PREGNANT WITH THE ALPHA'S UNWANTED HEIR

"Congratulations, Miss Crest. You're eight weeks along."

I've been saying it to myself the whole drive home. Practicing it like a speech. "Bastien, I'm pregnant." Four words. I even tried different versions. Casual. Nervous. Smiling. I settled on smiling.

I'm still smiling when I push through the lobby doors of Rourke Tower. The security guard at the front desk says good morning and I say it back without stopping because I cannot stand still right now. The elevator feels too slow so I take the stairs, one hand skimming the rail, the other pressed flat against my stomach over my coat.

Eight weeks. There's something in there that is half me and half him and I don't know what to do with how much that means to me.

Third floor landing. I can hear my own heartbeat.

Fourth floor. I'm already thinking about his face. Bastien doesn't do surprised. He does controlled. He does measured. But maybe, just maybe, this will be the one thing that cracks that wall open a little. Maybe he'll reach for me the way he did that one night three months ago when he thought I was asleep and he tucked the blanket around my shoulders and stood there a second too long.

Maybe this is the thing that changes us.

Fifth floor. His office door is open.

I slow down without meaning to.

His voice carries through the gap, low and even, the way it always is when he's talking business. I've heard him close deals in that voice. Fire people in that voice. I know every shade of it by now.

"Have the papers ready by end of day," he says. "The contract expires tonight. I want it clean."

I stop walking.

"Yes. Full settlement transferred to her account. Car arranged for ten." A pause. "No. There's nothing to negotiate. It's done."

The call ends.

The stairwell is quiet except for the sound of my own breathing.

I look down at my hand, still flat against my stomach. The smile is gone. I don't know when it left. My mouth just quietly stopped doing it somewhere between the fourth floor and the fifth and now my face feels like it belongs to someone else.

He's already done it. He didn't wait for tonight. He didn't even wait to see me first.

I stand there for ten seconds. Maybe more. Long enough for my brain to catch up with my body, which already knew, because my chest hurts in a way that has nothing to do with the stairs.

Then I turn around and walk back down.

I don't run. I don't make noise. I walk the way my father taught me to walk through bad news, steady and quiet, like it isn't happening to you. Put your shoulders back. Keep your face still. Feel it later when you're somewhere no one can use it against you.

I make it to the lobby. I sit down in one of the chairs near the window, the ones nobody uses because they face the wall. I set my bag on my lap and I look at my hands.

Eight weeks.

I think about the paper in my coat pocket, the one with the ultrasound printout. I thought about framing it. I actually thought that. I thought about his face when he saw it and whether he'd want to know if it was a boy or a girl and I built this whole small stupid world out of four words I was going to say on the fifth floor landing.

I'm not telling him.

The decision comes fast and clean, the way the real ones always do. Not out of spite. Out of survival. I know what it looks like when a door is closed. I grew up watching my father close them. You don't knock on a closed door and expect anything good.

I'll leave tonight. I'll take what's mine, which isn't much, and I'll figure out the rest somewhere he isn't.

"You look like someone ran over your dog."

I turn my head.

Soren Rourke is standing three feet away with his jacket half on and a coffee cup in each hand, watching me with that easy expression he uses to make people think he isn't paying attention. He is always paying attention.

"I'm fine," I say.

He looks at me for a moment. Then he holds out one of the coffees.

"That's a lie," he says. "But okay."

I take the coffee because my hands need something to do. He drops into the chair beside me, stretching his legs out, and he doesn't ask anything else right away. That's the thing about Soren. He waits. It's the one thing he and his brother have in common, except Bastien uses silence to shut people out and Soren uses it to let them in.

"The contract's done," I say. "He already called his lawyer."

Soren is quiet for a second. "I know."

Something in his tone makes me look at him properly. Not the casual version of him. The real one, the one underneath the easy smile.

"What do you know?" I ask.

He stares at his coffee cup. Turns it once in his hands.

"Six months ago," he says, "Bastien had a meeting with your father. Private. No staff, no record of it anywhere. I only know because I saw Gregor Crest leaving through the side entrance." He pauses. "Bastien came back from that meeting and within a week he started the termination paperwork."

The lobby feels very still suddenly.

"What did my father say to him?" My voice comes out flat and steady and I am grateful for every horrible year of practice that made it that way.

Soren looks at me. "I don't know. But Lena." He stops. Starts again. "Before that meeting, things were different. You know they were."

I know.

I knew three months ago when Bastien stopped leaving the room the moment I walked into it. When he started staying for dinner. When he asked me once, just once, what I was reading, and then actually listened to the answer. I told myself I was imagining it. I told myself not to build anything out of nothing.

But I built it anyway. Like an idiot. I built the whole thing in secret, in the space between who we were supposed to be and who it felt like we were becoming.

And my father walked into that building six months ago and took a sledgehammer to the foundation before I even knew it existed.

I stand up. My legs are steady. I'm proud of that.

"I need some air," I say.

"Lena."

I look back at him.

"Don't leave tonight," Soren says. "Not yet. Find out what he said."

I don't answer. I push through the lobby door and step outside and the cold hits my face and I breathe it in, slow and deliberate.

I press my hand to my stomach again, just for a second.

Then something moves inside me.

Not the baby. Something older. Something I haven't felt since I was ten years old, something my father paid someone to take from me, something that has been silent for thirteen years.

It moves like a current under my skin, silver and electric, and it is gone before I can name it.

But I felt it.