anything. Yeah, he’d been trained to be good with details, but once his dick started working, his brain generally shifted to standby. Still, this was an interesting revelation, one he tucked in the back of his mind.
But she wasn’t listening to him. Her eyes drifted shut, regret sharp on her face. “I . . . I didn’t know. Most women know. Most women see the signs.”
“You didn’t know you were pregnant?”
“I’m sure that seems strange to you, but I didn’t have periods when I was on Depo-Provera, so . . .” She opened her eyes and stared into the fire. “The shots last for four months, and it’s supposed to take a while for your body to go back to normal.”
Javier did the math and realized it couldn’t have taken too long for Laura to become fertile again. She’d spent half of her captivity pregnant.
If only they’d known she was still alive . . .
“He was always so rough with me, even when I didn’t fight him. He didn’t want to have sex with me. He just wanted to hurt me. I was a symbol of something he hated, and he wanted me to suffer. Every time he . . .” She paused as if searching for the words. “It’s like he was stabbing me again and again and again.”
Javier tasted bile in the back of his throat, his stomach revolting at the horrific images her words brought to mind, hatred like venom in his veins. He swallowed, fought back his rage. “I’m so sorry.”
“After a while, some part of me tried to forget my physical body. I just . . . moved out, blocked it out.”
Javier could understand that.
“I never thought about getting pregnant. There was so much else to worry about—getting enough to eat, beatings, rape, being killed. Every day they told me they were going to execute me soon. Every day I woke up thinking I was going to die. I . . . I made them promise to shoot me instead of cutting off my head.”
Javier could only imagine what it was like to live each day in that kind of terror, unable to fight back, depending only on your wits to survive. He knew men who’d lived through it as prisoners of war. None of them had come back without emotional scars.
“I . . . I thought it was poison.”
He didn’t follow. “Poison?”
“The pain.” Laura opened her eyes, her hands pressing protectively against her lower belly as they had that night in the sauna. “I thought Zainab had poisoned me.”
It took Javier a second to understand what she was talking about, the knot in his gut tightening when it hit him.
“I . . . I didn’t know I was having a baby. I didn’t know what was wrong with me. If I had known what was happening . . . How could I not have known?” She looked up him through tear-filled eyes, as if she expected an answer, her expression of despair slowly turning to self-loathing. “I should have known.”
“After what you’d been through? Your mind was doing all it could to protect you, to keep you alive. You can’t blame yourself,
Laura didn’t seem to hear him. “It was terrible. The pain was tearing me apart. I was sure I was dying. I begged Zainab to help me. I asked her why she had poisoned me. She called me stupid.”
Javier didn’t know much about women having babies beyond what he’d heard his mother and sisters say. The thought of Laura going through that much pain without medical attention or so much as a loving hand to hold was horrible enough, but to know that she’d been so brutalized that she’d had no idea what was happening to her . . .
He wanted to hold her. He wanted to comfort her. He wanted somehow to take all of this away from her. But he couldn’t. Nothing could.
NAUSEATED, LAURA COULDN’T bring herself to look at Javier’s face, fighting to put her worst nightmare into words. “I felt like my insides were being torn apart . . . like everything inside of me was being ripped out. And then . . . I heard a cry. I lifted my head, saw Safiya holding something in a blanket. The blanket moved. Until that moment, I’d had no idea I was having a baby. It almost didn’t seem real.”
She could still remember her confusion, her shock, the rush of adrenaline that had jolted her to a momentary awareness.
Javier’s warm fingers stroked hers. “You can finish telling me about this tomorrow after you’ve had some sleep. You’ve been through—”
But Laura needed to get it out. “They took her from me. I tried to get up and follow, but there was so much blood. I . . . I fainted.”
Laura told Javier how she’d almost bled to death, how she’d lain there on that bloodstained blanket for days, desperately thirsty and barely able to hold her head up, how she’d asked about the baby, only to be ignored.
“My breasts swelled and ached and started to leak milk.” The discomfort had been almost unbearable. “When I asked to see the baby, to nurse it, they told me I was crazy, but I could hear it crying. Then they said my baby had been stillborn. After a while, I began to wonder whether I had just imagined it all. My doctor says it was traumatic amnesia. When I was strong enough to walk, I tried to get close to her, tried to see her, but they wouldn’t let me, saying she was Safiya’s child and that I was unfit to be a mother.”
“How do you know it was a girl?”
“Angeza told me. She was the only one of Al-Nassar’s wives who was ever kind to me. She was Afghan. Her father had given her to Al-Nassar to settle a debt when she was only fourteen. I think she hated the others as much as I did. She said Al-Nassar had named the baby Yasmina. I call her Klara.”
“What happened to the baby, Laura? What happened to Klara?”
Laura shook her head, her pulse ratcheting. She stood, crossed the room, and gazed unseeing through the window onto the rooftops of a sleeping city. Why had she started this? Why had she told him?
Javier came up behind her and rested his hands gently on her shoulders. “It’s okay,
But it wasn’t okay.
It wouldn’t be okay until Klara was free and safe.
And once Javier knew the truth . . .
“About two months after the birth, the SEALs rescued me. I heard them speaking American English, and something in me woke up, some part of me that remembered who I was and why I was there. I wanted to survive, to escape. I didn’t mean to forget her.”
“Your baby was left behind.”
Laura whirled about to face him, knowing what he must think of her. How could she explain it? There was no explanation, no excuse. “I didn’t think . . . I didn’t remember . . . Something inside me just
“How soon before you remembered?”
She looked away. “The doctor at the hospital in Germany did an exam. Afterward, he told me that it looked like I’d recently given birth. And then it all crashed in on me—all the memories. But it was too late. It was too late.”
She looked up, expecting to see disgust or anger on Javier’s face.
Instead, he drew her close, held her tight, whispered to her in Spanish, words she didn’t understand, his voice not angry but soothing.
She resisted. She didn’t deserve this. “What kind of mother leaves her baby with terrorists? What kind of mother does something like that?”
Javier drew back and caught her face between his palms, forcing her to meet his gaze, his expression fierce. “Don’t you dare blame yourself. You’d been brutalized, violated, terrorized. You had a baby alone and almost died. They never even let you hold her. Then some men with guns drop from the sky and offer you a way to survive and come home. How could you expect yourself to remember she was your baby in the middle of that chaos?”
