Chapter 923: Fourth One: Melissa’s Fourth Miracle
"T-this is—"
The words fractured upon Adriana’s tongue and died there, leaving her stranded in the middle of the room like she’d stepped off the edge of the known world and found only void beneath her feet.
She could not finish;
The revelation had stripped language from her, leaving nothing but the raw, trembling fact of it hanging in the golden air between them.
Roxanne did not flounder, she simply stared, and none of the Hot Rude Neighbor’s usual theatrical flailing or undignified stammering touched her.
Yet her eyes had widened, gone glassy and vast, and in that silence they spoke every unspeakable thing Adriana’s broken sentence could not:
If not more.
The quiet ones always carried the heavier storms.
At the still heart of both reactions sat Melissa, lowering herself onto the couch with the careful grace like she understood that even furniture might protest the weight of miracles.
The afternoon sun poured through the tall windows in solemn, burning shafts, as though the heavens themselves had elected to anoint her.
It sought her the way light had always sought her — slipping first through the midnight fall of her hair from behind, threading each strand with liquid gold until they blazed like captured constellations before flooding outward to embrace the whole of her until she sat haloed like she was an errant goddess who had wandered into a mortal apartment and, for once, chosen to remain.
Her shadow stretched across the carpet like a supplicant that had forgotten the dignity of kneeling.
The poor, flat thing could trace her outline and show her hands clasped tightly in her lap, but it could not capture the exquisite tremor running through her body, nor could it render the tears that stood unshed in those beautiful, fathomless eyes.
Because here was the cruel jest of it — and any stranger walking in would have misread the scene in an instant.
There was no fear upon that face. No dread and none of the darkness the trembling might have suggested.
What lived there instead was happiness so vast it bordered on terror, shot through with a single, fragile thread of disbelief.
Melissa’s fingers moved against each other in her lap in small, precise motions, as though she were counting something in the dark of her mind, over and over, arriving each time at the same impossible sum while two other women stood frozen, waiting for her to speak.
That was not the whole of the counting, and Melissa knew it.
Part of her counted weeks while another part of her that lived in the locked room she visited only on certain anniversaries, alone — counted something older.
She had walked this path before.
Had felt life quicken within her once, only for the world to finish the counting and then steal one the result from her arms.
The Maxtons had taught her, in the cruellest classroom that existence offers, the precise cost of loving something so small. They had collected their tithe in blood and silence, then smiled as though the gods had personally endorsed the invoice.
So the tremor in her hands was not born of one feeling.
It was joy — and beneath that joy, standing quietly in the doorway like a ghost that refused to leave, was the little girl who had never drawn breath. And from that hollow rose a vow, already sharpening itself in the dark, older than thought and harder than any bloodline: Not this one.
Whatever it takes. Whoever must bleed. Not this one. The Maxtons had played their hand and lost; now the board belonged to her, and this time the stakes were carved from her own flesh and the unrelenting fire of the man who had claimed her.
Melissa’s heart threatened to split from the sheer, unbearable weight of it — the dream made flesh.
"Oh, my gods." Adriana found three words at last, three more than she had managed in the past minute.
She dropped to her knees beside the couch with the graceless devotion of a supplicant before an altar and shoved the coffee table aside with a screech of wood on floor that no one acknowledged and took Melissa’s shaking hands in both of hers — her own grip a heartbeat behind, as though the miracle might vanish if she did not anchor it with her own flesh.
Melissa smiled.
A single tear slipped free of one glassy eye and she caught it with her sleeve, laughing softly at her own lack of composure — a small, wet sound that hovered between sob and celebration, the body’s honest surrender when joy and memory collided too fiercely to choose one.
Or perhaps when it still carried the lingering ghost-echo of last night’s more carnal devotions.
It was quieter today than last night.
Last night, after she found out after checking had detonated through the her with all the subtlety of a star going nova—
Today the fire had banked into something steadier, yet no less consuming.
Some tidings burned with a half-life; this one was eternal.
It was more of a brand that had been seared into her soul and her womb alike, a constant reminder of how thoroughly their dark prince had rewritten the laws of fate with nothing but his body and his will.
Roxanne settled on Melissa’s other side, close, the two of them flanking her now as though by silent covenant they had taken shared custody of the miracle.
Adriana passed Melissa’s other hand like a sacred charge, and Roxanne folded it between both of hers.
"You didn’t suspect anything?" Roxanne asked quietly. "At all?"
Melissa shook her head — then immediately betrayed the gesture with a small, trembling nod:
"No. Yes. I did. A little." Her voice shook, but she made no effort to steady it. These two had earned every raw edge. "It’s just... usually, in those times, I feel nauseous. The smell of wine turns my stomach inside out. I always feel very properly sick."
The two women nodded. Understanding. Saying nothing like two living statues of anticipation, waiting for her to continue.
"But this time it wasn’t like before. The wine didn’t curdle in my veins or send me running to retch into the nearest bathroom. I felt... strange, sometimes, yes, but I blamed the wine itself, the travel, the endless nights wherein he had remade my body in his image, leaving me too gloriously undone to tell the aftershocks of pleasure from the first whispers of new life."
A faint flush rose along her throat at the memory, the dark, knowing humor in her eyes acknowledging precisely which ’symptoms’ had been Phei’s particular brand of worship, even the two women blushed slightly.
"There were no other signs to confirm the suspicion. Even the small symptoms flickered on and off like faulty wards — present one day, gone the next. One day I would feel a little weak and then it would pass, and that would be that."
She stopped.
They waited. Melissa sat gazing serenely into the middle distance, as though she were consulting with both the ghosts she carried and the gods who had, this time, decided to let her keep what she had made.
Roxanne ran out of patience first — a historic event in itself.
"Since when?" she demanded. "When did you feel the first symptoms? I mean—"
"A month ago."
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