I stared at the stick so long the lines started to pulse like they were alive.
Two.
Pink.
Permanent.
The bathroom was still dark except for the weak yellow bulb above the mirror. I hadn't bothered to turn on the real light. Maybe some part of me thought if I kept everything dim, the truth would stay blurry too.
It didn't.
I set the test on the edge of the sink and backed away like it might bite me. My legs gave out halfway to the door and I slid down the wall until I was sitting on the cold tile, knees to chest, arms wrapped tight around myself.
Twenty-three years old and pregnant by a man who told me to call him Sir.
I laughed. One sharp, ugly sound that turned into a sob before it even finished. Then the tears came hard, the kind that make your ribs ache and your throat raw. I pressed the heel of my hand against my mouth so Lila wouldn't hear through the paper-thin walls.
When it finally passed, I felt scraped empty. Hollowed out and strangely steady.
I stood up, splashed water on my face, and looked at the girl in the mirror. Same tangled auburn hair. Same freckles across the bridge of my nose. Same mouth he'd kissed until it was swollen and bruised.
She looked exactly like the girl who'd walked into Club Eclipse three weeks ago begging to feel something other than terror.
Turns out the universe answers prayers in the cruelest currency.
I wrapped the test in half a roll of toilet paper and buried it under coffee grounds and eggshells. Then I pulled on yesterday's jeans, the ones with the rip at the knee, and the diner polo that smelled faintly of fryer grease no matter how many times I washed it.
I had a double shift. Rent was fourteen days late. Grandma's next scan was tomorrow, and the hospital had already sent the second "final notice" in red ink.
There was no space for collapsing.
The day dragged itself forward in greasy, fluorescent pieces.
I smiled at customers who never learned my name.
I poured endless coffee refills for men who stared at my chest while they complained about their eggs.
I wiped down sticky tables and told myself the nausea was just stress, just hunger, just anything but the truth growing inside me.
Every time I bent over to clear a plate, I felt it: a secret weight low in my belly. Not a kick. Not yet. Just the knowledge that something impossible was rooting itself in the middle of my disaster of a life.
At 4:07 p.m. my phone buzzed against my hip.
Unknown number.
I ignored it. It rang again. And again. On the fourth call I slipped into the alley behind the diner, rain misting my face, and answered.
"Miss Vale?" A woman, crisp, impatient. "This is Margaret Park from St. Mary's Financial Services. Your grandmother's account is now three hundred and eighteen thousand—"
I ended the call. My hand shook so badly the phone slipped and clattered against the wet pavement. I left it there for a second, staring at the cracked screen lighting up with Grandma's smiling face from last Christmas, back when she could still stand long enough to hang ornaments.
Three hundred and eighteen thousand dollars.
I picked the phone up, wiped it on my shirt, and went back inside.
At 6:42 p.m. my manager told me I looked like hell and to go home. I didn't argue.
The bus to the hospital smelled like wet dog and old fries. I kept one palm flat against my stomach the whole ride, not tender, just claiming. Like if I held on tight enough I could keep this tiny life from drowning in everything I couldn't fix.
Grandma was asleep when I got there. The machines hissed and beeped in their steady rhythm. I pulled the vinyl chair close, took her hand (so small now, the veins like blue rivers under translucent skin, and rested my forehead on the edge of her blanket.
"I did something stupid, Gram," I whispered. "Really stupid. And really… incredible. And I don't know how to do this without you."
Her fingers twitched in mine. For a heartbeat I thought she'd wake up, squeeze back, tell me one of her stories about how the moon used to sing to her when she was a girl.
She didn't.
I stayed until the nurse gently touched my shoulder and said visiting hours were over. I kissed Grandma's temple, promised I'd be back tomorrow with the way I always did, and walked out into the rain.
The hallway smelled like bleach and lilies left too long in water. I was halfway to the elevator when the air changed.
It got heavier. Warmer. Like someone had opened a furnace door.
I looked up.
He was standing at the nurses' station, back to me, talking to the charge nurse in a voice so low it rumbled through the floor tiles. Black coat dripping onto the linoleum. Shoulders that blocked out the light. Hair wet and wild, like he'd walked straight through the storm without an umbrella.
I knew the shape of that body the way I knew my own heartbeat.
He turned.
Golden eyes locked on me across thirty feet of hospital hallway and the world narrowed to a single point.
The nurse was still talking, but he didn't hear her anymore. He moved, slow, deliberate, every step eating the distance between us until he stopped just… stopped. Close enough that I could smell rain on his skin and the same cedar-and-midnight scent that had soaked into my sheets for weeks after that night.
He looked older in the harsh fluorescent light. Harder. A thin scar now cut through his left eyebrow that hadn't been there before. But the mouth was the same. The mouth that had whispered filthy, beautiful things against my throat while the city burned gold beneath us.
His gaze dropped, just for a fraction of a second, to my stomach.
Then back to my face.
The hallway was empty now. Even the nurse had vanished.
He took the final step.
"Hello, little fox," Cassian Lockwood said, voice rougher than I remembered, like gravel and smoke. "We need to talk."
He didn't smile. Didn't reach for me. Just looked at me like I was the answer to a question he'd been asking the universe for weeks.
Then, quieter, meant only for me:
"Marry me."
The machines down the hall kept beeping. Somewhere a cart rattled. Rain lashed the windows.
And I stood there, soaked to the bone with shock, while the father of my child, the man whose name I'd only learned from Forbes covers, offered me the one word that changed everything.
Not a question.
A demand.
And somehow, terrifyingly, like salvation