Lucas's silence lasted only a breath, long enough for both of them to feel how fragile the moment had become. Behind his composed face, a private calculus was running he knew, with the cold clarity of habit, that he didn't love Cole. Their engagement was an arrangement gilded with duty and expectation, not the messy, flaring thing people called love. He didn't love Amara either. Not in the way novels defined it. But when he looked at her when he remembered the way her hazel eyes had caught the light that night a small, irrational image had lodged in him: children with her hair, her stubborn chin, those eyes. The idea of his own blood carrying something of her was disarmingly beautiful and terrifying at once.
He'd never been the sentimental sort; a string of conquests and quick exits had taught him how little he felt tethered afterward. Consequences, historically, were for other people. But here, in this sunlit study, consequences had a heartbeat.
"Think about what you want," he said, softer now, a mercenary tenderness in his tone. "Don't be reckless."
Before Amara could answer before the words that had pooled at the back of her throat could find purchase Elna entered the room as if she had been waiting at the doorway forever. She had overheard enough from the corridor to know the bare bones of the situation: the word pregnancy, the tremor in Amara's voice, the awkward pause in Lucas's defenses. Her face, always composed like a carved marble, tightened into something colder.
"No grandchild of mine shall be terminated," she declared, and the sentence landed like a verdict.
Elna moved with the swift authority of a woman who had never had to ask for anything twice. Her presence filled the study tall, immaculate, the skin of her hands pale as porcelain and yet somehow iron-strong. "Amara," she said, looking directly at her, "you will move into our house. You will be under my care until those children are born."
Amara's head snapped up. "With respect, Mrs. Henderson" she began, but Elna cut her off without effort.
"You will come, and you will be provided for. You will have privacy. You will have medical care," Elna said, her voice losing any softness it once had. "Or you will do otherwise, and I will make sure this this embarrassment disappears in ways you cannot imagine."
The threat, veiled though it was by grandmotherly concern, tasted of steel. Elna did not need to elaborate. Her name alone opened doors; her charities and board memberships were whispered like credentials in courtrooms and city halls. "If you choose termination," she continued, each word deliberate, "I will ensure the law finds a reason to make you pay. You will be prosecuted for coercion, for fraud whatever angle protects the family's name. Do not mistake my civility for weakness."
Amara felt the blood drain from her face. The room, the papers, Lucas's half-turned profile all of it blurred. Shelter or threat; sanctuary or a gilded cage. Elna's offer had the shape of salvation: a hospital with the best doctors, a nursery stocked and ready, the promise that the children her children would be born into comfort. But the cost was immediate and personal: she would be living in the mansion, sleeping in a guest wing two doors down from the woman she had never wanted to hurt but whose life she might upend.
"Stay," Lucas said before she could speak, and his voice was softer, complicated. It felt like consent, but it was no hand extended it was a decision being made for her by forces she could not control.
Amara's mind raced. To accept would mean proximity to the man who had turned away at the news, to the woman he would soon marry, to a household that treated her like an annex of convenience. It meant carrying twins in a house that did not love them and being watched by a mother who would protect the family's bloodline with the same ruthlessness she used to protect the family ledger. The irony was bitter: a single reckless night had seeded not only life but a political crisis, and now those tiny heartbeats were bargaining chips.
Her first impulse rage faded quickly into a cold, animal fear. How would she bear waking each morning in that house where everything was curated, controlled, and measured against the Henderson ideal? How could she sit across from Lucas at breakfast, knowing that his tenderness had been purchased by circumstance and could evaporate with a whisper from Cole or a scandalous headline? How could she keep two lives alive when the very people offering shelter had said, in effect, that their worth could be weighed against a reputation?
She pictured the nursery Elna had promised, white and soft an image that should have comforted her and instead saw bars and glass: windows that looked out on a life she might never belong to, and a man whose hands had known her body but not the small, ordinary acts that build family.
Nina's voice in her headbright, trusting made the choice more cruel. Amara thought of the tuition they'd agonized over, of the pills that kept their mother steady. The offer was a lifeline. But at what moral price?
Trembling, Amara folded her hands in her lap like someone trying to hold themselves together long enough to map an escape route. Lucas watched her with a strange, private vulnerability less of a lover's longing than of a man making a practical decision he would not have chosen if honesty were not so inconvenient.
Elna's stare cut a clean line through the room: "You will not do this alone. Not in my family." Her tone was final.
Amara understood then what the rest of her life might demand: that she choose between safety and agency, between the two small lives pressing against her ribs and the dignity of her own body and decisions. And she knew, with the bone deep certainty of someone who had already learned to survive on nothing, that either choice would scorch something precious.
Outside the study windows, lights in neighboring buildings blinked on. Inside, a family arranged itself like a chessboard, pieces shifting at the will of those who held the power.