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✲꘏ ꘏ ꘏ ꘏✲
"Listen, Elizabet. Save yourself," Toby said once more.
Instead of obeying him, I stepped directly in front of him, cupped his face in both hands, and forced him to look into my eyes.
I had hoped to find tenderness in those brown eyes. Love. Kindness. Any trace of romantic feeling. And if not love, then at least sorrow—something that would tell me his heart had not turned to stone, that some fragment of humanity still remained within him.
Instead, I found only emptiness.
No emotion.
Neither hatred nor affection.
Only emptiness.
What had happened to him?
What had changed since the last time I had seen him aboard that cargo ship, when we hid together in the cabin, dreaming of reaching sunny Spain? I had no idea what our lives would have looked like there, but I had been certain it would have been a new beginning.
Perhaps we would have gone our separate ways.
Or perhaps we would have chosen to stay together and see what became of us.
Perhaps—just perhaps—my dream of living a peaceful and beautiful life might finally have come true.
But those dreams had flown away with the migrating birds and would never return.
Even so, I still believed we could escape this ship.
Escape the war.
Hide somewhere no one would ever find us.
I still believed we might live in relative peace, if only for a little while.
At least until the war was over.
"I'm carrying your child, Toby."
I decided to tell him the truth.
For some reason, it suddenly seemed like the right thing to do.
Perhaps it was the only thing that might persuade him to flee with me instead of staying behind and forcing me to leave alone.
Toby slowly lifted his head and looked at me with an expression that was neither bitterness nor despair, yet somehow both at once.
It was impossible to read.
But one thing I knew with certainty:
he was not happy.
"Why now..." he murmured, letting out a hopeless sigh before looking at me again with that same unreadable gaze.
"What do you mean, why now?" I asked hurriedly, glancing toward the corridor.
Voices, shouts, and hurried footsteps were already echoing through it.
"Forget it," he said quietly. "Run. Get out of here as fast as you can. Save yourself... and save our child."
