All Chapters of PREGNANT WITH THE CEO'S TWINS: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

BRABRA I wake up already thinking about the appointment, the date circled in my planner for over a week now, tucked beside the small black-and-white printout I still take out sometimes at night just to look at. Twenty weeks. Halfway there, more or less, though nothing about the last twenty weeks has felt like anything I could measure so neatly. I lie in bed a moment longer than usual, both hands resting over my stomach, feeling the faint, unfamiliar flutter that's started showing up more often lately not quite kicks yet, Dr. Adaora told me at my last visit, just the first small signs of two lives finding their footing. "Big day," I whisper to them, though they have no way of understanding what that means yet. "Try to behave for the doctor." I get up slower than I used to, my body negotiating every movement now in a way it didn't back when this all started. I dress carefully, comfortable clothes that don't fight against the small, rounding shape of my stomach, and I catch myself

BRABRAI can still hear it that night, hours later, lying alone in my bed with both hands folded over my stomach.Two heartbeats, fast and layered and impossibly real, filling a small room that used to feel like the loneliest place in the world every time I sat on that exam table by myself. Today, it didn't feel lonely at all.I close my eyes and let myself replay it again — the static, the sudden rhythm, Andriy going completely still beside me like the sound had reached somewhere deep inside him that boardrooms and contracts never could. I think about his hand finding mine without either of us deciding it, warm and slightly unsteady, holding on like he needed it as much as I did.I didn't expect that. I didn't expect any of this, if I'm honest with myself. Not the tenderness in his voice. Not the brightness in his eyes he tried so hard to hide from me. Not the way he said they're real like the words themselves cost him something enormous to admit out loud.My phone buzzes on the nigh

BRABRAMonday morning starts ordinary enough — the same alarm, the same twenty-two stairs, the same careful pace I've learned to move through the world at these past few months.It stops being ordinary the moment I step out of my building and find a car waiting at the curb that isn't mine, a driver standing beside it holding a small sign with my name written across it in neat, careful handwriting."Brabra?" the driver asks, though he clearly already knows the answer."I didn't order a car." I glance around, half expecting some explanation to appear out of thin air."Mr. Andriy arranged it, ma'am. He asked me to take you to work from now on. Said something about the stairs at your building and the ones at your office both being a lot to manage most days."My phone buzzes before I can fully process that. A message from Andriy.Andriy: I know I should have asked first. I just didn't want you standing at a bus stop in the cold with your back the way it's been. If you hate it, tell me, and

BRABRAI wake up already regretting the rain, my whole body heavy in a way that has nothing to do with the extra weight I've grown used to carrying these past months.I stand under the shower longer than usual, letting the hot water work uselessly against a chill that seems to sit underneath my skin instead of on top of it. By the time I'm dressed, I've talked myself into believing it's nothing. A late night. A soaking. The ordinary cost of standing under a bakery awning laughing in the rain instead of getting straight into the car like a sensible person.I climb into the waiting car without complaint this morning, grateful, for once, not to have to manage the walk to the bus stop on legs that don't feel entirely like my own.The heaviness doesn't go away by mid-morning the way I expect it to.I sit at my desk, staring at the same spreadsheet I've been staring at for twenty minutes, the numbers blurring slightly no matter how hard I try to focus. My head feels full of static, my limbs

BRABRAI wake to the quiet beep of a machine and the stiff, unfamiliar feel of a hospital bed beneath me.For a moment I don't know where I am. The ceiling is wrong — too white, too bright — and my arm aches faintly where something is taped against my skin. Then it comes back in pieces, the way the collapse itself came to me in pieces. The office. The static in my head. Andriy's voice, breaking, telling me to stay with him."You're awake." A nurse appears beside the bed, adjusting something on the monitor with brisk, practiced hands. "Good. How are you feeling?""Tired," I say, my voice scratchy and unfamiliar. My free hand moves instinctively to my stomach, pressing flat against the small curve there, searching for the flutter that's become so precious to me these past weeks. "The babies—""Are just fine," she says gently, before I can spiral any further. "Strong heartbeats, both of them. You gave everyone quite a scare, but they handled it better than you did."Relief moves through