Chapter 24
Siobhan
The Secret
* * *
The first morning, I blame the oysters from Elena's lunch two days ago.
I make it to the bathroom before Nico wakes.
Knees on the marble, forehead against the toilet seat, body convulsing with a violence that feels disproportionate to anything I've eaten.
The retching is loud and raw and completely beyond my control.
My hands shake on the porcelain. My stomach empties in waves that leave me gasping, hollow, sweat beading along my hairline.
When it passes, I flush. Brush my teeth. Rinse with mouthwash. Study my face in the mirror: pale, damp, eyes too bright. I look like a woman recovering from a bar fight, not a quiet night in bed with her husband.
I go back. Nico is still asleep, one arm slung across my side of the mattress. I slide beneath it, and his hand finds my hip automatically, pulling me into the collarbone hollow. His breathing doesn't change. I press my face into his chest and will my stomach to settle.
Stress. The war, the back room at Elysium, blood on my lips. The body processes trauma physically. I've told clients this a hundred times. I wrote a Ward Risk Advisory white paper on crisis-related physiological response. Stress.
The second morning, stress becomes a thinner explanation.
Same time. Same violence. I barely make it, catching myself on the doorframe, dropping to my knees hard enough to bruise.
Nico is in the shower. I can hear the water through the wall, which means he can't hear me, which means the retching and the gasping and the animal sound I make when my stomach contracts around nothing are mine alone.
I crouch on the cold marble with my hair stuck to my face and my body doing things entirely without my permission and I think: this isn't stress.
I brush my teeth twice. Use concealer under my eyes. He notices anyway.
"You okay?"
"Fine. Didn't sleep well."
He studies me over his coffee. The tactical assessment. I hold his gaze the way I've held it since the first day in his office: level, steady, giving nothing away. He accepts it. Why wouldn't he? I've never lied to him before.
The third morning, I don't make it to the bathroom.
Nico is in the shower again. I'm at the kitchen island with my laptop, a client email half-drafted, coffee untouched because the smell of it — the smell I've loved since I was sixteen, the smell that used to be the first good thing about any morning — turns my stomach inside out.
I lunge for the kitchen sink and throw up so hard my ribs ache.
I run the tap to cover the sound and grip the counter and stare at my hands on the granite and the thought I've been pushing into the dark corners of my mind for two days walks into the light and sits down.
I'm late.
Not a day late. Not the kind of late that stress explains.
Weeks late. My last period was before the wedding.
Before the consummation. Before the wall and the floor and the bed and every night since when we fell asleep tangled together without a single thought about consequences because we were too consumed by the war and each other to think about anything beyond surviving until morning.
I track everything. Client deadlines. Alliance movements.
Viktor's pattern of escalation. The rotation schedule of Nico's security detail.
I built a consulting firm on the principle that you see the crisis before it arrives.
And I missed THIS. The most basic biological math a woman can do, and I missed it because I was busy assessing external threats while the most significant variable in my life was multiplying inside me.
I rinse the sink. Dry my hands. Open the calendar on my phone and count backward with the methodical precision of a woman running an assessment on her own body. The wall. Day nineteen. Skin to skin. No barrier. Nothing between us. The math is clean and damning: approximately eleven days.
I need a test.
Elena called yesterday. She missed the Elysium event — family obligation, her father needed her in New York, she was apologetic in the way that means she either couldn't get out of it or didn't want to. We rescheduled our dinner to lunch. Today. A restaurant in Back Bay that she suggested.
A restaurant with a bathroom. And a pharmacy two blocks east.
I shower. Dress. Apply makeup with the same precision I use for client presentations. Nico kisses me goodbye at the door. His hand rests on my lower back. "Have a good lunch."
"I will."
"Elena?"
"Elena."
He nods. Trusts it. Why wouldn't he? Elena is family. Elena is my friend.
The security detail follows me to the restaurant.
Two men in a black sedan, professional, discreet.
They'll park across the street and wait.
They won't enter the restaurant — Nico's rule for social outings.
They watch the perimeter, not the person.
I've observed the protocol for weeks. I know the gaps.
I arrive ten minutes early. Tell the hostess I'm waiting for someone.
Then I walk back out the side entrance, turn east, and cover two blocks in four minutes.
The pharmacy is a chain. Anonymous. I pay cash.
The box goes into my bag beside my wallet and my phone and the gun I'm not carrying because formal lunches don't require a Beretta and today, I need a different kind of weapon entirely.
Back to the restaurant through the side door before the detail notices the gap. Three minutes to spare. Elena arrives, warm and polished, and I smile and stand and hug her and feel the pregnancy test box press against my hip through the leather of my bag.
Lunch is normal. Elena is good at normal.
She asks about Nico, about the penthouse, about whether I've adjusted to the Greek world.
She tells me about New York, her father, the Drakos family obligations that keep pulling her back.
She's sympathetic and curious and she makes me laugh and I keep thinking, I need this woman to keep talking for twenty more minutes so I can excuse myself to the bathroom without it seeming urgent.
Twenty-two minutes. Close enough.
"Excuse me. I'll be right back."
The bathroom. Single stall. I lock the door and the sound of the bolt sliding home is the loneliest sound I've ever heard.
I take the test. Set it on the edge of the sink. Two minutes.
I sit on the closed lid and stare at the opposite wall. Cream tile. A crack near the ceiling. The muffled sounds of the restaurant beyond the door. I count seconds because counting is the only thing my mind can do that doesn't involve calculating the implications of two possible outcomes.
One hundred and twenty seconds. I stand. I look.
Two pink lines.
The world tilts. Not a crash. Not a collapse.
A shift of two degrees that rearranges everything.
The cream tiles, the muffled restaurant, the woman in the mirror with concealer under her eyes and a pregnancy test in her hand — all of it slides sideways and resettles in a new configuration where nothing is what it was, and everything is different and I am standing in a restaurant bathroom holding proof that I am carrying Nico Konstantinos's child.
I sit back down. My hand finds my stomach.
Presses. There is nothing there that anyone could see.
Nothing that shows. But the test is absolute, and my body has been telling me for three mornings in a language I refused to translate and the math is clean: eleven days.
A cluster of cells the size of a grain of rice that will become a heartbeat that will become a person that will become the heir to an empire built on blood and loyalty and the particular stubbornness of men who refuse to die.
My first thought, Tell Nico.
Walk out of this bathroom. Call him. Say the words. He loves me. He told me so four days ago with blood on his jaw and his body still warm from mine. He'd want to know.
My second thought arrives with the precision of a risk assessment: if I tell him, I lose everything I've fought for.
I know this man. I know the man who doubled security after a photograph.
Who taught me to shoot because the danger was too close and then couldn't sleep because the fact that I needed to learn meant he'd already failed to protect me.
Who held his mother's hand in Cambridge and said "everything is on me" with fifteen years of guilt in his voice.
If I tell Nico I'm pregnant, I become the most protected thing in his world.
He will wrap me in security and send me somewhere safe and make every decision about my life in the name of keeping me and this baby alive.
He'll do exactly what my father did. What Cormac did.
What every man in my life has done: choose for me.
He'll break "together" in the name of keeping me safe. And he'll believe he's right.
It's not lying. It's timing. I'll tell him when Viktor is dealt with. When the war is over. When telling him won't cost me the partnership we've built across every negotiation and every fight and every night I walked toward him instead of away.
I wrap the test in toilet paper. Consider the trash can.
Consider taking it with me. The penthouse trash is collected by building staff who answer to Nico's security — anything unusual would be flagged.
The restaurant trash goes to a dumpster tonight and a landfill by morning.
I bury the test beneath a stack of paper towels, deep enough that casual contact won't uncover it.
The risk assessment professional in me calculates the probability of discovery at under two percent. Acceptable margin.
I wash my hands. Wash my face. Look at myself in the mirror one more time.
The woman who walked thirty feet of hallway and knocked looks back at me. She has a secret now. It's the heaviest thing she's ever carried, and it weighs nothing at all.
I unlock the door.
Elena is at the table. She looks up and her eyes sweep my face with the attentive warmth that made me trust her in the first place.
Except today the sweep lingers. On the pallor I couldn't fully conceal.
On the faint sheen at my temples. On the careful composition of a smile that takes more effort than it should.
"Are you alright? You were in there a while."
"Fine. Bad oyster."
She looks at me for one beat longer than the question requires. Her eyes hold mine with an attention I've always read as friendship and which, in this moment, I'm too exhausted to analyze further.
"You sure?"
"I'm sure."
She drops it. Reaches across the table and squeezes my hand. "You'd tell me if something was wrong, right? We're friends."
"Of course."
We finish lunch. She pays. We walk out into the February cold, and she hugs me goodbye and tells me to take care of myself and the warmth in her voice sounds real. Almost is.
In the car. Alone in the back seat. The detail up front, eyes on the road, the practiced blindness of men who are paid to watch perimeters, not passengers.
I put my hand on my stomach. Press. The first knowing touch. The first deliberate contact between my palm and the secret growing beneath it.
I'm carrying the heir to the Konstantinos empire.
And I can't tell a soul.