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“Why did you never speak to me like this before? Why didn’t you share this?” My eyes are wet with tears. Tears for him. Tears for our baby. Tears for myself.

“You’re desperate now,” he says. “You fear for yourself and your baby. You don’t trust that I will be a father to it, or that you will be a mother. But I’m telling you, we will do what is necessary to raise this child. I was sent away while my people committed atrocities and in the end I was left with the blood money my father’s efforts garnered our family. I have never been a good man, Chloe. My blood runs dark in my veins. You cannot expect kindness or mercy from me. But you can expect me to exercise my power in the manner which grows our family stronger.”

“Just what every infant needs,” I say, trying hard to hide the bitterness, but failing.

“I can be a good father, Chloe. And I can be a good husband.”

“Are you going to put a crib in the cage with me?”

He shakes his head, a hint of a smile appearing on his lips. “Some things will have to change. For starters, we are returning home.”

“What home?”

“Yours.”

I stare at him in disbelief. “So that’s it? Baby makes everything better? We have been fighting for weeks, Darko. We’ve barely spoken, except to fuck, and now this little scan changes everything? Are we seriously going to pretend that’s how this is going to go?”

“Marriage is like that sometimes,” he says. “And you know, you’ve probably been hormonal.”

“Me! This has not all been on me!”

“Maybe some of it was my fault,” he admits graciously.

“Maybe all of it was. Maybe everything up to and including this stowaway in my stomach.”

“Maybe,” he admits.

A smile is starting to emerge from me and I don’t understand it. I have been so deeply angry, so completely miserable, so fiery and so aggressive, and suddenly it as if everything is all okay just because I’m pregnant. It cannot be that simple.

“We’re fucked up, Darko.”

“Yes,” he agrees. “So is everyone else.”

Chapter Seventeen

Chloe

I never thought I would set foot in my old home again. I thought that chapter of my life was closed. I thought I would live the rest of my life in some far-flung location, being roughly fucked and thoroughly punished, but this pregnancy has changed everything. It has changed Darko, and it has changed me.

Now I waddle up and down the stairs I used to run up and down as a teenager, and slide down as a kid. The bedroom I grew up in has been transformed into a nursery. The home my father died in, and I was taken in, has become the staging ground for a new life for all of us.

“M’lady, please.” Miles sounds desperately frustrated. “Use the elevator.”

“I don’t like the elevator.”

“Use the elevator.” A deep, commanding voice comes from behind me, warm lips on the back of my neck. Darko picks me up and carries me the rest of the way down the stairs, into the kitchen where I was heading for a snack.

I have to give him credit, he is playing domesticated well. As am I. I’m wearing a maternity dress with big yellow flowers on it. Darko is wearing slacks and a woolen Dad sweater. We both look stupid as far as I’m concerned, but we’re playing the roles anyway, what else can we do?

“Just a few more days and you can do what you want with that body,” Darko smiles as I descend on pickles and ice cream. “Until then, be careful.”

“That’s not true,” I say. “I haven’t been able to do what I want with my body since I met you. I think you mean a few more days and you can do what you want with it, except you won’t be able to because it’s six weeks of healing and then…”

He shakes his head. “I have my ways of using you no matter what…”

“I know you… owww?”

A sudden curious pain low in my belly interrupts our bickering. It’s not like any I’ve felt before. It’s not like the kicking that has been threatening to pulverize my internal organs for weeks. It’s like everything got very tight all of a sudden and very intense.

Water runs down my thighs, warm and wet and oh, my god, I’m peeing myself… oh, wait…

“I’m having it! I’m having the baby.”

“You won’t be,” Darko says from the interior of the fridge where he is smelling cheese. “It’s your first baby. Labor takes a long time. We read in the books, remember?”

“Darko!” I shriek his name and he whips around. There is real panic in my voice. The baby is coming, and nobody has told it that it is supposed to be slow. I have been feeling things all day, but I didn’t think it was labor. It didn’t hurt enough, and maybe my pain calibration is way off, maybe I don’t know what pain even is anymore.



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