All Chapters of Rejected and Pregnant: The Alpha King’s Forbidden Heir : Chapter 171 - Chapter 180

Already inside the house.The words from the child in Aira’s womb seemed to freeze the corridor in place. The black seam under their feet was still open, the hidden passage in the wall still breathing cold air, and the woman wearing her mother’s face was trembling now as if the truth had struck her harder than anyone else in the room. Aira could barely stand. Kael held her with both arms, his body rigid with fury, his crimson power pulsing around them in fierce protective waves, but even that was not enough to steady the terror rising through her. If the root gate was already inside the house, then nowhere was safe. Not the corridor. Not the chamber below. Not even the walls around them. Her blood felt too hot, then too cold, then hot again as the seal in her chest throbbed like a second heart trying to tear free. “What do you mean, inside the house?” she whispered, and her own voice sounded thin and broken in the dark. The thing in the floor wearing her face smiled with terrible calm

Then open.The words rolled through the hidden corridor like a command and a curse, and Aira felt them strike the seal in her chest with a force so sharp it made her knees buckle. Kael caught her instantly, his arms locking around her as crimson power burst outward in a fierce ring that lit the corridor in blood red light. The woman wearing her mother’s face in the hidden passage did not move. The child in the seam below did not move. Even the thing wearing Aira’s face in the floor held still, as if the whole house had inhaled at once and was waiting to see who would break first. Aira’s breath came in shallow, shaking pulls. The baby inside her had gone frighteningly quiet again, but this silence was not peace. It was listening. It was gathering itself. The black thread around her wrist tightened until it felt like a living vein pulled taut between the floor, the wall, and her own blood.Aira could feel Kael trembling with the effort of holding himself together. His voice, when it cam

Aira could not move.The Kael standing beyond the opened door in the memory was not her Kael, not really. His face was the same, his shoulders were the same, even the slight tilt of his head looked heartbreakingly familiar, but his eyes were black as the root gate, and the sight of them made something inside Aira turn ice cold. Her real Kael was still somewhere outside the memory, still holding her in the corridor, still fighting the house with his crimson power, but the figure in the doorway looked at her as if he had been waiting for her alone. Her mother pressed a bloodied hand against the inside of the door and shook her head in frantic warning. “Do not answer him,” she whispered. “It is wearing what you love.” The child inside Aira’s womb went rigid and then spoke with a trembling certainty that made her stomach clench. Mother, that is the first body.The words hit harder than pain. Aira stared at the dark eyed Kael and tried to understand what the child meant, but the memory aro

The sound of a baby crying rose from beneath the house, thin and wet and impossible, and Aira felt the entire memory shudder around her as if the walls themselves had been cut open. The black ring in her hand burst fully apart, spilling a thread of light that wrapped around her wrist and then vanished into the floor. Her breath caught. The false Kael in front of her did not move, but his smile changed, softening into something almost tender, as if he had been waiting for this exact sound. Her mother slammed her hand harder against the inside of the door and cried out, “Aira, do not look at the second door.” But it was too late. The hallway behind the false Kael was splitting open now, and the shape behind it was no longer just dark. It was a room. A real room. Deep beneath the house. Lit by black marks that pulsed like a heartbeat under skin.Aira staggered forward one step before she could stop herself. The child in her womb went rigid, then answered with a hard pulse that shook thro

The words we are the missing piece shattered the memory like a blade through glass.Aira felt the black hallway break around her in a wave of heat and sound, and suddenly she was no longer only inside the memory. She was half in the corridor with Kael holding her body upright, half in the room behind the second door where the woman with her face stood lifting a baby with twin colored eyes toward the light. Her breath caught so hard it hurt. The child inside her womb answered with a violent pulse, and the seal in her chest split open with a flare of white heat that made her cry out. Kael’s real voice tore through the breaking vision from somewhere close and desperate, and that sound was the only thing keeping her from being pulled apart. He was still there. Still fighting. Still trying to hold her together while the house tore itself open around them.The woman with Aira’s face in the room beyond the second door stepped forward as the memory cracked wider. Her expression was no longer