“Hold your fucking fire!” I hear Manny’s voice.
I see her first, her eyes large in her pale face. Then I notice the arm around her throat and the knifepoint to her cheek, and an angry roar bursts out of me.
“There it fucking is!” he yells. “That’s the pain I’ve craved to hear for so goddamn long.”
Getting out from behind my bike, I start moving toward the building, my eyes locked on Sophia’s.
Manny laughs.
“That’s it. Come closer, I want you to see this.”
When I’m standing right underneath the window the arm around her neck suddenly moves as he yanks her shirt down, exposing her tit. A trickle of blood runs from a perfect bite mark down past her nipple.
“I marked her.”
“I’m gonna rip you apart,” I grind out.
It takes everything for me not to run in there. I want Manny exposed at the window. There are guns trained on him, waiting for the slightest move, the narrowest margin, to take him down.
“You can try, but not before I rip her apart.”
That’s when he makes his mistake. So eager to see me suffer, he pokes his head over her shoulder.
The next moment Sophia screams as a shot rings out.
I’m already running as gunfire breaks out all around me. My only thought is getting to her.
I take the stairs two at a time and burst into the room where I saw them. Sophia is on her knees on the floor by the window, next to the body of Manuel Salinas. There’s little left of his head.
“Tse…” she whispers through the blood she’s covered with.
“Oh, Christ, baby…”
Sophia
“There. Once that heals it’ll be as good as invisible. Now, we should probably get you a tetanus shot.”
The doctor discards the suture needle and puts a Band-Aid over the stitches on my face.
Just three, where Salinas’s blade nicked me when he was shot. The bite mark on my chest was cleaned and bandaged.
I turn my head to look at Tse, who’s been a stoic presence by my bedside. He carried me into the hospital in Farmington and despite staff’s efforts to get him to leave the room, he’s been here the whole time. Other than yelling for help when he picked me up off the floor in that room, he hasn’t said a word.
“Left or right?” the doctor asks, holding up a syringe. “Your arm could be a little sore after.”
“Left,” I tell her, but at the last minute I pull my arm back. “Wait.” I dart a quick glance at Tse. “Is this safe during pregnancy?”
The doctor’s eyes bulge in surprise.
“You’re pregnant? How did you not mention that before?” she scolds me.
Before I have a chance to answer Tse responds gruffly.
“No one fucking asked.”
The woman presses her lips together and lightly shakes her head as she rubs an alcohol wipe on my upper arm.
“It’s perfectly safe.” She gives me the injection, gets rid of the needle, and leans over the side of my bed, her face stern. “From what I understand you’ve been assaulted, kidnapped, bitten, cut, and generally tossed around. If I’d known you were pregnant, I’d have started with an ultrasound.”
Now she’s pissing me off. I notice Tse moving like he’s got something to say, but I give his hand a squeeze, this one’s mine.
I push myself a bit more upright in the bed, forcing her to back up a little.
“As you said, I was assaulted, kidnapped, bitten, cut, and tossed around, so forgive me if I didn’t follow protocol to the letter. However, I am pregnant, and I would appreciate knowing the baby is all right.”
She looks at Tse, who stares back hard, before she turns to me.
“You’re right. I’ll get the portable in here. Drink that cup of water for me.”
While we wait I try a few times to get Tse to talk to me, but he keeps telling me to rest. I don’t want to rest, I’m afraid the entire past twenty-four hours are going to play on repeat the moment I close my eyes.
I eventually give up and almost sigh in relief when the bitchy ER doctor is back with the ultrasound.
“We’ll have a quick look, but I’ll also have the attending OBGYN pop in for a quick consult. Just in case.”
She plugs the ultrasound unit into an electrical outlet and starts it up. Then she asks a few questions and feeds the answers into the machine.
“Have you had an ultrasound before?” she wants to know, rolling a protective sheath over the wand before squirting it with gel.
“No. Not since I got pregnant anyway. But I did have one scheduled for this coming week.”
“Pull up your feet as close to your bottom as you can and let your knees drop to the side,” she instructs, lifting the sheet up from the bottom. “That’s it. Any particular reason why so early? I mean, you’re barely even eight weeks pregnant.”
“I don’t know. He just said he wanted a baseline.”
“Where the hell are you going with that?” Tse points at the wand.
“This early in the game we won’t be able to see much with an abdominal ultrasound,” the doctor explains. “We have to use this transvaginal probe to get a closer look.”
“It’s okay, Tse,” I reassure him. “Trust me there are worse things women have to put up with on a regular basis.”
He looks at me with a deep frown grooving his forehead, probably trying to gauge if I’m serious or not.
“Ready?” I look at the doctor and nod. “Take a nice deep breath in and slowly let it out.”
On my breath out, she slips the wand inside. It’s not exactly comfortable but my body quickly adjusts. I feel pressure when she starts probing around and clamp onto Tse’s hand.
“This can be a little uncomfortable with a full bladder, but it helps make the fetus more visible this early on.”
I just hope I don’t pee myself for the second time today. The first time was earlier, as I found out after Tse loaded me in the back of the
