run tests for both of you.”

“Both?”

“Yes, you and—” she abruptly stops speaking and closes her mouth. “I’ve said too much. Let me finish up and I’ll be off.”

Why is he taking Dove’s blood too? He’s already seen the positive pregnancy test. Does he want to ensure it isn’t a false positive? Dove’s been having morning sickness for a couple weeks now, she’s definitely carrying Adiv’s child.

It’s just another way for him to force control over the women of this house.

Once this is done with, I’ll head over to Dove’s room and check up on her. She should know that he’s testing her to ensure she’s pregnant. I think she deserves to know anything that can affect the baby.

When the nurse has gathered enough blood, she applies a bandage to my arm, tape to the vials, scribbles something on them and then scurries to my attached bathroom to presumably wash her hands. I take the moment to lean forward to read whatever paperwork she has in a folder.

Quickly, I pull out my phone and snap photos of the five pages within and then ensure everything is as she left it. I hide my phone back where it was and position myself back in my chair, feigning as if I’m too focused on applying pressure to the puncture.

When she steps back into my room, she doesn’t seem suspicious. In fact, she still seems a bit frazzled, which leads me to believe she doesn’t do work like this often. She slipped up by telling me more than she should’ve. I’d bet this is the first time she’s ever done something like this.

I wonder what would make her desperate enough to seek out money from Cain Brooks. She’s visibly uncomfortable with the morality of what she’s doing. She appears to think she’s doing something immoral, so what happened for her to ignore that in desperation of a quick cash injection?

What does she think will happen with the results of these tests? Is she assuming I’m pregnant and that Cain is about to seek out the baby daddies and kill them both? There’s no way this nurse isn’t aware of who Cain is and what he does, so I imagine her mind is running wild with scenarios. It would explain why she’s so nervous.

Nervous enough that it hurt when she pricked me with the needle and it’ll surely bruise.

She gathers her supplies to carefully put them away into her bag and then leaves the room without saying anything to me. Once she’s gone, I pull out my phone to glance at whatever she was carrying in her folder.

I spend a few minutes, zooming in to study each and every detail of the paperwork, but it doesn’t exactly reveal anything to me that I’m not already aware of. It has each of our names—Cain, Mariposa, Leo, Dove, and I—as well as our birth dates. It’s essentially a brief overview of our medical histories, including our blood types, illnesses, weight and height, etcetera.

None of it holds any useful information to me. At least, not that I can recognize.

I ignore it for now and head down the hall to Dove’s room, softly knocking on the door. When she welcomes me, I step inside, closing the door behind me for some privacy.

“How are you feeling?” Is the first thing I ask when my eyes meet hers. She looks a tiny bit better than the last time I saw her, but I can tell that she still isn’t well. With the loss of Adiv, I’m not sure she ever will be.

She shrugs her shoulders, “I don’t know, honestly. Probably the same.” After a sigh, she rips off the bandage on her arm from where she had blood drawn and tosses it into the trash. “At least I haven’t been puking my guts out.”

“Has the morning sickness passed?”

“It hasn’t bothered me for about two or three days now, which is nice.”

“How about nighttime? Are you sleeping?” After that night, she began having dreams. Not nightmares, but dreams, where she was with Adiv and their future child. It’s like her brain was wanting to do the opposite to her and instead of reliving the trauma, it was forcing her to see what her life might’ve been like had Adiv still been here.

Worse, in my opinion.

“I’m exhausted with everything, but I’m only sleeping a little.”

There’s a knock on the door and a woman pushes it open with a smile on her face. “I brought you something to eat,” she informs Dove and then walks into the room to place a plate down with some sort of wrap on it near the entry.

“Thank you,” Dove offers a forced smile back as she gets up to gather the food.

I quirk an eyebrow when the woman leaves, curious why Dove is having food delivered. She shrugs, “It started a few days ago. I’m guessing the chef heard about me being sick so they’ve been making me lunch to encourage me to eat.”

“That’s nice,” I comment. Not only has she been vomiting a lot because of the pregnancy, but she hasn’t exactly been consuming a lot because she’s grief-stricken and has little desire for food.

I don’t blame her. I can understand what she’s feeling.

Luca had said to me that the feeling he felt when he lost Adiv is the same thing he’d feel if he lost me and I get it. I love him and it’d destroy me if he was taken from me.

I don’t want to exist in this world—in any world—where Luca isn’t. Death would be dancing down the halls of heaven compared to a life without him being mine.

If anything, I’d think that Dove’s sense of loss is even more intense. And I don’t mean because of the hormones that are causing her to be more emotional than normal. She’s literally carrying a piece of Adiv with her. She’s surely replaying in her mind—over and over and over—the events of that night and reminding herself of all the milestones that Adiv won’t be here to witness.