All Chapters of PREGNANT WITH THE ALPHA'S UNWANTED HEIR : Chapter 51 - Chapter 60

74 Chapters

The statement

"Read it back to me," Bastien says.It is past midnight. The library lamp is the only light. I have been writing for three hours and he has been in the chair across from me for all of them, not reading, not on his phone, just present in the way I asked for and he provided without requiring acknowledgement.I pick up the pages.My name is Lena Crest and I am going to tell you what actually happened, starting with a staircase and a signed piece of paper and a morning I have been describing to myself in the wrong order ever since.I read the whole thing. Six pages. My voice stays even the entire way through, which surprises me slightly, because the content does not always deserve an even voice. The staircase. The lobby chair. The pregnancy test in my coat pocket. The rejection papers. The drive home I had been rehearsing in the car mirror for four words that never got said.The pages about Bastien are the hardest. Not because they are unfair. Because they are exact. The mistake he made,

Co- respondents

"He's claiming the charter complaint was politically motivated," Bastien says.He is reading from Holt's summary on his phone, standing in the kitchen at seven in the morning, and his voice has the specific flatness of someone who expected a move and is not surprised it arrived but is still cataloguing the shape of it.I am at the counter with tea I am actually drinking this morning. Sixteen weeks pregnant and the nausea has finally started to ease and my body has been quietly celebrating this by allowing me to consume hot beverages without protest.His argument, Bastien continues, is that the charter complaint filed against him was orchestrated by Iron Fang specifically to remove him from a council position before he could exercise legitimate oversight of the Volana bloodline situation. He pauses. He is naming me as the primary architect of the complaint and Suki Yuen as a co-conspirator.What is the legal mechanism of a co-respondent designation, I say.It requires me to respond for

The weeks between

The appeal panel is seated, Holt says.She calls on a Wednesday morning two weeks after the library, which puts us at eighteen weeks pregnant and five days from the tribunal and four days from the statutory review committee's first formal session.Three members, she says. The conflict exclusion was held. One of Vane's associates is out. The remaining panel is two neutrals and one associate. She pauses. For the appeal to succeed all three must agree. The two neutrals have reviewed Suki's documentation. One of them requested a secondary copy of the tracking map specifically.They read it carefully, I say.They read it very carefully, Holt says. The appeal hearing is scheduled for next week. After the tribunal.I look at the calendar on the library desk, which I have been keeping manually in the way my mother's letter said Sera kept things, in writing, on paper, because paper cannot be deleted or modified without leaving evidence.Tribunal in five days. Statutory review first session in

Tribunal day

He withdrew the appeal, Soren says.He says it at the breakfast table at six forty-five, the morning of the tribunal, with the expression of someone reading a development they did not predict and are trying to understand quickly.The panel composition, Bastien says. He is at the stove, which means Soren's version of standing near the kitchen and taking credit involved more actual cooking than I was led to expect. He saw the two neutrals. He saw Suki's documentation going to a panel that had no guarantee of a sympathetic majority." He puts a plate in front of me without ceremony. "He did the math.He withdrew before they ruled, I say. So there is no official panel finding on the record. No documented decision that his conduct violated the council charter.Yes, Bastien says. A withdrawal is cleaner than a loss.I eat. Eggs and toast and the specific quality of a morning that is trying to be ordinary and is not.Ivy is at the table already dressed, which means she slept as little as I di

What the document cannot show

"He is very good at believing in himself," I say.The room is still. The arbitrator who asked the question is watching me with the specific attention of someone who has decided they want to hear what comes next and has set everything else aside for it.I do not look at my father.I have decided I will not look at him during this. Not out of anger. Out of clarity. He spent twenty-three years defining what I was allowed to see and say and feel in rooms where he was present. This room is not one of those rooms.Every document you have reviewed today is accurate, I say. The blood test when I was nine. The suppression at ten. The contract at twenty. The nursery. The joint filing. The syringe. I keep my voice level. All of it is real and all of it is documented and none of it shows you the part that the documents cannot capture.Curator Isel is writing.The documents show decisions, I say. They don't show the space between the decisions, which is where I lived. I look at the three arbitrato

After the verdict

"Where did he go," Bastien says.He is on the phone with his security team before we are fully in the car, which is the correct instinct and the one I was about to voice myself. My father left the tribunal building without a word, without his observer, without a lawyer, without any of the apparatus of a man still operating within a system.That means he has decided the system is no longer his tool.I do not know yet what that means.Soren drives. Bastien talks. I sit in the back with Ivy, who has been quiet since the verdict in the specific way she gets when she is thinking something through to its end before she speaks.He accepted the finding, she says finally. He didn't contest it. Didn't argue the evidence. Made his single argument about context and then said nothing. She looks at the road ahead. He was already gone before the session closed.Because contesting it was never the goal, I say. The goal was to have said what he said on record. The context argument. The framework argum

Wolfe's border

"He signed a six-month lease," Bastien says.He is looking at Dara's message on my phone and his voice is doing the careful flat thing that means he has already identified what this is and is buying himself three seconds to decide how to say it.He's not going home, I say.No, Bastien says. He has nothing to go home to. The compound is under interim pack council administration. His files are in evidence. His access to Crest Pack resources is suspended. He sets my phone down on the desk. He went to the one person who is not bound by the tribunal finding and who he still has a prior relationship with.The agreement I made with Wolfe, I say.Covers Wolfe's conduct, Bastien says. It covers his commitment to stand down from any claim on you or the baby. It does not cover who he chooses to have as a neighbor. He pauses. Your father is not bound by Wolfe's agreement. He is only bound by the tribunal suspension.I look at the message.Neutral territory on the border of Ashen Pack land. A six-

Closing the gaps

"There are three gaps in the agreement language," Holt says.She calls at seven thirty the next morning. I am already at the kitchen counter with tea and the phone in my hand because I slept adequately and woke with the specific alertness of someone who has an answer coming and wants to receive it properly.Bastien is at the table. He has coffee and the expression of a man who also slept adequately and is already thinking.First gap, Holt says. The agreement prohibits Wolfe from making contact with you, your child, or any representative acting on your behalf. It does not prohibit him from receiving contact from third parties not named in the agreement.My father, I say.Your father is not named in the Wolfe agreement, she says. He is named in the tribunal finding and the conduct suspension. Neither of those instruments bind Wolfe's behavior. She pauses. So your father can sit on Wolfe's border and they can have dinner every Tuesday and that is not technically a violation of anything.

Twenty weeks

It's a girl, Nadia says.She says it the same way she says everything, plainly and without ceremony, but the particular quality of her stillness after she says it tells me she has been holding that information for the last thirty seconds while she made sure the reading was clear.I'm on the examination table. Twenty weeks today. The scan is running on the portable equipment she brought up to the ninth floor because I have not left the building in four days and she stopped suggesting that I should.I look at the screen.She is small and curled and entirely certain of herself in the way that people are before they know the world has opinions about them. Her heartbeat on the monitor is steady and fast, a sound I have been learning the specific rhythm of for eight weeks.A girl.I have known this was possible. I knew this was fifty percent likely. And yet the word sits in me now like something that arrived and rearranged the furniture while I was standing in the doorway.Everything looks

The source

How did he know about the amendment, Bastien says.He says it the way he says things he already has a partial answer to and is looking for the confirmation, not the question.It is ten at night. Ivy has gone to bed. Soren is at the table with his laptop already pulling access logs. The scan image is still on the library desk where I left it when Dara's message came in, the warm paper with her small curled shape, and I have not moved it because I am not done looking at it and the message does not get to take that from this evening.Three people knew about the amendment before tonight, I say. Holt, Maren Voss, and Wolfe.Four, Bastien says. Wolfe's pack physician was present at the original signing.Five, Soren says without looking up. Holt's junior associate who formatted the amendment language.I look at the table.The intermediary Wolfe turned away this morning was a different person from the first, I say. Which means my father is using multiple people. Not one trusted contact. A net

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