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CHAPTER 17: THIRTY-ONE

Author: Zieey
last update publish date: 2026-04-28 20:34:37

I opened the folder. Eight pages of clean, clinical surveillance. My address, my office, the Tuesday coffee shop, Isla’s school schedule, her after-school activities, even which door she used every morning. All of it written down like it was nothing.

Victor had read every word and done nothing. I turned the page and my stomach dropped. There was Isla at thirteen, standing just outside the school gates, bag slung over one shoulder. She was looking up at something off-camera, her grey eyes wide a
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  • PREGNANT BY THE CEO   CHAPTER 69- I KNOW

    Sixteen years of everything, and it came down to a sixteen-year-old girl deciding who she was in two words. I had never been more proud of her.Saturday's dinner was exactly what he said it would be.A restaurant I had never been to — his choice.It was good. Warm and unhurried, somewhere that felt chosen rather than convenient. He wore a jacket. He stood when I arrived.He always did that.I had stopped pretending I didn't notice.We talked for three hours straight, and for the first time in longer than I could track, none of it was about the year. Not Victor, not Diana, not legal proceedings or the accumulated wreckage of everything that had come before. We talked about his plans for the company now that it was genuinely his. About a book I had read and what I thought of the ending. About a film argument Isla had apparently been conducting with him by text for four days and showed no intention of dropping."She's winning," I said."Not yet." He said it with particular confidence. "

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    I drove home and found Sebastian at my kitchen table helping Isla with something and I thought: yes. That's exactly what it is.He was genuinely confused by the textbook. Isla was explaining something for the second time with the patient precision she reserved for things she thought deserved real effort, and he was frowning at the page like it had personally offended him."You're doing the second step before the first," she said."Show me again," he said.She showed him. He got it wrong again. She stared at him."You're doing that on purpose.""I absolutely am not." Pure innocence. Completely false."Sebastian.""It's a genuinely difficult problem.""It's not, though.""For some of us," he said — and she laughed. Fast, unguarded and real, the kind that escaped before she could decide whether to let it, the kind I had spent sixteen years being the only person who could reliably produce.I stayed in the doorway with my coat still on and let the moment be what it was.Sixteen years witho

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  • PREGNANT BY THE CEO   CHAPTER 66- CHOOSING

    He was staying, and he was building, and hoping I’d want to be around him, and I sat there in the room I built from nothing, thinking that after everything we’d been through, we were finally speaking the same language.I had I’m around. Always. Nothing else. Not because I was pulling back—I was past that, or at least I was trying like hell to be—but because it was nearly midnight, I just ran a gala that lost its catering four hours before the doors opened, and I was sitting there in an emptying venue on nothing but adrenaline, exhaustion, and the heavy, bone-deep weight of a day that had asked for everything I had left to give. Something that big didn’t deserve a decision thrown together in a room like this at an hour like this.He heard it. I could see it land in him, quiet and careful, the way he let it settle without trying to grab for more than the moment was ready to offer. His shoulders eased just a fraction, like some tight thing inside him had finally been given permission t

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    Sebastian moved across the room toward me with clear purpose, like a man who had already decided exactly whose side he was on and was ready to stand there no matter what happened next.He reached me without any rush. That was how Sebastian always moved through a space—he never performed urgency or drama. He walked with the steady confidence of someone who knew where he wanted to be, and the room seemed to shift around him instead of the other way around. When he stopped beside me at the edge of the gala, he first looked over at Victor for a long moment, then turned his eyes to me."Are you alright?" he asked, his voice low and genuine."Yes," I said, and this time I truly meant it. Not the careful, managed answer I usually gave, but the real one. I was standing in a room I built from nothing, and Victor Hale was there on the edge of it, looking smaller and more diminished than I had ever seen him before. He tried to stop all of this from happening, but here it was—more complete an

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    Someone tried to pull my catering four hours before my biggest event. I had a contact list, an emergency plan, and zero intention of letting it break me."Priya," I said, voice tight. "Phone out."She already had it in her hand.I called my secondary catering contact—a smaller firm I worked with twice before, sharp on execution. The kind of owner who answered on Saturday mornings because he knew events didn’t wait for Monday. He picked up on the third ring."Ms. Reed.""I have a situation," I said, the words steady but my pulse hammering. "Gala tonight. The primary vendor pulled this morning. Can you cover it?"A short pause. I could almost hear him weighing risk against loyalty."Guest count?" he asked."Two-eighty confirmed. Possibly three hundred.""Menu?""Sending it now. Some items will need adjusting based on what you can source in—" I glanced at my watch, stomach twisting—"three and a half hours."He didn’t deflect. I heard the quiet calculation in the silence, a professional d

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    We had started laughing together again. I noticed it the way you notice a smoke alarm in the middle of the night, sharp and sudden, forcing me to decide whether it was a warning or a signal. My stomach tightened just a fraction. I decided it was both.The easy phone calls were real, and for once I

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    There was a word for the place between revenge and forgiveness. I just wasn’t ready to say it out loud yet. The thought kept circling, quiet and persistent, like something I could almost touch but still wasn’t sure I wanted to hold.I woke up the morning after the deposition and stood at my kitche

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    My sixteen-year-old daughter was going to sit in a building and wait for me while I went to war with the man who had tried to erase us both. I walked into that deposition feeling like I had an army at my back.Marcus picked Isla up at eight-thirty. I heard them in the hallway…his low, steady voice,

  • PREGNANT BY THE CEO   CHAPTER 49- SIXTEEN YEARS

    Victor kept the forgery for a whole sixteen years. The same lie that once shattered my life was being dragged out again, and this time I would have to face it down in public, under lights, with witnesses. The thought sat like a cold stone in my stomach.I called Sebastian that evening. Not because

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