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.
I stood against the wall with my hand pressed to my stomach, and I understood, with a clarity that cut through the pain like a blade, exactly what kind of woman had moved into my home.