What the Test Confirmed

Three weeks of feeling like a stranger in his own body, and Liam still hadn't let himself say the word out loud.

He'd blamed the exhaustion on stress. Blamed the nausea on skipped meals and too much coffee on an empty stomach. Blamed the way certain smells turned his stomach on nothing more than bad luck. There was always something to blame that wasn't the truth, and he'd reached for every single one of them.

"You look like death," Zara said, sliding into the seat across from him at the café near his apartment. "Actual, walking death."

"Thank you." Liam pushed his coffee away. Even the smell of it made something in his stomach turn now.

"I'm serious. When's the last time you slept properly?"

"I sleep."

"That's not what I asked."

He didn't answer, and that was answer enough.

Zara studied him for a long moment, her teasing falling away into something more careful. "Liam. When's your heat supposed to start?"

"Any day now, I think." He rubbed at his temple. "Why?"

"Because it's late."

He blinked at her. "What?"

"You track it. You always track it. You told me last month it'd hit around now." She leaned forward, voice dropping. "It hasn't."

Liam opened his mouth to argue and found nothing there.

She was right. He hadn't noticed. He'd been so consumed by the stolen track, by Zara's plans and Jason Blake's name trending across every platform, that he hadn't paid attention to the one thing his body had never once let him ignore.

"That's probably just stress," he said, though it sounded thinner out loud than it had in his head.

Zara's expression didn't change. Neither of them believed it.

***

The hospital waiting room was too bright and too quiet, the kind of quiet that made every thought feel louder than it should.

This is nothing, Liam told himself, hands pressed flat against his knees. Stress does this. It's normal.

The longer he sat there, the harder that got to believe.

"Liam Carter?"

He followed the nurse down a narrow hallway into a small room, and the doctor who came in was efficient, calm, asking questions in the practiced tone of someone who'd asked them a thousand times before.

Symptoms. Duration. Last heat cycle.

Liam answered each one, his voice sounding like it belonged to someone else.

"We'll run a few tests," the doctor said. "It won't take long."

It felt endless anyway.

When the doctor came back, his face gave nothing away, and somehow that was worse than any expression could have been.

"Mr. Carter." He set the folder down. "You're pregnant."

The words landed strangely, like they'd been spoken in a language Liam almost understood but not quite.

"…What?"

"You're pregnant," the doctor repeated, gentler this time. "About five weeks."

Five weeks. The number hit him before the meaning did. Five weeks ago, the bar, the whiskey, the alpha with the steady gaze and the scent that had wrapped around him like something inevitable. The empty pillow. The name he'd never asked for.

"That's not…" Liam's voice cracked. "That's not possible."

"I understand this is a shock." The doctor's tone stayed level. "But the results are clear."

Liam's hands curled into fists in his lap.

He didn't know the father's name. Didn't know how to find him. Didn't know anything except the ghost of a scent that still surfaced sometimes, uninvited.

"Mr. Carter." The doctor's voice dropped, more serious now. "I need to be direct with you about something."

Liam braced himself.

"As an omega, a pregnancy like this carries risks beyond the physical. Your body will need stability from your child's alpha, their presence, their pheromones. Without that, things can become difficult. Heat cycles especially. They may intensify, and no other alpha's pheromones will ease them. Only the father's."

The words settled over him like something cold.

"And if I don't know who that is?" His voice came out barely above a whisper. The doctor's silence answered before he did.

"Then you'll need to prepare yourself," he said quietly, "for a pregnancy that will be significantly harder than most."

***

Liam didn't remember much of the walk home. The city moved around him in a blur of sound and color that felt disconnected from everything happening inside him.

He stopped outside his building, staring up at his own window like it belonged to someone else's life. A hand pressed instinctively against his stomach.

He didn't know this man. Didn't know his name, his family, his life beyond a few unguarded hours in a dim, loud bar, but somehow, a part of that man already existed because of that night.

Liam closed his eyes and breathed, trying to steady the storm building in his chest.

He thought about telling Zara. About the doctor's warning. About heat cycles that would only get worse, with no relief in sight.

Then, quietly, something inside him hardened.

He had survived being overlooked. Survived betrayal. Survived being left without even a name to hold onto. He would survive this too. Alone, if he had to.

He pushed off the wall and walked inside, already building the walls he'd need to carry it by himself.