Lorenzo checks his watch. “The mice have two more hours to go. It’ll take forty-five minutes to drive back to the lab.”

“An hour,” I say. “For me, at least. Remember, I’m not Mario Andretti.”

“So we have an hour.”

I say I can’t, but I do. And this time, I’m not silent. I scream with my body and my voice, nails digging into the bedclothes or into Lorenzo’s skin. I bite and moan and scratch like a feral cat on amphetamines, letting out all the stress and all the fear and all the hate, pouring it from me into him. He takes every last drop of it, then gives some back, pulling my hair, gnawing at my lips and breasts, attacking me with kisses. It’s violent, but it’s still love, a tandem scream from us to the rest of the world, and all of the world’s sins.

Chapter Fifty-three

FIFTY-THREE

We allow ourselves fifteen minutes to clean up and decide what happens next.

“There’s another lab,” I say, letting the shower rain over my skin. The hot water stings when it hits an abrasion. I look down and realize I’m a mess. “Oh Christ.”

“Your face is fine. Perfect, actually,” Lorenzo says, working up a lather in my hair. “And you’re right: there has to be another lab. But we won’t get inside it.”

“We have to.”

He rinses off and leaves me to deal with the rat’s nest my hair has become. Two minutes later, he’s back in the cramped bathroom, leaning one hip on the sink while he talks. “Listen to me, Gianna. Even if we get into their other lab, which we won’t, what then? Arson? We’d be caught. Steal their supplies? Sure, and if we weren’t caught by those security creeps with an armful of vials on our way out the door—which, by the way, we would be—then what happens? It’s the government, honey. It’s a machine. They’ll only start again. By next year, you and Lin will be picking fish guts out of your nails.” Lorenzo pauses, then says, “If you stay.”

I consider this. He’s right. “So we do nothing?” I step out of the shower and start toweling. “Nothing at all?”

“No. We do something. We get the fuck out of here.”

“I have kids, Enzo. Four of them. Even if I could leave Patrick—”

He looks me up and down, pausing at the swell of my belly. “Well. I have one, too. Do I get a say?”

“You could take her—it, him, whatever it is. You could take her away.” Even as I speak the words, I know it’s impossible. By the time this baby’s come to term, who knows what new enforcements will be in place?

“We both know that can’t happen,” he says, sterner now, decisive. “It’s now or never, Gianna.”