Chapter 924: Eye of War: Pregnant With Phei’s Child!
Two pairs of eyes went perfectly round. Adriana actually rocked back on her heels as though the floor had tilted beneath her while Roxanne’s grip on Melissa’s hand spasmed tight enough to bruise.
"A month—" Adriana’s voice climbed an octave and abandoned the sentence halfway up the ladder. "You mean you’re—?"
Melissa nodded.
And all three of them — slowly, helplessly, as one — turned to look at the coffee table Adriana had shoved aside.
The sun looked with them; it had angled itself through the window like a fourth uninvited witness, one golden pillar falling deliberately across the table’s surface, and all four of them — three women and a star — stared down together at the little device sitting there.
A small thing, cheap thing and plastic, mass-produced, utterly insignificant — a thing that had no earthly right to be the herald of a miracle, no standing whatsoever to announce what it was announcing.
And yet there it sat in its perfect, banal insignificance, two small lines glowing in the sunlight, telling them, in the flat factual voice of cheap plastic everywhere:
Melissa was pregnant.
"How?" Adriana whispered. "How—" She gestured vaguely at the universe, looked to Roxanne for backup, and found none.
"I mean—"
Roxanne had nothing either and the two of them sat there, eloquent women both, rendered entirely wordless while the implications of that little device soaked into the apartment’s silence like spilled wine into white carpet.
Melissa — bless her sweet, dangerous heart — saved them the way she saved everyone.
"I am a month pregnant," she said, "with Phei’s child."
It did not help.
It was, in fact, the opposite of help. The words landed and the silence after them rang like a struck bell.
"Phei’s child." Adriana said it once, testing the shape of it on her tongue.
Then again, louder, as though repetition might wear the impossible smooth:
"Phei’s child. Phei’s — child."
But on the other side of the couch — and this was the part nobody was watching, which was the only mercy in it — Roxanne was holding Melissa’s hand a little too tight.
’What is this feeling?’ She interrogated it even as it moved through her.
The happiness was there — real, immediate, whole. The excitement, the urge to celebrate her friend, to ring bells, to open something expensive. All of that, present and accounted for.
But underneath it, around it, through it, ran something else. A longing and a slow warm ache that had wrapped itself around her heart without asking permission, whispering a wish she had absolutely no business wishing — that she—
"How are you even going to—" Adriana started.
Melissa shook her head once, gently, before the sentence could finish becoming a problem. Not yet. Not today.
The Hot Rude Neighbor swallowed hard, read everything in that small gesture, and nodded.
But the unfinished question did not leave the room. It simply went where Melissa sent it — down, inside, into the same locked place she kept everything too sharp to hold in daylight.
Because she had already run that sentence to its end, alone, last night, lying awake in the dark with one hand resting low on her stomach after she found out herself. How are you even going to announce this.
A new child of the Ryujin Tiamat bloodline:
Conceived in the eye of a war that had already taken her brother, her daughter, and twenty years of her life — a war whose architects would understand, the instant they learned of this, that the single most valuable and most vulnerable thing the dragon possessed now had a heartbeat.
The world had stood up at a public breakfast and called what she and Phei were a crime. That same world was about to be handed proof.
She knew exactly what was coming for this child, because it had come before and took one.
’Let it come.’
She breathed once, slow, and the dread folded itself away behind her eyes — to be taken out and sharpened later, in private, into something the Maxtons or Heavenchilds would one day deeply regret.
Today was not for fear. Today, she had decided, was only for this.
Roxanne solved her own dangerous feeling the only way available: she turned and pulled Melissa into a hug, tight, fierce, her chin hooked over her friend’s shoulder.
"Congratulations," she said into her hair, and meant it down to the marrow. "Gods, Mel. Congratulations. I’m so happy for you I could scream. You’re going to be — you are — this is the best news this miserable beautiful year has produced."
Melissa laughed wetly into the embrace and nodded, whispering her thank-yous —
— and then, because she was Melissa, and because even trembling and tear-streaked she remained the most dangerous woman in any room, she turned her mouth to Roxanne’s ear and whispered:
"I do hope you won’t take too long to join me."
Roxanne’s entire face went scarlet. Instantly. Comprehensively. From collar to hairline, a single smooth flood of red that looked like it might never recede.
Melissa pulled back, took one look at her, and laughed — bright and delighted and merciless — reaching out to tug at the matriarch’s hair and laughing harder when Roxanne swatted at her, sputtering, the colour refusing to retreat.
Adriana, gloriously oblivious to whatever had just been detonated beside her, cleared her throat. "Sorry — sorry. I’m congratulating you now. Properly. Come here."
And then the three of them were hugging all together, a tangle of arms and hair and at least two sets of damp eyes, the sunlight pouring over the whole arrangement like approval.
Before Adriana had arrived at Roxanne’s apartment — summoned by Melissa’s instruction, no explanation attached — there had been the slow accumulation of signs.
When Roxanne cooked, and Melissa had gone quietly grey at the table, Phei’s mother-in-law and also his woman had assumed, with genuine professional wounding, that something was wrong with her cooking.
It hadn’t been the cooking. One small strangeness had stacked onto another, and another the way she’d been for a month now, until — for the first time — the signs and symptoms stopped flickering and stood there naked, glaring at her, refusing to be blamed on wine.
So, Melissa had discreetly, the way she did everything, and bought a test.
When the two lines surfaced, she had very nearly collapsed where she stood.
And then — because she was Melissa, because her mind organised itself even while her knees considered resigning — she had started calculating. Retracing. Walking backward through every strangeness of the past weeks, laying dates against dates.
Imagine her surprise when the arithmetic landed.
’I have been carrying Phei’s child for a month,’ she thought now, holding two women against her heart. ’I became pregnant on our first time.’
That night in the library, dark and breathless. And then the next day — when he’d come downstairs and found her waiting for him in the lingerie she’d chosen with shaking hands, and they had loved each other until the boy who didn’t yet understand what he truly was had outlasted her completely.
All of it — while she’d mopped the floor off their cum afterward and he’d sat on the counter watching her with those impossible amethyst eyes — all that while, something precious had already been taking root in her:
’He’d planted this miracle the very first night, growing quietly through every day since.’
She’d felt things. It had simply never crossed her mind — and when it finally did cross her mind, she’d dismissed it as impossible for her.
For her, of all women.
Because somewhere in the years she had learnt they took her daughter, Melissa had quietly closed that door inside herself and bricked it over, the way you seal a room you cannot bear to enter — had decided, without ceremony, without ever saying it aloud to a living soul, that motherhood was a country she had visited three times and been deported from, and that women like her did not get granted a second visa.
It wasn’t her body that had ruled it impossible. It was her grief.
She had simply stopped permitting herself the want, because the want, unanswered, had nearly killed her once already.
Luckily, she’d had her youngest, Sienna, before her brother told her what had happened.
And then a boy with amethyst eyes had walked through every wall she’d ever built as though they were drawn in chalk, and her body — kinder than her heart, braver than her grief — had quietly unbricked the door without asking her permission.
But yesterday had been too much. The last two days, the signs had stopped whispering — her emotions, her reactions, her—
Melissa sighed into the hug.
When the truth had surfaced last night, she had called Phei and told him only that something had come up — that he should collect them tomorrow instead of that night, as he’d planned.
Her voice had been level while she made her tone administrative as she could.
And the entire time, she had been burning. Burning with the need to shout it down the phone. To tell him to come now, this instant, to bury herself in his arms and be showered in him — to watch his face, that beautiful, arrogant, tender face, in the exact moment he understood the miracle the two of them had made together.
A month ago — in those same impossible twenty-four hours when he had jumped, and the system had found him, and the Awakening had torn through him and remade the boy into the beginning of something the world had no name for — Phei and Melissa had been making something else as well in her womb.
They had created a new life.
A brand-new member of the Ryujin Tiamat bloodline.
