CHAPTER 2

ELENA'S POV

The words kept echoing.

“I'm pregnant with his child.”

My chest caved in. I stood perfectly still because moving felt like a risk, and because two years of this household had taught me that falling in front of vampires was something you only did once if you were smart about it.

Lucian was going to be a father.

Just not with me.

I kept my eyes down. It was the only armor I had and I held it with both hands while Viviana's announcement settled over the room.

Logan shoved me forward. I stumbled into the council chamber and caught myself. The impact jolted through my palms and I was grateful for something physical to focus on.

Ancient vampires looked at me. Gold eyes, red eyes, violet. The brief assessment of creatures cataloguing something that had wandered into the wrong room.

"Why is a blood servant in this chamber?"

Lucian finally looked up.

His silver eyes found mine across the room and I waited. Some surviving piece of me waited, for something. Some acknowledgment that two months ago had meant anything beyond what he had decided it meant.

His expression was completely flat.

"She was summoned to serve refreshments," he said. "Elena, go to the kitchen and prepare blood wine."

"Yes, Master," I whispered.

I turned to leave.

"Oh, Lucian darling."

Viviana's voice cut through everything. She glided toward me with the particular grace of someone who had never once needed to hurry, ruby eyes moving over me slowly.

"You still keep human servants? How old-fashioned." She stopped in front of me. "What's your name, human?"

I kept my gaze down. "Elena, my lady."

"Elena," she repeated, tasting it. Finding it slightly sour. "How long have you served my Lucian?"

*My Lucian.* Something in my chest pulled tight.

"Two years, my lady."

She circled me. I made myself stand still and breathe and keep my hands from giving anything away.

"Two years," she said. "And yet you look like this. Thin. Tired." She came to stand in front of me again, close enough that her perfume filled everything. "Has Lucian been good to you?"

I chose the only safe answer. "Master Lucian has been fair, my lady."

Her smile appeared in my peripheral vision.

She stopped. Her eyes dropped to my neck, to the scars I could never fully hide, and something shifted in her expression.

"He has fed from you," she said.

My hand rose before I could stop it.

Her smile widened.

She turned back toward Lucian. "Darling, I thought you preferred bottled blood."

"The Blood Moon Ritual required a living donor." Flat. Final. *Required. A donor.* Not Elena. Not anyone in particular. A requirement he had fulfilled.

I told myself to stop expecting anything different.

It didn't work.

"Elena." His voice. Not looking at me. "Dismissed."

"Actually."

The voice came from the end of the table and the room shifted around it the way rooms shifted around certain kinds of authority.

Lord Konstantin.

I knew which one he was without looking. His presence operated differently from the others, something older underneath it, something that paid attention to things the rest of the room looked past.

"Before she goes," he said. "I have something I'd like to understand."

I froze.

"Child." He addressed me directly. "Come here."

I made myself turn. I made myself walk toward him. His eyes were pure gold, not the glowing kind, the permanent kind, like something that had decided what color it was a very long time ago and saw no reason to revisit the decision.

He looked at me for a long moment without speaking.

Not the way the others had looked at me, the quick dismissive sweep of something beneath notice. He looked the way someone looked at a document they were trying to read in poor light. Slow. Careful. Not yet sure of what they were seeing.

"The Blood Moon Ritual," he said. "You were present."

"Yes, my lord."

"And since then." He tilted his head slightly. "Have you felt different?"

I kept my expression still. "I don't understand what you mean, my lord."

He was quiet. His eyes moved to my face, past it, like he was reading something underneath my skin. His expression didn't change but something in his stillness sharpened.

"Something awakened after the ritual," he said finally. Slowly. Like he was speaking to himself as much as the room. "Something old. I cannot yet determine what it is. But it is there." He looked up. "She is not what she appears to be."

He didn't say more.

He left it exactly there, incomplete, suspended, more question than answer.

A murmur moved through the chamber.

Several council members exchanged glances. One leaned forward. Another narrowed their eyes at me with the focused attention of something that had just been told the furniture was worth examining after all.

Everyone looked at me differently.

Everyone except Viviana.

Viviana looked at Lucian.

She had gone still since Konstantin started speaking, the circling amusement she'd worn since she arrived going quiet. I watched her do what she had been doing since she walked through that door, reading the room, cataloguing every variable, deciding what mattered.

She watched Lucian's face while Konstantin spoke.

Whatever she found there, she kept to herself. But something in her expression shifted, slowly, from confidence into something that was working harder to look like confidence.

She looked back at me.

And I understood in that moment that I had become a problem she was deciding how to address.

"This is theater," she said. Her voice was controlled. Her hands weren't, I watched her fingers find the table's edge and press once before releasing. "She is a blood servant. Two years in this household and no one has found anything unusual."

"Lady Viviana," Konstantin said mildly.

"My child is Lucian's heir," she said. "That is settled." She looked at Lucian. "Tell him."

Lucian's jaw tightened.

One beat. Two.

His fingers pressed flat against the table's surface.

"Lord Konstantin's observations are noted," he said. "But they do not change the matter at hand." He looked at Logan. "Remove Elena from the chamber."

Logan moved toward me.

*Now,* I thought. *Say it now.*

"I'm pregnant," I said.

Logan stopped.

The room went quiet.

Lucian's hand cracked the stem of the wine glass beside him.

A clean sharp sound in the silence. Everyone heard it. He looked down at it for exactly one second and then set the broken stem on the table with the specific deliberateness of someone forcing something back under control.

His eyes found mine.

Three seconds. Something moved through them that I couldn't hold onto because it was gone before I finished seeing it.

Then he looked away.

"She is mistaken," he said. To the room. To no one specific. "And even if she were not, it changes nothing. Lady Viviana carries my heir. This matter is closed."

I had known, somewhere underneath the hope, that this was how it would go.

Knowing didn't change how the words landed.

‘I'm done begging,” I said quietly.

And I was. The decision settled through me, quiet and certain, underneath the grief that hadn't arrived yet but was coming.

I was done begging this man for anything.

Logan's hand closed around my arm. His grip was looser than I expected. He looked at the wall instead of my face.

"Twenty minutes," he said, when we reached my door. He set it closed quietly. Didn't slam it. Stood outside it for a moment before his footsteps moved away.

Maria found me before he came back.

She appeared in my doorway with red eyes and her hands already reaching and I let her pull me in because I had maybe fifteen minutes left in this building and I wasn't going to spend them being strong.

"I heard," she whispered.

"I know."

She held me the way she had held me a handful of times across two years. Then I stepped back and finished packing because there was nothing else to do.

She pressed folded bills into my hand. More than she should have had.

"Maria—"

"Don't," she said.

I closed my fingers around the money.

Logan appeared in the doorway. His eyes moved from Maria to me to the floor. "Time," he said. Quietly.

Maria squeezed my hands once and her face did everything mine had been trained not to do and I memorized it, because I understood that this was goodbye and there wasn't going to be another Maria where I was going.

The lobby was empty.

The rain was already coming down when the doors opened. New York in November, cold and indifferent, the city going about its evening entirely unaware.

I pressed my hand over my stomach.

"We don't need him," I said quietly. To the baby. To myself. "We never needed him."

I started walking.

Two blocks.

Then the awareness arrived before the sight, the sensation of being watched, the specific quality of very old attention that had already decided what it wanted before it let itself be seen.

I turned around slowly.

Three figures stood in the shadows of the alley to my left. Their eyes glowed red in the dark. Their smiles appeared when they saw me looking.

"Well, well," one of them said.

My blood went cold.

"If it isn't the Nightshade heir. We've been looking for you."

I ran.