Roxanne and Adriana looked at each other once more, the quiet, wordless exchange; they had long since stopped pretending surprise at anything Melissa did.

Then, with the quiet resignation of women who had spent the last several hours watching Melissa slowly unravel into joy, panic, pride, worry and divine maternal madness, they shrugged and looked back at her.

Melissa had not sat down properly for more than three minutes.

The apartment around them was warm and bright, sunlight pouring in through the open windows while the afternoon wind slipped through the room and lifted the ends of her black hair. The curtains breathed softly. The city beyond shimmered beneath a high, elegant sky. Everything should have felt peaceful. Domestic. Comfortable. The variety of quiet afternoon sane people used for tea, conversation and other harmless little rituals civilization invented before love started making everyone ridiculous.

Melissa, naturally, had chosen pacing.

Back and forth.

Again, again and again.

Her hand rested over her stomach; her fingers spread protectively across the place where the apple of her eye and Phei had formed a month ago. The gesture was unconscious by now.

Every few steps, her palm pressed there, stroked there, lingered there, as if she still needed proof that the impossible was real. As if the tiny life hidden beneath her hand might vanish if she stopped touching it for too long.

She touched herself with slow, possessive certainty, as though telling the world it was not allowed to take this from her.

She murmured to herself constantly.

Sometimes too low for Roxanne and Adriana to hear.

Sometimes just clear enough to make them exchange looks again.

"How do I tell him first?" Melissa whispered, turning near the window before walking back across the rug. "No, no, not like that. If I simply say it, he might freeze. He will freeze. He will absolutely freeze. Then he will smile. Or panic. No, Phei does not panic. He pretends not to panic while his eyes betray him like adorable little traitors."

Adriana’s mouth twitched.

Roxanne covered hers with two fingers.

Melissa did not notice. Across the room the two of them had, somewhere in the last hour, stopped being guests and started being an audience, and a deeply entertained one at that. Roxanne had abandoned all pretense of drinking her tea while Adriana had simply given up and let her chin rest in her palm, watching the spectacle the way she might have watched weather roll in over a sea — magnificent, slightly dangerous, impossible to look away from.

Her thoughts had become a private sea, and she was drowning in it with shameless elegance, already decided the water belonged to her.

"What will his reaction be?" she continued, voice soft and rushed. "Will he hold me first? Will he look at my stomach? Will he ask if I am all right before he even lets himself be happy? Of course he will. That boy worries like it is a bloodline talent. Is he even ready for this kind of responsibility?"

She stopped.

Her face changed.

The softness in her eyes deepened into fierce certainty.

"Yes," she answered herself. "Phei is ready. Despite everything, he is ready."

The words steadied her for half a breath.

Then the next worry attacked, because apparently joy had brought friends and all of them had knives.

"But how do I tell my family?" Melissa whispered, pacing again. "How do I tell them I am pregnant with Phei’s child? My mother will..." She paused, then her expression cooled with dismissive elegance only those raised around terrifying power could manage. How do you tell your mother you’re pregnant with her grandson’s child?

"No. I do not care what the Empress thinks."

Roxanne and Adriana both went very still.

That was not a sentence ordinary people said casually. Ordinary people did not place "I do not care" and "the Empress" in the same thought unless they had already arranged their funeral clothing and chosen the flowers. Melissa, however, said it like someone discussing bad weather.

Rich bloodlines. Terrible for humility and excellent for dramatic tension and the occasional public execution of expectations.

Roxanne opened her mouth, but thought better of whatever loyalty-preserving disclaimer had been forming there, and closed it again. Some sentences simply passed through the room unchallenged, the way one lets a tiger cross a kitchen — politely, and without sudden movement.

Melissa’s hand tightened over her stomach.

"But my daughters..." Her voice softened. "How do I tell them?"

That was the question that made her stop again.

Not the Empress, the family politics or the public scandal, not the old Ryujin Tiamat bloodline madness, there would be inevitable whispers and the jealous eyes that would bloom across Hell’s Paradise like poisonous flowers once the truth escaped.

...But her daughters.

That mattered.

She looked down, thumb stroking slowly across her stomach.

Would they be shocked? Hurt? Happy? Confused? Would they think she had stepped too far into a life they had not been prepared to see her enter? Would they look at her not as their mother, but as someone loved, chosen, carrying another child beneath her heart —

someone whose body had already been claimed in the most irreversible way possible, marked from the inside out by the same boy who had once made her forget every careful lesson about power and restraint.

Melissa inhaled.

The worry hurt.

But it did not erase the joy.

Nothing could erase the joy.

Because beneath every concern, beneath every question, beneath every future conversation waiting to ambush her peace, something hot and shimmering lived inside her chest. A radiant happiness so intense it almost frightened her.

She was having a baby; Phei’s baby.

The man she loved so much had left part of himself inside her, and now that tiny miracle was growing quietly beneath her hand like the most beautiful secret the world had ever been rude enough not to know yet.

Her body still remembered the exact night and the next day it happened — the weight of him, the heat, the slow, devastating way he had filled her until there was nowhere left for either of them to hide.

She could still feel the way her pussy walls had clenched around him when he finished inside her both that night and the day after and how her own newly satisfied pussy sucked him dry almost; greedy and helpless, taking everything he poured in her.

And it had become a seed!

Her smile returned slowly, the kind of smile that already belonged to someone who had decided the universe could adjust itself around her good fortune.

Then wider and brighter.

She imagined Phei’s face when he learned.