How To Tame An Empress (BOOK I)

Chapter 47 - What His Hands Could Not Protect

--Valeria POV--

Consciousness returned to me in fragments.

The familiar ceiling above our bed was the first to greet me as I opened my eyes. Followed by the weight of linen against my legs, but more unfamiliarly, there was a dull ache in my body, sharpening each time I attempted to breathe too deeply.

Then came the memories. Claude kneeling at the foot of the throne. Stacius descending the marble steps with his sword in hand. His fingers closing around my arm, and my heel finding nothing beneath it.

After that, there was only white stone rushing past me, the terrible crack of my shoulder against the steps, and Stacius standing above me with one hand still extended. He had reached for me. Only too late.

My body felt strangely distant beneath the blankets, as though it belonged to someone else. Pain throbbed along my side and across my lower back from the fall, but beneath that lingered something heavier; a deep, dragging ache low in my stomach.

But before I could dwell on it, the voices murmuring beyond the chamber doors drew my attention. I recognised the physician first, his voice was gentle in the way men became when kindness was all they had left to offer.

"Her imperial majesty will live. The fall has bruised her badly, but I found no injury that should threaten her life." He said, and silence followed for a brief moment before I heard my husband's voice. So quiet that I almost did not recognise it.

"And the child?" The words meant nothing to me at first.

I stared at the canopy above our bed, waiting for the physician's answer while my mind searched for the child they might be speaking of. Had one of the boys been hurt in the throne room? Had something happened after I fell?

"The child has been lost, imperator. I am sorry."

What?

My hand moved before thought returned, flattening over my stomach as realisation dawned on me. The pain I was feeling had not just been from simply falling down those steps, but something more internal.

"No." I whispered. The knowledge arrived at the same moment as the loss, leaving no space between discovery and grief. There had been a child. Inside me. I had been pregnant without even knowing?

This child. I had not known to protect them. I had not gotten to speak to them, wonder about their face, or rested my hand above my womb with the awareness that beneath it, another small life had begun.

I had become a mother and ceased to be one in the same breath.

"No. Examine her again." Stacius spoke at last. The words were not loud, but carried the brittle certainty of a command filled with a desperation which I almost did not recognise.

"Imperator-"

"You said she would live. If she will live, then the child may live too. Examine her again. Summon another physician if you must. Bring every physician in Rome." He ordered again, voice growing louder, more agitated.

"I have examined her carefully. There is nothing more that can be done." My hands remained above my stomach, tightening over the fabric as I suddenly felt so empty. Truly, I thought, what a terrible mother I am.

"There is always something to be done." I had heard Stacius speak those words before whenever the world dared present him with an obstacle. But the difference is that there was always another order to give, another man to threaten, another fortune to spend, but the same cannot be said this time.

He had built his life upon the belief that if he wanted something fiercely enough, reality would eventually submit. But unfortunately, the physician did not yield.