“My baby is gone, but my body still thinks she’s alive.” The words barely left my mouth as I pressed a cold washcloth against my chest inside a restroom at St.

“My baby is gone, but my body still thinks she’s alive.”

The words barely left my mouth as I pressed a cold washcloth against my chest inside a restroom at St. Catherine Medical Center in Manhattan.

Milk soaked through my nightgown again.

Three weeks earlier, I had held my daughter Grace in my arms after doctors told me there was nothing more they could do. She had been born silent. I had begged them to try again, holding her against my skin, weeping: “Warm her. Please. She’s cold because you took her away from me.”

But Grace never opened her eyes.

I sang the lullaby I had practiced throughout my pregnancy while holding her tiny body against mine. Then they took her away. My body never understood. It kept preparing milk, kept waking me at night, kept insisting somewhere there was a hungry baby waiting.

Standing in that hospital restroom, I heard crying through the wall.

Not one infant. Two. The sounds were weak, high-pitched, and exhausted.

I stepped into the hallway and followed the sound toward a guarded neonatal suite. Two men in sharp black suits stood outside the doors, hands clasped, eyes scanning the corridor. A nurse emerged carrying an untouched bottle.

“They refused again,” she whispered to a colleague.

That was when Nurse Margaret Hale saw me. She had been there the night Grace died. Her eyes dropped toward the damp fabric visible beneath my open coat.

“Emma,” she said carefully, stepping away from the guards. “You’re still producing milk?”

I looked away, swallowing the sharp lump in my throat. “Yes.”

Margaret glanced toward the guarded room, her face tight with worry. “The twins lost their mother during delivery. They nursed from her once, and since then they’ve rejected everything—formula, donor milk, bottles. They’re premature, and they’re getting weaker by the hour.”

My heart tightened. The weak, frantic crying echoed through the cracked door. I thought about Grace’s grave beneath the cold ground in Queens. Then I thought about the milk my body refused to stop making.

“Can I try?” I asked.

Margaret stared at me. “Are you sure?”

“No,” I admitted softly. “But let me try anyway.”

Only after the guards checked my bag and opened the heavy wooden door did I learn who the babies belonged to.

Gabriel Moretti.

Thirty-nine. Billionaire chairman of Moretti Holdings. And, according to every whispered story in New York, a man powerful enough to make people disappear.

He stood beside two glass bassinets, looking nothing like the cold titan the media portrayed. He looked like a father coming completely undone. His dark hair was disheveled, his suit jacket hung over a chair, and his eyes were bloodshot with exhaustion and grief. His wife, Isabella, had died minutes after giving birth to Anthony and Lucia. The twins were only three weeks old, and they were fading fast.

Gabriel’s sharp gaze snapped from the bassinets to Margaret, then to me. “Who is she?”

“A mother,” Margaret said quietly.

I almost corrected her. I almost said I used to be a mother.

Then tiny Lucia whimpered, her little fists flailing against her blanket. Something inside me broke wide open. I washed my hands, walked past the silent billionaire, and took the tiny girl into my arms.

For one agonizing second, she turned her head away, crying weakly. Then I held her against my chest and began singing the low, soft lullaby I had sung to Grace.

Lucia went quiet. Her little mouth found my breast, and she began to nurse eagerly.

The entire room went dead silent.

Beside us, Anthony began crying louder, as if sensing his sister’s relief. Gabriel stared at his daughter drinking as though he were witnessing a divine miracle. He took a ragged breath, dropping his face into his hands for a fraction of a second before looking up again.

Then his security chief stepped into the room, holding a tablet, and whispered something urgent into Gabriel’s ear.

Gabriel’s expression changed in an instant. The exhaustion vanished, replaced by an terrifying, lethal rage. He stared at the silver bottle of donor milk sitting on the nightstand, then at the hospital door, and finally at the twins.