All Chapters of Pregnant By My Ex's Brother : Chapter 171 - Chapter 180

ELENAJess arrived with soup, gossip, and the particular restless energy of someone who had been holding too much information in an open-plan office for too many days.Mother let her in with a nod that had become almost welcoming over the weeks, then made herself scarce in the way of a woman who understood that some conversations required a peer, not a parent. Jess took one look at me on the sofa; blankets, soft trousers, the unmistakable forward shift of a pregnancy that had stopped negotiating with clothing, and whistled low under her breath.“You’re really showing.”“I’m aware.”“It’s a good look on you. Also a terrifying look. Both can be true.” She unpacked containers onto the coffee table, then sat cross-legged on the floor like we were still in university and the stakes were smaller. “You need to hear the floor before the floor becomes mythology.”I braced. “How bad.”“Victoria is thriving.” Jess said it without venom, which made it worse. “In the competent, visible, board-ple

I chose the park because a park had witnesses without being a spectacle, and because I needed to see his face when I told him what I had found without the charged walls of kitchens or hospital rooms doing half the talking for us.He arrived exactly on time, which was its own kind of restraint. No car left ostentatiously at the curb. No security silhouette in the trees. Just Damien in a dark coat that hung a little looser than it should have, walking the path toward the bench I had claimed near the water as if we were two ordinary people with an ordinary reason to meet in daylight. Up close the thinness was clearer; the taut reduced look of a man eating because the body required it and sleeping because the body eventually forced the issue. My own body had gone the other direction into unmistakable pregnancy, coat unable to hide the curve, and I watched his eyes catch on it and hold for a second too long before he forced them back to my face.“You asked for this,” he said, standing unti

DAMIEN The threat arrived as a soft inquiry first, which was how the serious ones always arrived.A freelance fixer with a journalist’s appetite and a lawyer’s caution had begun asking about prenatal records under a hospital vendor number that should not have been reachable from outside. The pressure of someone testing whether Elena Harper’s medical quiet could be purchased, bullied, or socially engineered into a leak that would finish what the corridor photo had started. By the time the inquiry reached a contact who still took my calls, it had already brushed the edge of the specialist wing’s administrative layer.Silent support did not mean letting strangers put their hands on her body through paperwork.I handled it myself because outsourcing this kind of thing created witnesses, and witnesses had a way of becoming leverage. The man agreed to meet in a parking structure that did not bother with cameras past the second level, confident in the ordinary armor of people who thought th

I did not forward Marcus’s message to Damien.By the next afternoon a formal letter arrived on my phone from a firm I recognized only by reputation, the kind of letterhead that made private threats reconsider their appetite. The language was clinical and devastating: any implication of contested paternity regarding the unborn child of Elena Harper would be treated as actionable harassment absent biological basis; prior relationship history with a third party did not constitute standing; further contact of that nature would be documented and pursued. Marcus was not named in the first line. He was named, surgically, in the third.Jess, when I told her, whistled. “That wasn’t HR. That was teeth.”“I didn’t ask for teeth.”“No. But someone still has you on a silent monitoring loop, and someone still moves when the loop picks up a threat.” She hesitated. “Are you angry.”“Yes.”And I was. Furious in a bright, specific way at the unasked intervention, at the efficiency of a man who had agr

DAMIEN Alexander summoned me the way men summon a result they already consider inevitable. To a smaller private room off the board level, the kind used for conversations that were never meant to acquire minutes. No Victoria. No observers. Only a folder centered on the table with the quiet confidence of a loaded instrument, and my father standing beside it as if posture alone could restore the correct order of sons and outcomes.“You’ve had enough wilderness,” he said. “The board is prepared to discuss your return to operational authority on an accelerated timeline. Stabilization has served its purpose. Continuity needs a face that is not permanently provisional.”“And the price.”Alexander almost smiled at the absence of preamble. He opened the folder, turned it, and slid the pages across. The language was exquisite in the way only expensive lawyers could make ugliness exquisite: private separation arrangement, non-interference clauses, structured provision for the child through thi