Semua Bab Pregnant for the ruthless billionaire vampire: Bab 41 - Bab 50

ELENA'S POV She didn't know what to do next. That was the thing I couldn't stop looking at. Her face. Morgana standing in front of me with the dead stone in her hand and nothing behind her eyes. Three seconds of nothing. Then her expression closed back up like a wound sealing over and she took one step back from me. "Do you think this changes anything?" she said. "I think it changes everything," I said. She looked at the stone in her hand one more time. Then she set it down on the table between us, carefully, like it was still something worth handling with care. Old habit, maybe. She had been carrying that thing for a long time. "You're five months pregnant," she said. "Undertrained. Surrounded by people who each want something from you." She looked at me. "And you think burning out one artifact makes you safe." "I think it makes you less safe," I said. "That's enough for tonight." Something moved through her face. Gone before I could name it. Then she raised her

ELENA'S POV Seraphine didn't make me wait. She came through the safe house door while I was still pulling off my jacket and she set her phone on the table between us and sat down and looked at me with those gold eyes that had never once in all the time I'd known her softened a difficult thing before delivering it. "The life bond," she said. "Tell me what you already understand about it." "It formed when I healed Lucian at the estate," I said. "Our lives are linked. If one of us dies the other dies." I looked at her. "And Konstantin said it's incomplete." “I know about your lives being linked. I was there, remember?” “Yeah. That's right.” I said, running my fingers through my hair. "And about the bond, It is truly incomplete," she said. "What formed that night was real and permanent. But a life bond created in an emergency is structurally different from one created through intention." She paused. "Think of it like a door built in a hurry. It hangs. It holds. But the fra

ELENA'S POV The pain didn't stop. That was the first thing I understood. It wasn't a spike or a warning or my body reacting to the stress of the broadcast. It built and built and kept building, low and spreading and rhythmic in a way that my body recognized before my mind caught up to what the rhythm meant. Nara had me on the floor before I finished processing it. Not the floor by choice. My legs had made the decision and the rest of me had followed and Nara was there with her hands already moving, her face doing the controlled thing that meant she was reading something serious and choosing how fast to deliver it. "When did it start?" she said. "It just started," I said. "The pain before this. Earlier. How long has it been building?" I thought about the last hour. About Konstantin walking out the door and the broadcast starting and standing in the center of the room watching the cult war begin on every screen simultaneously. About the dull pressure I had been managing dow

ELENA'S POV Two months felt like two years. That was the thing about living inside a war with a countdown running, time stopped moving the way it normally moved and started moving the way pressure moved instead. Heavy. Uneven. Some days collapsed into nothing and some days lasted longer than they had any right to. I was seven months along. The baby made sure I never forgot it. She had opinions about everything now. Position. Pressure. The specific angle of the pillow Lucian kept adjusting at three in the morning because he had decided, somewhere in the last month, that adjusting my pillow was something he was going to do regardless of whether I asked him to. She communicated her opinions with her feet, which she deployed with the focused conviction of someone who had decided that everyone else's comfort was secondary to her own. I know, I whispered to her silently, pressing my palm flat against the movement. I know. She pushed harder. I gave up on sleep and got up. Th

ELENA'S POV The ground shook again and this time it didn't stop. A sustained tremor moving through the earth from the center of the clearing outward, the kind that came from something massive shifting in a space that had held it still for a very long time. The gold light rising from the cracked ground intensified with every passing second, brighter and more urgent, the binding straining against the ritual pressure being applied to it from above. Forty cult members in their concentric circles. Konstantin at the center with his arms raised and his back to us and the complete focused certainty of a man who had been moving toward this moment his entire existence and had finally arrived at it. "We move now," Seraphine said. "Before the outer ring locks." Ryker was already signaling his wolves. They separated into three units without a word, the practiced split of people who had drilled this deployment enough times that executing it in the dark on unfamiliar ground required no