Chapter Thirty-Three: Scorched Earth
The world outside the hospital's sterile bubble was a fickle, unforgiving place. The public mourning for Prime Minister William Madden and his family was a brief, official affair—solemn news anchors, flags at half-mast, tributes from foreign leaders that felt scripted and distant. But beneath the formal pageantry of state funerals, a uglier, hungrier current swirled.
We couldn't attend. Not the private service for the family, shrouded in secrecy due to "security concerns." Certainly not the larger, public memorial. Damien, pale and grim, delivered the news. "It's not safe, Arisha. The narrative… it's shifted."
The narrative. That's what they called the vile poison now seeping through the city. Gregory Hale's whispers, once confined to back rooms and anonymous blogs, had become a deafening roar. The "tragic fire" was now, in the court of public opinion, a "convenient inferno." The whispers said William Madden, cornered by the corruption scandal Hale himself had fabricated, had orchestrated it—a murder-suicide to escape disgrace and protect his fortune. They said the Accountability Act was a smokescreen for his own theft. They called him a coward. A monster.
The people who had once waved flags and cheered his speeches now spat on his memory. The Madden name, synonymous with power and dignity for generations, was mud.
The first time we ventured out, just to my mother's apartment to pack a few things, the hatred found us. A small, angry crowd had gathered outside the building—not reporters, but ordinary citizens, their faces twisted with a fervor that was terrifying. They held signs scrawled with words like BLOOD MONEY and WHERE'S THE TRUTH?
"Murderer's whore!" a woman shrieked, her eyes locking on me as we hurried from the car. "You knew! You all knew!"
A rotten tomato sailed through the air, splattering against the wall beside my head. My mother cried out, shielding me. Another object—a rock this time—glanced off my shoulder, the same one that bore the healing gunshot wound. Fresh, white-hot pain lanced through me.
I stumbled, the world tilting. This wasn't grief anymore. This was a hunting party.
Then Damien was there. He'd been following in a separate car. He materialized from nowhere, shoving the most aggressive protesters back, his voice a low, dangerous snarl. "Get back! She's a victim, you animals! Get back!"
He formed a wall with his body, ushering my sobbing mother and me through the jeering crowd and back into the safety of the car. Inside, shaking, I stared at the tomato juice dripping down the window, a symbol of how quickly admiration could curdle into blind, violent hate.
"We have to leave the city," my mother said that night, her voice final, etched with a new, hardened fear. "This is a graveyard for us now. We go back home. To our old city. We start over. Where no one knows that name."
Leave.
The word was a death sentence all its own.
"No," I whispered, the first spark of feeling in weeks. It wasn't a plea. It was a raw, animal refusal. "I can't leave. I can't leave him."
My mother looked at me, her eyes brimming with a pity that stung worse than the rock. "Arisha, cuore mio… he's gone. They're all gone."
"You don't know that!" The words tore from me, hysterical. "What if he's not? What if he's hurt somewhere, or lost, and he comes back? He'll come here! He'll look for me! If I'm not here… he'll think I left him!" The logic was the logic of dreams, of fever, the only scaffolding holding my shattered mind together.
I became a ghost in the city of ghosts. We stayed, hidden in a small, anonymous apartment Damien arranged. For two more weeks, I barely lived. I paced. I stared at walls. I clutched the platinum wedding band on its chain until the skin of my chest was raw. The physical pain of the healing gunshot was a welcome distraction from the howling void inside.
How could he have left me? He promised. I am your shelter. Where was my shelter now? In this world of whispers and rocks and ash? He was my air, and he had taken all the oxygen with him. The loneliness wasn't an emotion; it was a physical vacuum, crushing my lungs.
One afternoon, the silence in the apartment grew too loud. It was filled with his voice, his laugh, the memory of his weight on the bed beside me. The pain was a living thing, gnawing at my bones. I just wanted it to stop. I just wanted to go where he was. If this world held only his absence, then I didn't want this world.
The details were a blur—a bottle of my mother's sleeping pills, the cool tap water in a glass. A desperate, childish thought: I'll go find Addie.
I didn't get far. The world swam, my legs gave way, and the last thing I heard was the shatter of glass as I hit the floor.
---
I woke to the smell of antiseptic again, but a different room. My mother's face was ravaged, etched with a fear deeper than grief. Damien stood behind her, his expression unreadable. A doctor I didn't know was adjusting an IV.
"What did you do, Arisha?" my mother wept. "What did you try to do?"
I turned my face to the wall. There were no words.
The doctor cleared his throat. "Mrs. Rossi… while we were running tests following the… incident… we conducted a standard blood panel." He paused, choosing his words with care. "The results were conclusive on one matter. You are pregnant, Mrs. Rossi. Approximately eight weeks along."
Time stopped.
The beeping of the monitors.
My mother's crying.
The very air in the room.
All of it froze.
Then, it rushed back in a deafening roar. Pregnant. Eight weeks. The math was cruel and perfect. Our honeymoon weeks. Our lazy mornings. Our desperate, hopeful collision in the dark.
A sound escaped me—not a scream, not a laugh, but something wild and broken. My hands flew to my flat stomach.
"The heir," Damien breathed, the word sounding ancient, heavy with a legacy that was now a burden. "A Madden heir."
The words were a shackle and a lifeline, all at once. I couldn't leave. I couldn't go to him. I couldn't fade away. Because a piece of him wasn't ash. A piece of him was here, growing inside me. A secret. A miracle. A reason.
The all-consuming need to vanish was violently eclipsed by a ferocious, primal need to protect. The void inside me was suddenly, irrevocably, occupied.
I looked from my mother's shocked face to Damien's solemn one. The grief didn't leave. It would never leave. But it was now woven with something else—a terrible, beautiful, terrifying purpose.
I had to live. Not for myself. Not for my shattered heart. But for the last living ember of the Madden fire. For the heir. For the future he never got to see. For the love that, against all odds, had taken root and refused to burn.
The world was still scorched earth. But in the barren ashes, something had stubbornly, impossibly, begun to grow.