Three slaps. She stood there, stunned stupid. Her cheek was scarlet and swelling. Her hospital gown hung open. The provocation was gone from her face, replaced by something raw and animal, the look of a woman who had never been hit back before.
The silence settled over us like dust after a detonation.
Then she screamed, clawing her way off the bed. "Giovanna, I'll kill you!"
She shoved me hard. I hit the ground, and a sharp pain shot through my lower abdomen. Not a bruise. Not a cramp. Something deeper. Something wrong. Dread flooded through me instantly, cold and total, like ice water poured into my chest. I gritted my teeth and dragged myself up, bracing against the wall to stay on my feet. My hand pressed against my stomach. My fingers were shaking.
She swung at me, her palm connecting with my face. "You hit me? You think I'm someone you can push around? Those three slaps? I'm paying them back double!"
She raised her hand for a second strike, but footsteps echoed in the hallway outside. Multiple sets. Heavy. The sound of men returning.
Her arm froze mid-swing.
The rage vanished from her face so fast it was like watching someone change channels. In one fluid motion, she snatched the baby from the bassinet, dropped him onto the floor from a low height, then threw herself down beside him, curling over the infant and wailing as if the world were ending.
The transformation took less than three seconds. From fury to theater. From predator to victim. She tucked her hair behind her left ear with a trembling hand and screamed louder, the sound pitched to carry through the door and down the corridor to where Tomasso's footsteps were getting closer.
The baby's screams tangled with hers, filling the room.
I stood there clutching my stomach, my body locked in place. The pain in my abdomen pulsed in time with my heartbeat, but I couldn't move. I couldn't process what I'd just witnessed.
Catarina had hurt her own child.
He'd just been born. Hours old. Still wrinkled and red and smelling of new life. And she'd thrown him on the ground without a second thought, the way a soldier discards a spent cartridge. Not out of madness. Not out of desperation. Out of calculation. Because the footsteps were coming, and she needed a story, and her own newborn son was nothing more than a prop in the performance.