All Chapters of Pregnant for the ruthless billionaire vampire: Chapter 81 - Chapter 90

ELENA'S POVThe combat ring was older than the sanctuary around it.Esmeralda's coven had cleared a section of the eastern field for it, marking the boundary with stones that had been pulled from somewhere deeper in the mountain, each one carved with symbols that predated the supernatural world's written history. Caros had insisted on the old form. No modern conveniences. No magical assistance beyond what each combatant carried in their own blood.I stood at one end of it with the morning cold against my skin and tried to remember what full strength used to feel like."You're favoring your left side," Lucian said.He stood beside the stones with his arms crossed, watching me move through the warm-up drills Seraphine had built for me, and his silver eyes were doing the thing they did when he was cataloguing every flaw before an opponent could exploit it."I'm aware," I said."Then fix it.""I'm working on it.""Work faster," he said. "You have forty minutes."I shifted my stance and t

ELENA'S POVDavid didn't walk into a room.He arrived in it, the way his father arrived in rooms, with that particular quality of presence that announced itself before the body did. Fourteen months old, and already carrying the quiet authority of someone far older.Ryker's wolves had that, the Alpha instinct that read spaces and people before committing to either. David had inherited it along with his mother's ruby eyes and something else entirely that neither of them could fully account for yet.He sat in the center of Esmeralda's main room with a wooden block in each hand and Aurora cross-legged in front of him, and the two of them were engaged in a conversation that had no words in it.David would look at one of the lamps.Aurora would look at the same lamp.The lamp would flicker."Again," Aurora said.He looked at it again. The lamp brightened by a degree and then dimmed and then returned to normal, and David's expression throughout all of it was the particular concentrated focus

ELENA'S POVJayden didn't tell us about the second incident. We found out from James.He'd been picking Jayden up from school on Tuesdays, It had become their thing. Research on the drive home. Questions about science. Questions about the world. Questions Jayden never seemed comfortable asking anyone else.James had said yes. Jayden had simply nodded and said, "Oh. That's interesting." The Tuesday pickups had existed ever since without either of them ever admitting that Jayden had planned it that way from the beginning.James called me on a Wednesday."He's alright," he said first. Always first. He had learned that when you called the mother of a child who had already been beaten up once, you led with that."What happened?" I said."The same boys from last year. They brought two others with them this time.” A pause. "He didn't fight back this time. He just, stood there and let it happen."I was already halfway to the door before he'd finished speaking."Elena." James's voice stopped m

ELENA'S POVFive years passed between the witch coven's first visit and their second.Five years saw James studying Jayden's null-field with the focused patience of someone who understood that the most significant discoveries didn't arrive on demand. Jayden learned to control the field, imperfectly, inconsistently, but with improving precision, under Aurora's guidance and through his own stubborn daily practice. Meanwhile, the supernatural world adjusted to the fact that the Nightshade heir's human son was apparently something the ancient texts had been expecting all along.Jayden turned fifteen on a Tuesday.He was taller than Lucian now, which Lucian had received with the particular expression of a man who found the development both expected and mildly offensive. He had Lucian's precise economy of movement and my tendency to say exactly what he meant at inconvenient moments and something of his own that had been emerging more clearly every year, a dry wit, a deep patience with compl

ELENA'S POVThe champion's name was Brennan.He was forty-three years trained, which the eldest announced before the trial began in the specific tone of someone establishing context rather than intimidating, though the effect was the same. He was tall, broadly built, with the particular settled quality of someone who had spent decades becoming very good at one specific thing and knew it.He looked at Jayden the way the coven had looked at Jayden since the beginning, with the expectation of a conclusion already reached.Jayden looked at Brennan the way he looked at everything he was trying to understand before committing to a position. Careful. Quiet. Piecing the picture together.We stood at the boundary of the field that Esmeralda's coven had prepared, or the same eastern field where Jayden had been training for years, now marked with coven boundary stones that carried active frequency within them, the kind that would make any null-field use visible and measurable.Lucian was beside