Page 19 of Bred By the Tsar

"I'm pregnant," I tell him, like he can't already see it pouring down my face. "It's — there's a—"

He doesn't let me finish. He gathers me up off the cold marble and into his lap and bends and presses his mouth to my stomach. I feel him shaking, feel him laugh, feel something hot drop onto my bare skin and realize, astonished, that the Tsar, the ruler of the country, is crying.

"Mine," he says against the place where our child is. The oldest word he has. The only one. Made brand new. "Both of you. Moya dusha — I told you. I told you exactly what I'd do."

He lifts his head and his eyes are wet and feral and worshipful all at once, and his hands come up to frame my face the way they did the first night, the way they did at the gate.

"You're going to marry me in three weeks before you show a thing," he says, "and I am going to spend every day of this on my knees right here, and you are going to be so beautiful round with my child that I genuinely do not know how I'll be expected to run a country." He kisses me.

"I wanted a family," I whisper.

"You're going to have the largest, most loved family this country has ever seen." He says it like a vow, like a law, like a man who has never once in his life been wrong about what he feels. "Starting with this one. Starting right now."

And then I watch the reverence in him turn into something else.

It happens in real time — the kneeling worshipper becoming a feral beast, because the idea has fully landed now, that I am carrying his child, that he did this, that the filthy litany he's growled into my skin since the first night is no longer a fantasy but a fact growing inside me.

It blows his pupils black. It wrecks his breathing.

"I need—" His voice has gone to gravel. "Hazel. I have to—"

"I know." I'm already reaching for him. "Me too."

Konstantin lifts me off the floor like I weigh nothing and won't set me down. He carries me to the bed and lays me out on it like something that might shatter, which is new, which is the protectiveness rewiring him before my eyes. But the way he comes over me is not careful. The way he comes over me is starving.

"Say it again." He drags my dress up, mouth at my throat, my breast, his hand already between my thighs. "I need to hear it while I'm inside you."

“I’m pregnant—” It breaks on a gasp. “Konstantin, I’m carrying your—”

He makes a sound I’ve never heard from him, low and broken and animal, and then there’s nothing between us and he’s pushing into me slow and deep and reverent and desperate all at once. The stretch is immediate, overwhelming; he sinks to the root and stays there for a heartbeat, shaking, as if the knowledge that I’m already full of him has rewritten every nerve in his body. Then the old litany starts—except now every word of it is true, and every thrust drives it deeper.

“Did this.” Each stroke claiming, deep, and somehow still careful, careful even gone this far. The wet, heavy drag of him inside me is filthy and perfect. “I did this to you. Put my child in you and it took. You’re mine—you’re proven—you’re carrying me.” His big hand splays low and possessive over my belly, over the secret nobody can see yet, pressing down just enough that I feel the pressure of him from both sides—cock buried deep, palm claiming the future. “Mine. Both of you. Say whose you are.”

“Yours—” I’m sobbing it, lit up everywhere, the knowing of what’s happening inside me wound so tight with the pleasure I can’t tell them apart. Every time he bottoms out I feel it in my bones: the thick pulse of him, the way my body opens and clenches around the man who already owns the next heartbeat growing under his hand. “Yours, both of us, Gosudar’, please—”

That word, that name, does what it always does to him. The last of the careful goes and he gives me all of it—deep and devastating and worshipful, his forehead dropped to mine, watching my face exactly the way he did the first night.

I want to watch you become mine.

Except I already am. Completely. Twice over, now. He fucks me harder, hips snapping, the wet slap of skin on skin filling the room, his free hand fisting the sheets beside my head while the other never leaves my stomach.

“Feel that?” he growls against my mouth, driving in so deep I see white. “That’s me. That’s the man who put a baby in you. Going to keep filling you, keep breeding you, keep you round and claimed until the whole palace knows exactly what I’ve done.” His thrusts turn short and brutal, chasing the edge. “Come for me. Come on your husband’s cock while you’re already carrying his child.”

I break around him with my fists in his shirt, walls clamping down hard enough to make him groan, and he follows a heartbeat later with his palm still spread over my belly, flooding me in thick, endless pulses like he can pour even more of himself into the life we’ve already made—holding deep, grinding, kissing me through every aftershock as if the future is something he can keep safe with nothing but his body and his vow.

After, he won't let me move.

Konstantin cleans me up and tucks the blanket over us both and arranges me against his chest with his hand returned to my stomach the very instant it's free, like it's found the only place it intends to live from now on, and he presses his mouth to my hair and murmurs things in Russian I don't know yet but understand completely.

I finally, completely, stop bracing for the moment it all gets taken away.

It isn't going to get taken away.

It's just going to grow.

14

Konstantin