All Chapters of Pregnant By My Ex's Brother : Chapter 141 - Chapter 150

I didn’t go home after work.Home meant Mother’s eyes, Ruth’s quiet competence, the risk of saying too much with a face that had stopped obeying me. I went to a side terminal near the archive annex that nobody used after eight, logged in under a project code Dana had left active, and opened the acquisition trail properly.Dates first. I lined them up on a legal pad in handwriting that got worse as the night went on. The year my father’s temper changed. The year the suppliers started delaying. The year the bank meetings multiplied and the conversations in our kitchen began ending in silence instead of plans. Against those, the consolidation wave in the Voss materials division: preliminary targeting, pressure on credit pathways, a quiet campaign of purchase orders redirected until a mid-tier firm could be framed as nonviable and then mercifully absorbed.Voss fingerprints were everywhere once I stopped looking for a single smoking gun and started looking for a pattern. Shell references

The side office suddenly felt too small for the size of what he was about to have to say.Damien looked at the phone in his hand once more, then set it on the table between us carefully, as if it might detonate. Through the half-glass I could see the floor continuing its ordinary morning; Jess pretending not to watch, Dana on a call, someone from accounts carrying a stack of folders past with no idea the room they were passing had just become a crime scene with better lighting.“It was a consolidation package,” he said. “Materials and specialty supply. My father wanted the mid-tier firms that could be pressured into distress and folded before they became expensive later. I was younger.”The word effective landed in my stomach like something spoiled.“Say it without the corporate soap.”His jaw flexed. “We identified companies with fragile credit and concentrated buyer dependence. We redirected enough volume to make their cash position scream. Then the acquisition team arrived with an

ELENAThe horn came first, then the blur of white metal.I didn’t fully register the car until Damien’s arm banded around my waist and yanked me backward so hard my teeth clicked. We hit the curb in a messy stagger, his body between me and the street, the vehicle tearing past close enough that the air of it slapped my clothes. Someone shouted. A cyclist swore. For a second the whole block seemed to tilt while my heart tried to punch out of my chest.“Are you out of your mind?” Damien’s voice was rough, almost shaking. His hands were still on me, gripping too hard. “You walked into traffic. You walked into traffic with nothing in your hands and no eyes in your head…”I shoved him off. The contact of him, the heat, the rescue, all of it felt contaminated now by the memo and the initials and the years of watching with knowledge. “Don’t touch me.”“Elena…”“Don’t.”We were still in the street’s edge, half on the pavement, a terrible place for this, and I did not care. The truth he had gi

Mother arrived while the discharge papers were still being printed.Ruth must have called her. Or the hospital. Or some combination of the two that did not include me, because I would have tried to soften the landing and there was no soft version of this. She came through the curtain in a coat thrown over home clothes, face drawn from her own unfinished recovery, and took in the bed, the monitor marks still fading from my skin, Damien standing too close, the whole ugly geometry of us in one sweep.“What did you do,” she said.Not what happened. What did you do.“There was bleeding,” I managed. “Stress. They’re sending me home on rest.”Her eyes snapped to Damien. “Stress from what.”The silence that followed was answer enough. She was sick, not stupid, and the last few weeks had already taught her the shape of our particular disaster. She knew something was wrong; she had simply been missing the pieces that would make it whole.Still, when the fuller truth began coming out in broken p

ELENAHe came to the apartment against my mother’s instruction and against every practical reading of the week.Ruth let him into the hallway only because I said yes from the bedroom, where I had been arranged like something breakable among pillows I did not want. Mother was asleep in the other room, finally, her earlier fury spent into exhaustion. Damien stopped at the threshold of my door as if the wood itself might require permission, and for a moment neither of us spoke. He looked wrecked under the composure. I felt wrecked without any.“I won’t stay long,” he said.“You shouldn’t have come at all.”“I know.” He exhaled, eyes dropping once to the blanket over my stomach and then away, as if even looking were a risk. “The board is moving. My father has step-down papers drafted. They’re using the hospital, the street, all of it, as proof that I can’t be left in control while I’m attached to you like this.”A thin, tired sound left me. “So you’ve been punished for my body failing und