Sitting was… a challenge, now that a tiny foot had taken residence against her right ribs. Getting up, belly larger by the day, was almost impossible. Not that it stopped her from plopping down on the couch with a tired sigh.
Head lolling against the cushion, Eugenia shut her eyes. “I’m just going to take a nap real quick.”
Lips came to her forehead. “You’ve never looked more beautiful.”
“Shut up, Aaron.” She felt like a whale. A striped whale who clearly had not received the no-stretch-mark gene.
He put a plate on her belly. One that balanced just fine. “Eat. You’ll feel better.”
Roast pumpkin with onions and fish. Everything she craved since waking that morning and telling him how badly she needed it. Gloriously delicious as she scarfed it down like an animal. And then she did feel better. Like a new woman even. One even willing to talk to the handsome man taking off her shoe.
“I set a broken leg today. Compound fracture. A real mess.” Smiling, she met his eyes. “You should have seen it.”
Laughing, he removed her other shoe. “I’ll let the men know you’re looking forward to their suffering.”
“Ugh, I need to pee again.” Said with such desolation for her imminent loss of comfort on the couch.
“Up you go.” Plate set aside, he heaved his extremely pregnant wife to standing.
And stole a kiss before she might escape. One that rode her moods and altered their course until she was relaxed against him with a small smile on her mouth.
Lashes parting, she found his gaze as warm as it always was, and then her smile became a frown. “You know, they hate that I’m forced to leave Level 9 and come here every night. Those women, they don’t know what you’re really like. They only know what you did to them.”
Too many of the women on Level 9 had been fucked too hard by an indifferent, evil man. Some of them had once thought themselves in love, until they realized what he’d put them through on Level 15. Others had never seen him save the first time they stepped onto the boat. How he’d coldly outlined what their lives would be before throwing them into isolation for a month to adjust.
Not that all those new women made it to Level 9 anymore. Those who truly refused went… somewhere else, hidden from Eugenia to be bred.
Babies were delivered upstairs in need of a breast, fresh from the womb and squalling.
Eugenia had almost killed him the first time, slicing Captain so badly with his dinner knife Dr. Herbert had been called to stitch him when she refused.
On his knees, weeping when she swore she’d never look at him again, he pleaded that the mother promised to kill the baby. Swearing that she had murdered the one before—that the little boy wasn’t safe with her. That all the complicated cases were well fed and as clean as the women would allow themselves to be. That he didn’t have a choice.
Eugenia still didn’t speak to him for a week.
Staying with Brooke, who was far more pregnant and far more coherent when Eugenia came sobbing to her door.
Who told her to pull her head out of her ass.
Because she had seen the captain and his favorite captive. Because, out of all the women on Level 9, Brooke knew how much they loved one another and never told a soul. “The world out there is fire and pain. Some bring the pain back here where it’s safe. The captain can’t let it spread.”
Eugenia, in the most fucked-up way, had the dream all of them had yearned for.
Yet her voice still had to be heard. “He has women on the boat he forces to reproduce… and then he takes away their children.”
Scar tissue distorting her smile, Brooke offered a lopsided and honest grin. “And good for those women for refusing. And good for him for saving a life.”
“It’s rape.” The ugliest of words.
“It is.” A thing Brooke knew well, a word that set her eyelid twitching. “But I know it’s not like… what happened to me.”
“Brooke.” Eugenia took her friend’s hand, tears on her cheek. “It’s exactly like what happened to you.”
Brushing back her friend’s curls, Brooke whispered, “Yet you love him anyway.”
And Eugenia cried all the harder.
Because she did. She loved him so much that sometimes it hurt to breathe.