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Home / Paranormal / Pregnant for the ruthless billionaire vampire / Chapter 51 - Chapter 60

All Chapters of Pregnant for the ruthless billionaire vampire: Chapter 51 - Chapter 60

86 Chapters

CHAPTER 51

ELENA'S POV I raised both hands and pushed. Everything I had. All of it, directed at the column of gold light rising from the cracked earth, reaching for the binding the way I had reached for Viviana's stopped heart in that mountain cabin, not forcing, not overwhelming, just finding the frequency and pressing into it, reminding it what it was supposed to do. The column flickered. Just once. A single hesitation in its upward surge. But Konstantin felt it. He turned from the center of the clearing and looked at me across the battle still raging between us and his expression shifted for the first time since we arrived. The patience cracked at the edges. Just the edges. But it cracked. "Hold her," he said. Three cult members broke from the outer ring and came directly at me. Lucian took two of them before they crossed half the distance. The third reached us and Seraphine put him down from the right without breaking stride, her blade finding the gap between his defense and

CHAPTER 52

ELENA'S POV The ground stopped shaking. That was the worst part. The tremor had been constant since we arrived and the silence that replaced it was heavier than any sound had been. The kind of silence that meant something had finished becoming what it was always going to become. The column of gold light compressed inward. All that surging energy pulled into a single point so bright I turned my face away. Even through closed eyes it pressed against my skin, warm and old and carrying a frequency that made the threading framework in my chest respond the way prey responded to a predator, before the mind caught up, before the decision was made, just the body knowing. Lucian's arm tightened around me. The light went out. Three seconds of complete darkness. Nobody moved. The battle sounds had died, wolves, cult members, everyone caught in the same suspended moment, every instinct holding its breath. Then the presence arrived. It didn't move through the clearing. It didn't trav

CHAPTER 53

ELENA'S POV Lucian had me off the ground before the gold light finished fading from my hands. He didn't ask. He didn't pause to assess or calculate or do any of the things he did in every other situation. He simply picked me up and moved and the clearing fell away beneath us as he ran. Another contraction. I grabbed his jacket with both hands and pressed my face against his shoulder and breathed through it while the world moved at a speed my body had no business moving at right now. The gold light had come off my hands involuntarily when the contraction hit, a surge I hadn't directed or controlled, just raw power responding to raw pain, blazing off my skin and lighting the clearing like a second sun for three full seconds before I dragged it back. Cain had seen it. Of course he had. "Seraphine," Lucian said without slowing. "Go." Her voice from somewhere behind us. Already further than it should have been. I lifted my head. She was facing the clearing. Alone. Stan

CHAPTER 54

ELENA'S POV Nara had three minutes to prepare. That was what she told Petra when she came through the door of the back room and found me already past the point where preparation was a meaningful concept. Three minutes. Like three minutes was a number that changed anything about the situation we were both currently inside. "I need more light," Nara said. "There is no more light," Petra said. "Then get closer to the one we have." Lucian moved the lamp without being asked. Closer. Angled exactly where Nara pointed without her finishing the point. He did it one-handed because the other hand was around mine and he had made a decision about that hand that apparently didn't involve releasing me regardless of what else needed doing. I wasn't going to argue with that decision. Another contraction. This one started before the last one had fully finished releasing and I grabbed Lucian's hand with both of mine and pressed my back into the surface beneath me and made a sound I had

CHAPTER 55

ELENA'S POV The shockwave was still moving. I felt it through the bond, outward and outward and outward, Aurora's frequency spreading through the supernatural world the way Cain's presence had spread through the clearing. Different in quality. Hers was gold and clean and carried none of the crushing weight his did. But it was just as total. Just as impossible to ignore. Aurora had stopped looking at nothing. She was looking at me now with those gold eyes that had no business being that focused in a newborn and both her small hands were pressed flat against my chest like she was checking something. I'm here. I'm right here. She blinked once. Satisfied. Lucian's forehead came down against my temple. His eyes were closed and the bond between us was running so wide open that I felt what he felt receiving his daughter's frequency for the first time through it, something that had no name, something that lived below language, the particular collision of a man who had existed for

CHAPTER 56

ELENA'S POV Cain's interest moved through the clearing like a change in temperature. Aurora felt it before I did. She turned her head toward the dark where the enslaved vampires stood at the perimeter, those flat empty eyes tracking us with the patience of something that had no urgency because urgency implied the possibility of failure, and she made a sound. Small. Deliberate. Not a newborn sound. Something more focused than that. Like a response. Lucian's arm tightened around her. "Don't," I said quietly. "I'm not doing anything," he said. "Keep not doing anything." The enslaved vampires hadn't moved. Twenty-three of them, maybe more by now, positioned at intervals around the clearing's edge with the coordinated stillness of something being operated rather than something standing. I recognized faces. Serge. Two of Lucian's council members. Now they stood here with Cain's frequency overwriting everything that had made them who they were. Ryker was beside me. Not

CHAPTER 57

ELENA'S POV We made it back to the safe house at dawn. Viviana was at the door before the vehicle stopped moving. She stood in the frame with her arms crossed and her ruby eyes doing the rapid assessment that covered every face in the group simultaneously, counting, checking, confirming. Her jaw was tight in the specific way it went tight when she had been managing something alone for too long and was deciding whether to express the relief or the fury first. She chose the fury. That was Viviana. "Forty minutes," she said to Ryker as he came through the door. "Forty minutes of Cain's reach moving through the city and nobody answering." "I'm sorry," he said. He crossed to her and his hands came to her face and he looked at her for a long moment with those amber eyes doing the thing they did when he had been afraid of something specific and was confirming with his own hands that it wasn't true. She let him look. "The baby?" he said. "Fine," she said. "We're both fine."

CHAPTER 58

ELENA'S POV Lucian hit the wall hard enough to crack it. Ryker had driven him there, both of them tangled together on the floor a second ago and now upright, Lucian's shoulder taking the impact while his hands found Ryker's throat with the same mechanical precision he'd used on every threat since the control took him. "Get him off," I said. "Working on it," Ryker said through his teeth. Aurora was across the room in Seraphine's arms, her small hands pressed flat against Seraphine's collarbone, the faint gold still flickering at her fingertips. Seraphine had positioned herself in the corner farthest from the fight, her back to the wall, every line of her body built around the single fact of keeping Aurora out of reach. Lucian threw Ryker off. Ryker hit the table. Kyle's screens went over. Papers scattered. Lucian turned toward me. I raised both hands. "I'm not going to hurt you," I said. His flat silver eyes didn't respond to that. There was nothing behind them to

CHAPTER 59

ELENA'S POV "Everyone moves. Now." Lucian was on his feet before I finished the sentence, one hand still braced against the cracked wall, his legs unsteady and his jaw set against it. "Can you stand?" I said. "I can stand enough," he said. Kyle's phone was still going off under the table. He pulled it free and looked at the screen and his face did the thing it did when the news was bad enough that delivering it required no preamble. "Three vehicles," he said. "Eight minutes out. Confirmed enslaved signatures." "He's sending them here," Seraphine said. Aurora was still in her arms, both small hands pressed flat against her collarbone, gold light pulsing faint and steady at her fingertips like something keeping time. "He saw the safe house through Lucian's eyes for half a second," I said. "That's all he needed." Viviana came out of the back room with one hand braced against the doorframe and the other pressed against her stomach. Five months pregnant and moving like every

CHAPTER 60

ELENA'S POV By the second day, Kyle stopped reading the reports out loud. He just turned the laptop around and let us see for ourselves. Easier that way. Faster. The numbers had grown past the point where saying them meant anything — three hundred, six hundred, a number that kept climbing every time he refreshed the feed. We were in the back room of a motel forty miles outside the city, the kind of place that took cash and didn't ask questions, six adjoining rooms rented under three different names. Ryker's wolves rotated the perimeter in shifts. Viviana slept when she could, which wasn't often. Aurora slept more than any of us, which was its own kind of strange because newborns weren't supposed to also be growing visibly between naps. "The council," Kyle said, "is gone." "Gone how," Lucian said. He'd been standing at the window for the last ten minutes, arms crossed, watching the parking lot like watching it would change anything about what was happening sixty miles away.

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