All Chapters of Pregnant for the ruthless billionaire vampire: Chapter 71 - Chapter 80

ELENA'S POVEverything the forging had taken, the guttering flicker, the fraction I'd been managing on for weeks, came back all at once. Not because the sacrifice had reversed. Because Aurora was giving me hers. Her reserves, her power, the same bloodline frequency running through a body that hadn't spent months bleeding itself into wars and rituals and the specific cost of surviving things that should have finished me.She gave it all.I felt her the moment it landed. Not beside me. Inside me. The two of us ran on the same frequency the way the same note ran through two instruments playing in unison, her instincts feeding into my responses before I consciously formed them, her awareness of the fight moving through my hands before my eyes had fully processed what they were seeing.The gold blazed off both my hands.Cain stopped moving.He'd been two steps away, one hand already reaching, the certainty of a man arriving at the conclusion of a long plan visible in every line of his body

ELENA'S POV"Don't," I said.Aurora's hands were still raised, still tracking the bond, and I grabbed her wrist before she could do anything with them."Mama—""Don't," I said again. "There has to be another way. There has to be something else. Esmeralda—""Esmeralda can't help with this," Lucian said. His voice was quieter than it had been a minute ago. Not weaker. Quieter in the way things went quiet when they were settling into something final. "It's bond architecture. It's ours. Nobody else can touch it.""Then we find something that can," I said. "We don't just, Aurora, put your hands down. We don't do this yet.""Elena." Lucian's hand tightened around mine. "Look at me."I looked at him.At the silver eyes. At the face that had been cold and closed in a penthouse two years ago and had opened, slowly, across every impossible thing between then and now."The merge is running," he said. "I can feel it. It doesn't slow down because we need more time.""Then we slow it down," I said.

ELENA'S POVThe gold light spread to his face. I watched it move, up his chest, across his collarbone, finding the lines of his jaw, settling into his skin the way light settled into something it recognized.Not the gold of my power or Aurora's. Something older than both of us, something that lived in the blade's frequency and the bond's architecture and whatever mechanics governed the kind of sacrifice that had no precedent in anything Esmeralda had ever prepared me for.I pressed both hands flat on the table and leaned over him and didn't breathe."Lucian," I said again.The light kept moving.Then his chest rose.One breath. Barely visible. The smallest possible motion.I stared at it.It happened again."Esmeralda!" I screamed. My voice came out strange, stripped of everything except the bare fact of what I needed. "Esmeralda, get in here. Now."I heard her footsteps in the corridor. Then the door opening. Then silence for three full seconds while she took in what was on the stone

ELENA'S POVViviana's work took three days, not two.She didn't apologize for that. She just kept going until it held completely, rebuilding the architecture between my vampire and Nightshade natures with the focused precision of someone who had spent their entire life studying exactly this kind of problem and was not going to leave it half-finished.When she stepped back and Nara ran the assessment, the interference had stopped.Not repaired to what it had been before the forging, that was gone, that architecture had left with the immortality and wasn't coming back. But stabilized. The two natures running alongside each other instead of against each other, held in place by the Drakov bridge Viviana had built between them, and underneath both of them the baby's presence still there, still contributing, still running the small steady cooperation through the whole structure like the baby has been doing it since before anyone knew he/she existed."How long does the bridge hold?" Lucian

ELENA'S POVJayden was only three weeks old when they came for him.Not at night. Not with the dramatic coordinated precision of Cain's cult. They came at midday, in the open, a move born of confidence, arrogance, or both. In the end, the difference didn't matter.Four of them came through the sanctuary's eastern gate.Esmeralda's wards registered them as supernatural, two vampires, one witch, one werewolf, which was its own kind of statement. The Pure Line had been deliberate about their composition. Look, they were saying. We are not one faction protecting its interests. We are a principle.The principle was that Jayden shouldn't exist.No one had to explain what that meant. Four strangers had walked into our sanctuary because my three-week-old son had committed the crime of being born.Aurora intercepted them before they reached the cottage row. Calm. Unhurried. As though she had been expecting them all morning.I wasn't there for the first thirty seconds of it. I was in the cottag