*Runze's POV*
"...Our... baby?"
The words scraped painfully against my throat, and my chest tightened the moment they left my mouth, like saying it out loud made the possibility of an answer I didn't want to hear suddenly real in a way it hadn't been a second before.
Bael didn't answer.
His face changed, but not into fear. Into something worse, something uncertain, the kind of expression a person wears when they genuinely don't know what to say and aren't willing to lie just to fill the silence.
A cold wave rushed through me.
The monitor beside my bed answered before anyone else did.
*Beep.*
*Beep.*
*Beep-beep-beep.*
My heart was racing, and I could hear it happening before I could feel it, the machine translating my own panic back at me faster than I could process it.
No. No, please, not that, anything but that.
