Part 2: A sudden painful tightness bloomed beneath her nursing bra. Warmth spread through the cotton pads she still wore because some habits outlived the reasons for them. Her milk let down hard and fast, answering the babies’ cries as if grief had not rearranged the entire world six months ago.

Six months since Grace.

Six months since Naomi had woken before dawn in her little Detroit apartment and realized the room was too quiet.

Not peaceful. Not sleeping-baby quiet.

Wrong quiet.

She could still feel the cold of Grace’s cheek under her fingers, still hear herself making a sound no human being should make, still see the paramedics moving quickly and then slowly, which was how nurses knew the truth before anyone said it aloud.

Sudden infant death syndrome, the medical examiner had said.

As if a name could hold the weight of a universe collapsing.

Naomi was an emergency room nurse. She had held pressure on gunshot wounds. She had counted compressions through sweat and sirens. She had told mothers to wait outside trauma bays and fathers to sit down before their knees gave out. She knew the body. She knew systems. She knew the fragile line between alive and gone.

But she had not saved Grace.

She had not even known Grace needed saving.

Now three babies were crying with the sharp, desperate sound Naomi had heard only a few times in the ER, mostly when neglect and poverty and exhaustion had cornered a child into danger. It was the sound of hunger turning into panic. The sound of reserves running out.

A flight attendant stopped beside Naomi’s seat. Her professional smile had begun to crack.

“Ma’am, are you all right?”

Naomi opened her eyes. She was thirty-two years old, with tired brown eyes, deep brown skin, and natural curls pinned loosely at the back of her head. She wore jeans, old sneakers, and the denim jacket Grace had once drooled on. She was not polished. She was not rich. She had no business walking toward a private cabin guarded by men who looked like they carried silence for a living.

But she was a nurse.

And those babies were in trouble.

“They’re starving,” Naomi said.

The attendant blinked. “I’m sorry?”

“Those babies. They’re not crying because they’re fussy. They’re crying because they’re hungry, and one of them is getting weak.” Naomi unbuckled her seat belt.

The attendant’s eyes flicked nervously toward the partition. “The gentleman in that cabin requested privacy.”

“Then he can request privacy in a pediatric ICU.”

“Ma’am—”

Naomi stood. “I need you to open that door.”

“I can’t just—”

“If you don’t, and one of those babies stops breathing, you’ll remember this conversation for the rest of your life.” Naomi’s voice did not rise. It did not need to. ER nurses learned how to make urgency sound like fact. “Open the door.”

The attendant swallowed.

The crying shifted again. One voice dropped out, not because the baby had been soothed, but because he was too tired to keep fighting.

Naomi moved.

The door slid open before the attendant could decide, and two men inside turned sharply. One of them reached beneath his jacket.

“Hands where I can see them,” Roman said.

His voice was low and cold enough to quiet the air.

Naomi stopped just inside the compartment. It took her only a second to see the details. The expensive bottles. The untouched formula. The father with a dying man’s panic behind a criminal’s eyes. The two screaming infants in the stroller. The baby in his arms, pale and frighteningly quiet.

She ignored the armed men.

She looked straight at Roman.

“Your sons need milk.”

His expression hardened. “Get out.”

“No.”

Victor stepped forward. “Lady, you need to leave.”

Naomi shot him a look. “I’m an ER nurse. If you touch me before I assess that child, you’d better hope God is less tired of foolish men than I am.”

For one stunned second, even the babies’ cries seemed to hesitate.

Roman stared at her as if trying to decide whether she was brave, insane, or both.

“What do you want?” he asked.

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