What Gemma Wanted

Chris's POV

The months after Ayesha resigned passed in a way I could only describe as gray. Gemma moved into the mansion within a week of the confirmed pregnancy, carrying in boxes I hadn't agreed to make room for, rearranging furniture in rooms I rarely used and some I did.

I told myself it didn't matter. None of it mattered, not really, not measured against the responsibility I believed I carried now. I had been raised to take ownership of my mistakes, and if this was mine, then I would see it through properly, whatever that cost me.

It cost more than I expected.

Gemma redecorated the east sitting room without asking, replacing furniture that had belonged to my mother with pieces she preferred. She began monitoring household accounts that weren't hers to monitor. She attended events at my side, something Ayesha had never once been allowed to do, and positioned herself carefully in every photograph, every introduction, every conversation with my associates, referencing the baby constantly, in a tone that felt less like tenderness and more like staking a claim.

I endured it because I believed the child was real, and because believing that gave the entire arrangement a shape I could live inside, however uncomfortable. I thought about Ayesha more than I let myself admit. Her laugh. The way she used to look at me when she thought I wasn't paying attention. The expression on her face the night she knelt in front of a hundred people and I told her to get up.

I tried not to think about it. I failed, consistently, every single day.

The argument that finally broke everything started over money. Gemma had been spending at a pace that made no sense even accounting for the baby, and when I finally addressed it directly, she turned the conversation back on me with a speed that should have warned me something was wrong long before it did.

"You have no right to police me," she said, her voice rising, "when you're the one who put me in this situation."

"I'm only asking you to be reasonable."

"Reasonable." She laughed, sharp and humorless. "You should be grateful I'm even here."

Something in the way she said it made me go still. "What exactly do you mean by that?"

I asked the question expecting nothing, expecting another deflection, another argument circled back onto me. Instead, something shifted in her face, the practiced warmth dropping away all at once, replaced by something colder and far more honest than anything I had seen from her before.

It came out in pieces, fast and bitter, the kind of truth that only spills out when someone is too angry to remember they're supposed to keep it hidden. The meeting with my uncle. The drink. The woman planted in the hotel room, who had been her the entire time. The doctor, paid to run another woman's results under her name. The baby, never mine at all, belonging instead to one of my uncle's business associates, a man who had been part of the arrangement from the very beginning.

The whole thing had been built to compromise me. To hand a small group of powerful men leverage they could use whenever it suited them. Gemma had simply been the instrument they used, because she had access to me and wanted, badly enough to do this, everything I had.

I sat there in the silence that followed, and I felt something in my chest go completely still, the kind of stillness that frightened me more than anger ever could.

"Get out of my house," I said.

She tried to argue, tried to soften it, tried every version of charm that had worked on me before. None of it worked this time. I called security. I watched her walk out the front door for the last time, and then I sat alone in the living room, in the silence she left behind, and thought about every single thing I had gotten wrong.