Page 192 of Marrying My Ex's Brother
The timer on my phone goes off. The sound makes me jump.
I turn slowly. The test lies on the counter, small and white and ordinary.
Two lines.
For a moment, I don’t understand.
Then I do. I pick it up with numb fingers.
Two lines.
Pregnant.
The word opens under my ribs and steals the air from my lungs. I sit down on the edge of the bathtub because my legs will not hold me.
The bathroom is very quiet. Outside, the house continues around me. Footsteps somewhere in the hall. A door closing. Distant voices. The guarded, controlled life of the Volkov estate moving on as if nothing has changed.
But everything has changed.
I’m pregnant.
Yaromir’s child is inside me.
A laugh comes out of me, small and terrified and not really a laugh at all. I press my hand over my mouth, then lower it to my stomach again.
There’s nothing to feel yet. Still, my palm rests there like it knows something the rest of me is only beginning to understand.
I should think of what this means politically. Instead, the first clear thought that comes is much smaller.
Yaromir is going to lose his mind.
And then, because I’m apparently losing mine too, I start to cry.
I close my eyes, and all I can see is his face. The way he looks when he’s angry. The way he looks when he’s trying not to soften. The way he stood in the breakfast room this morning and told me not yet, because the world outside our gates is full of men who might hurt me to reach him.
What will he do when he finds out?
Lock the gates forever?
Put guards outside every door?
Carry me from room to room like I might break?
Or worse, will he look pleased? That thought frightens me more than the others.
Yaromir pleased is not simple. His happiness has teeth. His protection already feels like a wall closing in. A child will turn that wall into a fortress.
I stand too quickly and nearly drop the test into the sink. “Oh God.”
I can’t leave it here. That thought cuts through the panic first. Not the baby. Not the future. Not my husband’s reaction.
The stick.
I look around the bathroom as if someone might already be watching me. Ridiculous. The door is locked. Still, the Volkov house has too many eyes, too many silent maids, too many guards who lower their heads and report everything that matters.
I wrap the test in tissue. Then I wrap it again. Then, because that doesn’t feel like enough, I tuck it into the bottom of an old cosmetics pouch I hardly use and shove that behind a folded stack of towels in the lowest bathroom cabinet.
Not hidden well enough. Nothing in this house feels hidden well enough.
