MasukMAYAKieran called her at four that afternoon and said he'd eaten properly today.He said it the way he said most things just the fact, no performance around it. He'd had breakfast, actual breakfast, and lunch, and he was going to eat dinner. He said it because he knew she'd been worrying and he was the kind of person who took note of that even when he pretended not to.She got off the phone and stood in her kitchen for a minute.Then she opened the fridge and started cooking. Not heating something up, not assembling things out of packets. Actually cooking, from scratch, with a pan on the hob and a knife on the board and something that needed watching. She needed something to do with her hands. She'd been needing something to do with her hands for about three days.It had been a long few months.✦ ✦ ✦Dr. Chen's text came in at six.Kieran's hormone levels this morning are the best they've been since week eight. Thought you'd want to know.Maya stood at the stove and read it. Read
He stood sideways in the bathroom mirror at seven in the morning and just looked at it. the kind of feeling that needed managing. He does this about once a week now, same as checking the weather brief, informational. He'd stopped being shocked by his own reflection somewhere around week twenty-four. What replaced the shock was something he couldn't name it .Just the recognition that his body was doing something enormous and he was still in it, still standing, still getting dressed and opening laptops and doing calls and carrying all of it forward. Thirty weeks. Two small people who had been working through their own scheduling disagreements with his spine all night. He turned away from the mirror and went to make tea. ✦ ✦ ✦ Elliot had been giving him space for two weeks. He'd asked for it. That part was always the first thing he reminded himself. This was his choice. Clean distance, exactly as requested, Elliot holding to it without trying to chip at the edges. No messages excep
CLARAThe text came in at eight on a Thursday morning.Elliot: Are you free for coffee?She looked at it. Elliot texted for logistics, not for social things. If he wanted to see someone he had his assistant call their assistant and things got arranged. A direct text at eight in the morning asking if she was free meant something was going on.She typed back: Give me an hour.✦ ✦ ✦He was already there when she arrived. In civilian clothes, which she noticed immediately because Elliot in civilian clothes meant he hadn't come from the office and wasn't going to the office and was therefore not in performance mode. He looked like a person instead of a CEO, which was rarer than it should have been.She got a coffee and sat across from him."What happened?" she said."Nothing bad." He looked at his cup. "I just needed to talk to someone who knew me before all of this.""Before all of what?""Before I knew what I was actually like," he said. He said it without self-pity, just as a fact. Cl
Three days after Sunday and the world had not ended.That was still a surprise, honestly. He'd been bracing for something to fall apart for so long that the absence of falling apart felt suspicious. He lay in bed on Wednesday morning and listened to the building and waited for the thing to go wrong.Nothing went wrong. A bus went past outside. Someone's alarm was going off two floors up and then stopped. The twins shifted, both of them, doing their usual morning check-in.He got up and made tea.It was different. He'd expected different, but this was a specific kind of different he hadn't planned for. Quieter. Like something that had been taking up a lot of space in his chest had been put down, and now there was just room where that thing used to be. He didn't know what to do with all the room yet. He kept reaching for the weight of the secret and finding it wasn't there.It was like forgetting you'd been holding something and then noticing your hands were empty.✦ ✦ ✦His phone buzz
Week 22 — Kieran POVIt was eleven-forty and he'd been staring at the same paragraph for fifteen minutes.He knew this because he'd checked the time when he started reading it and checked again just now and the only difference was that the tea beside his laptop had gone completely cold. The paragraph was about contractor liability thresholds in the phase three agreement and it had made sense the first time he read it at nine o'clock and apparently stopped making sense somewhere around the tenth reading.He was twenty-two weeks pregnant with twins and it was almost midnight and his brain had stopped cooperating.He got up.He went to the kitchen. He stood in front of the open fridge for a while. Nothing looked right. He wanted something but he couldn't name it, the kind of craving that was more like an itch than an actual appetite. He stood there long enough that the fridge started making the little alarm sound it made when you left the door open too long.He closed the fridge. He looke
ELLIOTHe had a habit he hadn't told anyone about.Every morning when he got to the office, he walked past Kieran's workstation on the way to his own. He didn't stop. He didn't slow down. He just walked past it the same way you walked past a chair where someone used to sit, without deciding to look and somehow always looking anyway.Ryan had been keeping it ready. The monitor was on, the way Kieran left it. The cable management along the back of the desk was still neat and precise, each wire exactly where it was supposed to be. The small spider plant in the corner had been there since week four and was still alive, green and completely unfussy, growing in the particular way plants grew when someone was actually looking after them.The first week Elliot assumed Ryan was watering it. The second week he walked past it and noticed the soil was damp and Ryan was in a meeting that had started forty minutes ago. He'd stood there for a second, doing the math, and then walked on without saying
Kieran woke up exhausted despite having slept seven hours, which should have been more than enough. His body felt heavy, like someone had filled his bones with lead overnight. He lay there for a moment, staring at the unfamiliar hotel ceiling, trying to remember what day it was. Thursday. Day four
Clara’s intuition lingered in the air like a held breath. She wasn’t convinced, not completely, but she let the topic drop with a soft, uncertain “If you say so…”Her eyes stayed on him a moment longer than they should have. Not suspicious now just… worried. An omega’s instincts could pick up subtl
Kieran stood there in the empty office for a moment, staring at the bank transfer authorization on the desk. One hundred thousand dollars. Blood money. Hush money. Payment for being a good little omega and keeping his mouth shut about being fucked and discarded.He picked up the paper, folded it ca
The ambulance ride to the hospital felt like the longest journey of Kieran's life. He sat on the hard bench while a paramedic fussed over his shoulder wound, re-bandaging it with efficient movements. The woman kept asking him questions: was he in pain, did he feel dizzy, had he experienced any tra







