All Chapters of Pregnant By My Ex's Brother : Chapter 81 - Chapter 90

The second message landed while Marcus was still staring at my phone like he wanted to put it through the wall.I didn’t pick it up. I could see Damien’s name from where I stood. That was enough. The fact of him texting after leaving with her was already a mess in my chest; irritating, magnetic, too late, too much.Marcus let out a short, ugly laugh. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”“Don’t.”“He’s texting you?” Marcus pointed at the counter. “Right now? After driving off with his little black-dress schedule entry? And you’re just standing there looking at it like it might grow a mouth and apologize?”“I’m not answering.”“Oh, congratulations. Growth.” His voice was sharp with jealousy. “What’d he say? Miss me already? Or just checking whether the curb still has you on it?”I grabbed the phone before he could. The preview burned across the screen.Damien: What were you going to say?Damien: Answer me.My thumb hovered and then locked the screen. “None of your business.”“It became my bus

I opened the door because the knocking was going to bring a neighbor out.Damien was right there. Close. Jacket still on. That look on his face like he’d been wound too tight the whole way over. His eyes hit me first.Then they went past me.Marcus.The hallway felt too narrow. My stomach dropped so hard I thought I might be sick again right at the threshold. Damien didn’t say anything. He just stood there taking in the room behind me, Marcus’s jacket on my shoulders earlier, Marcus still inside, the whole wrong picture.I waited for him to ask what Marcus was doing there, because an accusation would have been easier than that silence. At least an accusation would give me something to fight. Instead, Damien kept looking around the apartment with the kind of quiet attention that made me feel as though every little thing had suddenly become evidence, and I found myself wondering what he had already decided before I had even found the courage to speak.I hated that my first thought was s

He didn’t leave. I opened the door and said I was done and he stood there like the words were a suggestion he could wait out.“You don’t get to end a conversation every time it stops going your way,” Damien said.My hand stayed on the door. “You asked me if I slept with your brother.”His jaw tightened. “Because he was in your apartment.”“No.” My voice came out rough. “Don’t dress it up. You didn’t ask if he helped me. You didn’t ask if I was okay. You looked at me and asked if I slept with him. Like that’s the natural next step. Like that’s what I do.”Damien’s eyes flashed. “That’s not what I said.”“It’s what you meant.” A tear stung and I blinked hard, angry at it. “One night with you and suddenly I’m the kind of woman who ends every bad evening on her back? Is that it?”“Elena…”“Say it properly then.” My mouth was shaking. I hated that. I kept going anyway. “If you think I’m a whore, say that. Don’t stand in my apartment doing the polite version.”The word landed in the room

The crying burned out eventually.It just stopped giving me anything. I sat on the floor with a raw face and a blocked nose and that empty after-feeling where your body is still shaking but the tears are done. The apartment was quiet. Damien was gone. Marcus was gone. The carton was still in my pocket like a bad joke.I pulled it out. Looked at it.Threw it in the kitchen bin this time like that changed the fact of what it meant.My hands were steady enough now, which somehow made it worse. Steady meant I could do something. Steady meant I was out of excuses.I picked up my phone.Damien’s unanswered calls were still there. His texts. The apology through the door sat in my head whether I wanted it or not. None of it helped. None of it made the next months look survivable. If he knew, he would take over. If he didn’t, I would keep rotting in secret. If my mother found out, it would sit on her like another illness. If the building found out, I would become a headline with legs.I opened

DAMIEN I had not slept in any way that counted. At some point the chair by the window had taken the shape of my body and the city outside had gone from black to that thin, colorless pre-morning gray while my mind kept replaying the same useless stretch of hallway outside her door. The way she said she was done. The soft refusal to take the chain off. The fact that I had apologized through wood like a man who had already lost the right to be in the room. When the intercom started up, aggressive and insistent, I ignored it long enough to prove a point to nobody and then Marcus’s voice came through, frayed at the edges and looking for a fight. “Open the door, Damien. I’m not standing down here all morning.” I should have left him there. Instead I hit the release and waited with a kind of tired violence already gathering under my skin. He came in without asking, bringing the smell of a long night and that particular restless energy he got when something was eating him from the in