เข้าสู่ระบบCHAPTER 60Calla’s POVThe silence after my refusal was a living thing. It filled the sunlit penthouse, thick and charged with everything we hadn’t said. The weight of the ring on his finger felt like it was on mine, a secret anchor threatening to drag us both under.Ronan didn’t argue. He didn’t rage. He just… absorbed my words. The storm in his eyes receded, not into calm, but into a deep, unsettling focus. He rose from his knee, his movements fluid and controlled, and helped me to the plush sofa, tucking a blanket around my legs with a tenderness that contradicted the intensity of his gaze.“Rest,” was all he said, before retreating to his study.For hours, I drifted in the quiet. The fear was a dull background hum—fear of the enemies he was unleashing upon, fear for the tiny life inside me, fear that I’d wounded him in a way that couldn’t be mended. Dr. Vance’s warning—your body is the battlefield—echoed in my head. I felt like a trespasser in my own skin, a fragile vessel on a st
CHAPTER 59Ronan’s POVMy study was no longer a room; it was the command nexus of a war. The blue light from the laptop screens felt surgical, illuminating the evidence I was about to use as a scalpel to dissect an empire. Beck stood beside me, a solid, silent presence, but the final decisions, the weight of this, were mine alone.“The financials are the hammer,” Beck said, pointing at the transaction chains on one screen. “But the media narrative is the anvil. We drop it all at once—the payment to Jade, the shell corporation trail, the poison report—and we flatten them.”I didn’t look away from the screen. “No.” The word came out flat, final. “Flattening is too quick. I don’t want them flattened. I want them excavated. I want the world to see the rot in their foundations, layer by filthy layer.”My finger tapped a key, pulling up a different file. It wasn’t about money. It was about blood. A blueprint of my own mansion filled the screen, a specific wing highlighted in cold red. “The
CHAPTER 58Calla’s POVThe hospital room became my world. A world of beeping monitors, hushed voices, and the relentless, terrifying focus on the tiny, flickering heartbeat on the ultrasound screen. They’d moved me to a high-risk maternity ward, a gilded cage with better security and softer blankets. Dr. Vance was a calm, commanding presence, but her updates were always hedged with warnings. Stable, but fragile. Rest is crucial. Absolutely no stress.A joke. The stress was a living thing in the room with us, wearing Ronan’s face.He was everywhere. He’d converted the adjoining family suite into a command post. His quiet conversations with Beck and Finn were a constant murmur through the wall. He was a king guarding his most vulnerable treasure, and his kingdom was on high alert.He was meticulous in his care. He ensured my meals were perfect, adjusted the lighting, brought me stacks of mindless novels. But his touch, when he helped me to the bathroom or adjusted my pillows, was carefu
CHAPTER 57Ronan’s POVThe hospital corridor was a tunnel of sterile white and humming silence. I leaned against the wall outside her room, the cold plaster doing nothing to douse the firestorm in my head.My child.The words were a foreign, devastating country. For a few brief, horrifying minutes in the kitchen, I’d thought I was losing her. The blood, her pain—it had been a preview of a hell I couldn’t survive. Then Dr. Vance’s words had redefined the nightmare. It wasn’t just Calla at risk.Our child.A life I hadn’t even known existed, conceived in the fragile peace we’d built between battles, now hanging by a thread in a war I had dragged it into.And she had known. She had hidden it. She had lied with such convincing, fragile panic over those tests.The fury was a white-hot ingot in my chest. It was clean, righteous, directed at her deception. It was easier than the other, more complicated terror.But as I stood in the silent hall, the icy water of logic began to drip onto that
CHAPTER 56Calla’s POVThe pressure in the house was a physical weight, pressing down on every surface, every breath. Elira’s debriefing in the bunker had stretched for hours. The names, the accounts, the shadowy networks she sketched out for Finn were like tendrils of a dark, deep-rooted weed. We were no longer just cutting off the heads; we were trying to dig out the roots, and the soil was full of poison.Jade found me in the library, where I’d fled to escape the oppressive air of the command center. I was staring at a shelf of leather-bound books, seeing nothing.“Hey,” she said softly, coming to stand beside me. She looked exhausted, dark circles under her eyes. “This is… a lot.”“That’s one word for it,” I murmured.“You look like you’re about to vibrate out of your skin.” She placed a gentle hand on my shoulder. “Come on. You need to come down from the ledge. Just for a minute. Let’s have a drink.”She said it like a lifeline, a moment of normal sisterhood in the insanity. The
CHAPTER 55Calla’s POVElira’s name in the quiet room was a detonation.The shock of the failed op, the guilt over Wraith, the terrifying near-confession I’d almost uttered—all of it was blasted aside by a white-hot nova of rage.Ronan’s expression hardened into something lethal. He touched his earpiece. “Is she alone?”“Appears to be,” Beck’s voice was tinny through the comms. “No visible escort. She looks… disheveled.”“Let her in,” Ronan said, his voice devoid of all emotion. “Escort her to the drawing room. Search her. Then wait outside.”He looked at me. “You don’t have to see her.”“Are you kidding?” The words came out sharp, edged with a fury that felt good, felt clean after the sickening helplessness of the bunker. “After what she just cost us? I want to look her in the eye.”He didn’t argue. He just gave a curt nod, a general readying his soldier for battle. Together, we walked down the hall, not touching, but united by a new, cold purpose.Elira stood in the center of the fo







