Page 66 of Scaled Daddy's Secret Heir
“I always do.”
CHAPTER 22
LEAH
The briefing glows in the dim half-light of the ops room, its surface pulsing blue with urgency.
I read it once. Then again. Then a third time, slower, letting each word settle into the marrow of my bones. The target coordinates, the mission window, the secondary fallback routes. Every piece is sharp-edged and stripped down, clinical in its certainty and confident in its brutality.
Talvek.
That name carries weight. Enough to crush small rebellions and large hesitations alike.
But what tightens in my gut isn’t the risk of the kill. It’s what’s missing in the margins. The echoes between the lines. The uncomfortable silence where strategy should be.
This isn’t clean.
And clean is something I know by now.
I flip to the logistics tabs, fingers steady, heart hammering like it wants out. I tag the structural schematics, note the gaps in sensor coverage, run my own cross-checks against local weather flux to anticipate blindspots in visual feeds.
None of this is new.
What is new—what I haven’t let myself touch yet—is the reason my chest hasn’t stopped aching since the moment Kalev said yes.
I lean back, one hand resting on my stomach.
Still flat. Still silent.
But not empty.
Not anymore.
A breath catches in my throat. I swallow it down with practiced precision. There’s no space for tears here. Not in this room. Not when there’s blood about to be spilled and my hands are part of the equation.
I should tell him.
Ishouldtell him.
I run the line in my head, again and again:
I’m pregnant.
Two words. Simple. But they hit like ordnance in my chest every time I imagine saying them.
He’ll change.
His choices will shift. He’ll hesitate. Maybe not obviously, maybe not at first. But somewhere between the lines of the mission, between the kill and the exfil, he’ll remember. He’ll try to protect me in ways that get people dead.
And that—that—is the thing I can’t risk.
So I don’t tell him.
Instead, I bury it.
I build redundancies into the mission schematic, silent and unnoticed. Backup uplinks. Underground med-bay alert protocols. A second evac route I don’t log in the official system.
I do it all alone, in the quiet hours before dawn, while Kalev calibrates his rifles and sharpens the edge of his jaw with silence.
