Alle Kapitel von The Contract Omega( MXM Romance): Kapitel 121 – Kapitel 130

Caelen POVAdrian met his brothers officially on the car ride home.He stared at them from his car seat with the particular intensity of a two-year-old trying to understand why there were suddenly two babies occupying space that had previously been his alone. He had visited the hospital. He had touched James's foot and said uh oh. But the hospital was a place things happened temporarily. Home was different. Home was permanent."Babies," he announced, reaching toward James's car seat. "My babies!""Your brothers," I said from the front seat, too exhausted to turn around properly. "James and Lucas. They live with us now.""Live here? Forever?""Forever."He considered this with the gravity it deserved."Okay," he said finally. "My babies forever."We had been home twenty minutes when the twins needed feeding simultaneously. James was already screaming. Lucas was doing the particular fussing that meant he was working up to screaming and would arrive there shortly. I settled on the couch

Caelen—POV The return to full-time work happened gradually, the way the right things did. Two days a week working from home first. Then three days in the office. Then, finally, the full schedule I had held before the twins arrived, and the world reorganized itself around two simultaneous, new people. Adrian was three and a half. He went to preschool three mornings a week, and came home with paintings and strong opinions about what constituted an acceptable lunch. The twins had just turned one. They were walking, unsteadily, determinedly, falling and getting up with the uncomplicated confidence of those who hadn't yet learned to be embarrassed by falling. They babbled at each other in a language that appeared to mean something to them and nothing to anyone else. "Are you sure about this?" Aldric asked the night before my official return. We were folding laundry. There was always laundry. Three children generated laundry in quantities that defied the physics of how small they wer

Caelen POVThe school supply shopping trip happened on a Saturday in late August.All five of us in the SUV we had bought specifically because three car seats and the logistics of going anywhere required it. Adrian was in his booster with the supply list his kindergarten teacher had mailed, reading it aloud with the careful pronunciation of a five-year-old still mastering longer words."Twelve crayons." He tracked each word with one finger. "One backpack. Two fold-ers." He looked up. "What's a folder, Papa?""A special holder for papers. We'll find you the coolest ones." I glanced back at him. This child. This specific child who had arrived eight weeks early at four pounds two ounces with a breathing tube and a NICU incubator, is now going to actual school. "What color backpack do you want?""Dinosaurs! And space! And trucks!""Pick one theme. We can't find all three in the same backpack."He considered this with the gravity it deserved. "Dinosaurs. Because dinosaurs are the most cool

Caelen POVFive years.Half a decade since I had signed a contract to marry a stranger for money to save my dying mother. Three years since we had chosen each other for real, properly, in front of a fireplace with the contract burning to ash and a ring that said Always choose you. Three beautiful, chaotic boys who had transformed us from reluctant partners into something neither of us had known how to want until we had it."You're sure you can handle all three?" I asked Eleanor for the fifth time, watching her arrange snacks with the calm efficiency of someone who had been managing this household's logistics for years."Caelen, I raised you alone. I can manage three boys with Sebastian and Mira as backup." She steered me toward the door with the gentle authority she had always had. "Go. Have an actual anniversary. Be adults who remember they're married to each other, not just parents surviving together.""But what if Lucas has one of his nightmares? Or James refuses to eat vegetables?

Caelen POVThe house had been loud in the way it had been for years now. Not the sharp, alarming noise of a newborn or the exhausted hum of early toddlerhood, but a particular kind of loudness belonging to three boys who had grown into themselves, into their opinions, humor, and unique ways of moving through a room. Adrian, at nine, carried the focused intensity of someone who had already decided what mattered and pursued it with unwavering determination. The twins, at seven, engaged in a continuous bilateral conversation, James methodical and precise, Lucas perpetually in motion. Together, they exuded a gravity all their own.The house held all of this as it always had, still featuring the wooden letters on Adrian’s wall and the star mobile long since stored away but not discarded. The mobile sat in the attic in a box labeled "Adrian, First Year," one of four boxes now, one for each child, with a special box holding the twins’ first months together because there had been no other way