Chapter 26: Baby
The van door slid open with a rattling groan, flooding the cabin’s dim interior with the harsh, gray light of late afternoon. Levi stood framed in the doorway, his silhouette rigid, the world held carefully in his arms.
Aria was already sitting upright on the sofa, pushed up by an effort that showed in the white-knuckled grip she had on the blanket. Mikasa stood sentinel by the wood stove, her hand drifting toward a knife hilt at her back before she recognized the shape in Levi’s hold.
For a suspended second, there was no sound but the crackle of the fire and the soft, rhythmic whoosh-click of the portable oxygen concentrator Connie had thought to grab from the ambulance. It sat beside the sofa, its tube coiled and empty.
Levi stepped inside. His eyes found Aria’s and held them. He didn’t speak. He simply crossed the room and, with a slowness that seemed to hurt him, knelt before her on the rough plank floor.
He didn’t present the bundle. He just shifted it gently, his hands still underneath, and let her see.
Wrapped in a stolen hospital blanket, striped in pale blue and white, was a face. A tiny, terribly small face the color of a stormy twilight, scrunched in sleep. A miniature oxygen cannula was taped under his nose, the tube trailing over Levi’s arm to the tank Jean was hurriedly assembling by the door. A beanie, drably hospital-issued and gray, was pulled over a head that looked too fragile to exist.
Aria didn’t move. She didn’t breathe. She stared, her expression blank, as if the image couldn’t find purchase in her drugged, traumatized mind.
“Oh,” she whispered, the sound paper-thin.
Her hands came up from the blanket, hovering in the air between them. They were shaking. She stared at them as if they belonged to someone else, then slowly, deliberately, lowered them. She wiped her palms hard on the knees of the hospital gown, as if cleaning them. Then she reached out.
Levi transferred the weight with infinite care, his forearms supporting hers until the new, impossible burden settled against her chest. He kept his hands there, a solid shelf beneath her trembling ones.
The baby didn’t wake. His little mouth, lips the color of a rose petal, pursed and relaxed. One miniature hand, its skin nearly translucent over fine bird-like bones, escaped the swaddle and rested against the blanket.
Aria looked from that tiny hand to Levi’s face, which was etched with a fatigue deeper than bone. Something in her own face fractured. The blank dissociation shattered, and what flooded in was a wave of pure, uncomprehending terror.
“He’s so small,” she said, her voice breaking on the last word. “Levi, he’s so small. I can’t—he’ll break.”
“He won’t,” Levi murmured, his thumbs stroking the backs of her hands. “He’s tougher than he looks.”
“He doesn’t look tough. He looks like…” She swallowed hard, her eyes welling up. “He looks like he’s made of glass.”
From the doorway, Eren watched, his own rage momentarily banked by the sight. Jean turned the valve on the oxygen tank, and a soft hissing joined the room’s sounds. Connie dragged a duffle bag inside, unzipping it to reveal neatly stacked cans of formula, packets of sterile gauze, and tiny premie diapers that looked like they were made for a doll.
“Supplies from the ambulance,” Connie said quietly, placing the bag near the sofa.
Mikasa approached, moving with a predator’s grace into something domestic. She assessed the infant with a clinical eye, then Aria. “His color is better than I expected. The oxygen is mandatory. We need to monitor his temperature. He cannot get cold.”
Aria nodded robotically, her entire being focused on the minute rise and fall of the blanket over his chest. “Okay. Okay, monitor. Right.” She looked up, a wild, skittish look in her eyes. “How do we do that? We’re in a shack.”
“We have what we need,” Mikasa stated, pulling a digital thermometer and a space blanket from the medical kit. “We adapt.”
Armin had set up his laptops on the rickety table, the glow painting his face in shades of blue. He hadn’t looked up from the screens, his fingers a constant flutter over keys. “The hospital chaos is contained to the NICU wing. Police scanners are active but… confused. Veritas and his men are gone. No police reports filed.” He finally glanced over. “They won’t involve the authorities. This stays in the shadows. That’s our advantage.”
Levi finally pulled his supporting hands away, letting Aria bear the full weight. She gasped, a small, sharp sound, but her arms tightened instinctively, drawing the baby closer to the source of her own warmth. He watched her for a long moment, something in his chest unlocking at the primal image. Then he stood, his knees cracking.
He walked to the sink—a rust-stained basin with a single, cold tap—and turned it on. The water ran brown, then cleared. He pumped soap from a cracked bottle and scrubbed his hands, his forearms, up to his elbows. He scrubbed until the skin was raw, washing away the feel of Veritas’s throat, the hospital sterility, the ghost of the gun’s grip. He dried them on his jeans and returned to the sofa, sitting beside Aria, his thigh pressing against hers. A point of contact.
“What… what did you do?” Aria asked, her gaze still locked on the baby’s face. “To get him.”
“What was necessary,” Levi said, his voice low.
Her eyes flicked to his. She saw the fresh, purple bruise forming on his knuckles, the grim set of his jaw. She saw the unspoken violence in the lines of him. She didn’t flinch. Instead, a shadow of the woman she’d been—the one who craved his control, who found safety in his capable darkness—passed over her face. “Good.”
The baby stirred then, letting out a faint, reedy cry that was more of a squeak. Aria froze, panic flashing across her features. “What’s wrong? Is he okay?”
Mikasa was there in an instant. “He’s hungry. Or needs changing. Or both.” She held out her hands. “I can—”
“No,” Aria said, the word sharper than intended. She softened, blinking back another wave of tears. “No, I… I need to. Show me.”
Mikasa gave a single, approving nod. Under her direction, with Connie handing items like a surgical nurse, they managed. Aria learned to change a diaper on a being not much larger than her hand. She fumbled with the premie bottle, her hands shaking so badly Mikasa had to guide them. But when the tiny mouth latched onto the nipple, and his frantic, weak sucking began to slow into a rhythmic pull, a different kind of silence fell over the cabin.
Aria watched him eat, her breath held. A single tear rolled off her nose and landed on the blanket. She didn’t wipe it away.
Levi watched her watch him. He saw the terror slowly being overtaken by a fierce, focusing concentration. He saw her memorize the sweep of tiny eyelashes, the shape of a miniature ear. This was a battle she understood. A tangible problem. A thing to hold.
When the bottle was half-empty, the baby fell asleep again, milk-drunk. Aria leaned back against the sofa, exhaustion hitting her like a physical blow. The adrenaline was gone, leaving the raw ache of her surgery and the heavy dredges of sedation. But she didn’t let go.
“I need to call him something,” she murmured, her voice thick with sleep. “I can’t just call him ‘the baby.’ He’s… he’s a person.”
“You have time,” Levi said.
“Do I?” She looked at him, then at the others—Eren pacing by the door, Armin bathed in data-light, Connie repacking supplies, Mikasa silently cleaning. “What happens now? They’ll come. Won’t they?”
Armin swiveled in his chair. “The data I pulled is more valuable than we knew. Veritas wasn’t the end client. He’s a broker. The client list… it’s global. High-net-worth individuals, private corporations with questionable research divisions. The trail doesn’t end with us saving him.” He gestured toward the baby. “It makes us a permanent target.”
Eren stopped pacing. “So we don’t run. We finish it.” He looked at Levi, his green eyes burning. “You put the fear into that suit. But fear isn’t enough. We have to burn the system down.”
“The system is protected by money and power we don’t have,” Armin countered, but there was no defeat in his tone. It was a calculation. “Direct assault is impossible. But an information assault…”
Levi’s gaze was fixed on the fire. “We have the map. We know the players.”
“We need to disappear first,” Jean said from the corner, his arms crossed. “All of us. This cabin is a pause, not a solution. They’ll track the ambulance, the van. We need to split up, vanish, and regroup when we have a real plan.”
A soft ping came from the table. Armin looked down at a secondary phone, one of the burners. He went very still. “Sasha,” he said.
Everyone tensed. Sasha was their outside lifeline, embedded in the normal world.
Armin read the message, his brow furrowing. “She’s en route with supplies. ETA two hours. But she says…” He looked up, his face grave. “She says her restaurant manager was asking weird questions. Showing her pictures on his phone of ‘custom motorcycles.’ Asked if she knew anyone who rode them. Specifically mentioned the brand ‘Acker Customs.’”
Levi’s expression didn’t change, but the air in the room grew colder. Acker Customs was his shop’s name. It was on his social media, which he never used, and on the sign over his garage.
“They’re widening the net,” Mikasa stated flatly. “They’re looking for connections. For weaknesses.”
Aria’s grip on the baby tightened. Her breath hitched, a precursor to the spiral Levi knew too well. He saw it in the flicker of her eyes, the slight tremor starting in her shoulders.
Before he could speak, Eren did. “Let them look.” He walked to the table and picked up a map Connie had unfolded. He tapped a point far to the west. “We scatter. Armin and I head back to Miami, use the port traffic to disappear. Jean, Connie, you take the van north, into Canada. Change plates, dump it, buy something else with cash.”
“And us?” Aria asked, her voice small.
Levi finally looked away from the fire, meeting her gaze. “We go to ground. Somewhere no one would think to look. Somewhere with no connections to anything I’ve ever built.”
“Where’s that?” Connie asked.
Levi was silent for a long moment. He was seeing a different place. Not a cabin, not a city. A barren, windswept coast. A house of glass and cold light. A prison of his own making from before he’d learned how to want things. “I know a place,” was all he said.
Aria studied his face, reading the shadow that passed over it. She didn’t ask for details. She simply nodded, a tiny, resigned dip of her chin. Then she looked back down at her son, her finger tracing the curve of his cheek. “We’ll need a bigger diaper bag,” she whispered, almost to herself. “And… can I have my Stanley cup? The pink one? And my… my stuff from the apartment?”
It was such a normal, Aria question, born of a mind trying to anchor itself to the familiar amidst the chaos. It meant she was planning. It meant she believed there was a future to pack for.
Levi reached over and tucked a strand of her hair behind her ear, his fingers lingering. “We’ll get your stuff,” he promised softly.
The baby sighed in his sleep, a tiny, contented sound.
Outside, the wind picked up, whistling through the pines. The fragile peace inside the cabin felt borrowed, a temporary ceasefire in a war they had just escalated. But for now, there was a bottle of formula, a crackling fire, a sleeping infant, and the unspoken vow that passed between them all in the dim light.
They had what was theirs. The rest of the world, with all its darkness and its hunting dogs, could wait until dawn.
The borrowed peace lasted precisely forty-three minutes.
It bled away with the fading light and the slow, relentless grind of reality. The baby—their baby—slept in a nest of blankets on Aria’s chest, his oxygen hissing a frail counter-rhythm to the fire. Aria watched his every breath, her own synchronized to his, as if she could force air into his lungs by sheer will.
Levi saw the precise moment the willpower fractured. Her breathing hitched, skipping a beat. Her gaze, locked on the tiny ribcage, went glassy and distant.
“He stopped,” she whispered, the words airless. “He stopped, Levi, he’s not—”
He was beside her in an instant, his hand resting lightly over the blanket on the baby’s back. He felt the rapid, birdlike flutter beneath his palm. “He’s breathing. Look at the monitor.”
The portable pulse-oximeter, clipped to a tiny foot, showed a steady, if too-fast, heartbeat and oxygen saturation in the low nineties. The numbers glowed in the dark.
“The numbers are lying,” she insisted, her voice climbing. “I can’t feel it. I can’t—” A full-body tremor ran through her, jostling the infant, who let out a faint squeak of protest.
“Aria.” Levi’s voice was a low command, a wire pulled taut. “Look at me.”
Her eyes, wild and swimming with terror, snapped to his. The PTSD was a live wire, sparking through the sedation’s remains.
“Your hands are cold. You’re in shock. You can’t feel him breathing because your nerves are screaming about twenty other things.” He kept his gaze locked on hers, a lifeline. “The machine is not lying. I am not lying. Breathe. Now. In for four.”
He counted it out, fierce and quiet. She followed, the obedience a desperate anchor. On the exhale, a sob broke loose.
“I can’t do this,” she choked out. “I’m broken. He needs machines and… and I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m just a thing they filled with drugs and questions.”
From his post at the table, Eren spoke without turning, his voice uncharacteristically flat. “You’re here. That’s the part that matters.”
Mikasa added a log to the fire. “The skills are acquired. The presence is mandatory. You have the latter.”
Armin’s typing paused. “Sasha’s five minutes out. She’s reporting a clear tail. No visual surveillance on her route.”
The confirmation should have helped. Instead, Aria’s anxiety mutated, twisting inward. Her free hand plucked at the itchy hospital gown. “I need my own clothes. I feel like… a patient. I need to not be a patient anymore.”
Levi nodded. “Sasha has your bag.” He didn’t add that her apartment was certainly being watched. The bag in Sasha’s car was all that remained of Aria’s pink, glittering world.
Headlights speared through the cabin’s front window, painting frantic arcs across the wall. Everyone moved. Eren melted into the shadows by the door, a knife in hand. Jean and Connie flanked the windows. Levi stayed seated, a solid barrier between Aria and the entrance.
The engine died. Two doors thumped closed. A familiar, cheerful voice cut through the tension. “I brought pie! And also, like, medical supplies and formula, but the pie is key!”
Sasha Braus bounded up the porch steps, a massive insulated catering bag in one hand and a pink sequined backpack in the other. Behind her, moving with more caution, was a tall, sharp-eyed man with his hands conspicuously in the pockets of his jacket.
Jean had the door open before she could knock, yanking her inside. Connie grabbed the man by the shoulder, shoving him in after.
“Who’s this?” Levi’s question was a blade.
“This is my Uber driver, Kofi!” Sasha announced, dropping her bags. “He’s cool. I paid him extra. Also, he’s former Army logistics and he asked zero questions about why I needed to go to a creepy cabin with a trunk full of baby stuff and a giant pink backpack.”
The man, Kofi, gave a tight, professional nod, scanning the room and its occupants in one sweeping assessment. His gaze lingered on Levi, then on the bundle on Aria’s chest. “Logistics confirmed. No further engagement required.” He started backing toward the door.
“Wait,” Armin said, swiveling in his chair. “You have a car. A registered, clean vehicle.”
Kofi stopped, suspicion hardening his features. “I have a business. This is not part of it.”
“We need to fragment,” Armin continued, his mind visibly racing ahead. “The van is hot. The Challenger is hot. We need a cold car for a primary transport.” He looked at Levi. “The place you know. It needs a discreet approach.”
Levi understood. He looked at Kofi. “Name your price. For the car, and your silence.”
Kofi’s eyes narrowed. “The silence is free. I see a postpartum mom, a preemie, and a group of people who look like they’ve been fighting a war. I’ve seen enough of those.” He tossed his keys to Jean, who caught them neatly. “It’s a silver Hyundai Sonata. Registration in the glove box. Leave it at the Columbus airport long-term lot. Key under the mat.”
He turned to leave, then glanced back at Sasha. “The pie is strawberry rhubarb. Best eaten warm.” And then he was gone, absorbed into the night.
Silence reclaimed the cabin for a beat. Then chaos, of a more domestic sort, erupted.
Sasha descended upon them, unpacking the catering bag with the fervor of a battlefield medic. She produced containers of soup, sandwiches, the promised pie, and a staggering array of stolen medical supplies. Then, with a flourish, she handed Aria the pink backpack.
Aria unzipped it with trembling fingers. Inside, folded with haphazard care, were her softest leggings, an oversized sweatshirt, clean underwear. Her favorite Stanley cup, full of ice water, nestled in the side pocket. Her toiletries bag. And at the bottom, in a small silken pouch, the personal items she’d asked Levi for weeks ago—a delicate rose gold vibrator and a small, pink silicone butt plug.
She stared at them, then at Levi, a faint, ghost of her old smirk touching her lips. “You packed my happy toys.”
He didn’t blush. He just gave a slight, acknowledging tilt of his head. “You asked for your stuff.”
The normalcy of the exchange, the sheer absurdity of it in this context, was a pressure valve. Aria hugged the backpack, burying her face in the soft fabric of her sweatshirt. It smelled like her apartment. Like her lavender laundry detergent. Like a life.
“Okay,” she breathed, the word muffled. “Okay.”
The plan coalesced with brutal speed as they ate. Sasha would take the van with Jean and Connie, heading west to create a decoy electronic trail. Armin and Eren would take the Challenger south, a separate, faster distraction. Levi, Aria, and the baby would take Kofi’s Sonata north, toward the place Levi refused to name.
Mikasa would go with them. This was non-negotiable.
They left in staggered intervals. The goodbyes were abrupt, shoulders clapped, nods exchanged. There were no promises of safety. They all knew better.
Eren paused at the Challenger’s driver’s side door, his eyes finding Levi’s across the dark clearing. “Don’t get comfortable,” he said, the old fire smoldering in his gaze.
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Levi replied.
Then they were gone, the taillights swallowed by the trees, leaving Levi, Mikasa, and Aria alone with the sleeping baby in the sterile quiet of a stranger’s sedan.
Aria was in the back, the baby in a car seat they’d rigged with towels and prayers. She had changed into her own clothes. The simple act seemed to rebuild her, piece by piece. She took a sip from her Stanley cup, the straw clicking softly.
“So,” she said, her voice tentative in the dark. “This place. Does it have, like, Wi-Fi?”
“No,” Levi said, putting the car in drive.
“Running water?”
“Maybe.”
“Central heating?”
“Doubtful.”
She was quiet for a mile, the headlights cutting a lonely path. Then she spoke again, her voice small but clear. “Is it the place from before? The one with the glass and the cold light?”
Levi’s hands tightened on the wheel. He’d only ever described it once, in the dark, after a nightmare. “Yes.”
He expected fear. Hesitation. Instead, he saw her reflection in the rearview mirror, a slow, determined settling in her features. She looked down at the baby, then out at the rushing dark.
“Good,” she said, finally. “They’ll never look for us in your ghosts.”