Page 92 of The Kingpin’s Bride

My wife was watching me over the rim of her coffee cup, something careful in her expression.

“There’s one more thing,” she said quietly. “I was waiting until she was safe to tell you.”

She set the cup down.

“I’m pregnant.”

The words landed in the quiet kitchen like a held breath finally released. Camilla kept humming, oblivious. I stared at Morena for a long second, then reached across the table and covered her hand with mine.

“Say it one more time.”

“I’m pregnant with your baby.”

I stared at her.

The kitchen did not change. Camilla’s orange-peel tower listed a little to the left. The espresso had gone cold in my cup. Morena’s hand was small and warm under mine, the same hand that had put my mother’s ring on itself three weeks ago and then dared me to live with it.

Pregnant.

The word did not land like triumph. It landed like a door slamming open in a house I had spent my whole life locking.

I had wanted this. I had scheduled it. I had come inside her in front of the Five Families and called it strategy. I had told myself heirs were the price of the seat and her body was the method. I had been a liar then, and I was a worse one now, because the first thing that moved through me was not the chair and not the bloodline.

It was the idea of my wife as a mother.

A baby. Mine.

My thumb found the inside of her wrist. Her pulse was fast. Not fear. Not exactly. The kind of speed that comes after you finally set a thing down and wait to see if the other person drops it.

I brought her hand to my mouth and kissed her knuckles. Once. Harder than the moment deserved. I tasted coffee and the faint salt of her skin and the knowledge that I had put this in her when I was still pretending she was only a solution.

“How long?”

“I’m not sure about the specifics,” she muttered. “Since before I ran.”

Camilla hummed and added another peel to the tower. She did not look up. The world, for her, was still breakfast.

I looked at Morena’s stomach. There was nothing to see yet. Soft. Hidden under one of my shirts. I had had my hand there a dozen times since she came home and I had felt only heat and breath and the stubborn fact that she was still here. I had not felt this. I had not let myself.

Something in my chest pulled tight enough to hurt.

Not joy. Not yet. Joy was too clean a word for a man who had burned a bloodline so he could sit at a table and then used a girl’s womb to keep the chair. What I felt was worse and better. Ownership with the sharp edge knocked off. Terror that I would become the man who made children watch. A hunger so specific it made my hands want to shake. I did not let them.

“I’m just tired. And hungry. And I didn’t want to tell you in a kitchen full of orange peels if you were going to look at me like I had handed you another weapon.”

“I’m not.”

“You are thinking it.”

“I’m thinking,” I said, and had to stop, because the truth was uglier than the version she expected, “that I planned this when I did not love you yet, and now I do, and that makes it better.”

Her fingers tightened in mine.

Camilla knocked the top off her tower and said a very quiet “oops.” Neither of us moved to fix it.

“Come with me.”

She glanced at Camilla.