Page 81 of Scaled Daddy's Secret Heir

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Different. Softer. Subtle at first.

I’m in the shower — warm water sluicing down my back, steam in the small room thick enough to taste — when it hits me like a lurch in the ribs.

The world tilts.

I blink.

And the water runs warm through my fingers.

Not because I’m imagining it.

But because I can’t wash away what’s growing inside me.

I know before the test confirms it.

Not because I’m clever — because I’mliving it.

The food I once loved twists sour in my mouth. The wind out on the dunes feels too sharp. My sleep is full of dreams — warm hands, distant corridors, voices calling without words.

I take the test in the crammed bathroom stall, holding one breath in, one breath out, because the future is always measured in heartbeats.

And when the screen readspositive, I don’t gasp.

I don’t collapse.

I justfeelit — like something ancient shifting into place.

A new gravity.

Glimner’s sun dies slow, and I sit outside on the chipped stone step of my room, one hand resting lightly on my stomach — once empty, now stirring with something so small it feels impossible.

“Hey,” I murmur, voice soft as nightfall. “You’re here, huh?”

No reply, not on this world. Just the distant rumble of wind and the slow, steady thrum of my own heartbeat.

That little spark — mine, his, ours — thrums under my palm.

And for the first time in a long while, I breathe.

Birth doesn’t wait.

It storms in.

Early. Unannounced. A riot of pain and sweat and fire that I never imagined would belong to me. I collapse onto the rough mattress in my little room, boots kicked off, shirt soaked with sweat and grit, and the labor comes hard and fast.

I don’t have a doctor.

I don’t have a team.

I have a makeshift medkit and a will that twists sharp in my spine.

“Breathe,” I tell myself, over and over, in between the waves that crash through me like tidal force.

And it works.

Step by step. Breath by breath.

I push.

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