Chapter 334 Pregnant
Aria’s POV
I woke up in a bed that wasn’t mine, in a room I didn’t recognize, with sunlight coming through the wrong window.
For one merciful second I didn’t remember. Then I did, all of it, and I sat straight up so fast the room swam.
"Damian." I threw the blankets off. "Where is he. Where—"
The door opened. It was Rick. He looked like he hadn’t slept either. There were dark hollows under his eyes and a two-day shadow across his jaw, and when he saw me trying to get up he crossed the room fast to stop me.
"Easy. Sit down before you fall down."
"Where is he, Rick." I grabbed the front of his shirt. "Tell me you found him. Tell me he’s here."
He was quiet for a moment too long, and that silence hollowed me out from the inside.
"We don’t have him," he said finally. "We don’t have his body either. That’s the only good news I’ve got for you, and I’m not going to pretend it’s more than it is."
"How long." My mouth had gone dry. "How long was I out."
"Three days."
*Three days.*
The number didn’t make sense. It landed somewhere in my chest and just sat there, heavy and impossible. Three days since I’d watched him disappear into that smoke. Three days of the world turning without him in it, and I’d slept through all of it.
I called everyone and every single one of them said the same thing.
*Nothing yet. We’re looking. Nothing yet.*
By the second call I was pacing. By the fifth I was crying without noticing I’d started.
"Nobody just disappears," I said into the phone, to Julian, to anyone. "Not the Alpha King. Someone knows something. Someone always knows something."
"We’ll find him, Aria." Julian’s voice was steady, and I hated how steady it was. "You have to hold on until we do."
I hung up and stood in the middle of that unfamiliar room, and the whole thing collapsed on me at once—the fear, the helplessness, the three days I’d lost.
"I never should have gone." My voice broke on it. Rick was still standing by the door and I turned on him like it was his fault, like it was anyone’s fault but mine. "He told me to run and I ran. I let him send me away. I promised him I’d stand beside him and the second it got real I *left.*"
"You didn’t leave. He made you go."
"I should have refused." I wiped at my face with the back of my hand, furious, useless. "That’s it. I’m going back to the site. Today. Right now. If nobody else will look then I’ll—"
The room tilted again.
Not fear this time. Something else. A cold, spreading dizziness that dropped me down onto the edge of the bed with one hand splayed against the mattress just to stay upright. My stomach lurched.
"Whoa—" Rick was across the room again, catching my elbow. "Sit. When’s the last time you ate anything?"
"I’m fine." But I wasn’t. The dizziness came in a slow wave and my skin had gone clammy. "I just stood up too fast, I—"
There was a knock, and a woman came in. One of the pack physicians—I recognized her, she’d checked me over after the ambush. She took one look at my face and set her bag down on the nightstand.
"You’re pale as a sheet," she said. "Lie back. Let me look at you."
I didn’t have the strength to argue. She took my pulse, pressed cool fingers to my throat, asked me questions I answered on autopilot. When she’d been quiet for a moment too long I opened my eyes and found her watching me with a strange, careful expression.
"Miss Smith." She glanced at Rick, then back at me. "When did you last have your cycle?"
The question was so far from anything I’d been thinking about that it took me a full second to even understand it.
"I—" I stopped. Counted. Couldn’t. The last few weeks had been nothing but chaos, sleepless nights and endless ledgers and the road to that warehouse. "I don’t. I haven’t been keeping track. Things have been—"
"I’d like to run a test," she said gently. "But I think you already know what I’m going to tell you."
The room went very quiet.
I stared at her. Somewhere far off I heard Rick shift his weight, heard the physician open her bag, but it all came to me through water. My hand had drifted to my stomach without my telling it to.
"That’s not possible," I whispered. But even as I said it, the pieces were sliding into place. The exhaustion I’d blamed on the ledgers. The nausea I’d blamed on nerves. Fainting in the car. Fainting again now.
"It’s very possible," she said. "You’re carrying his child, Aria."
I don’t know how long I sat there. Long enough for the test to confirm what she already knew. Long enough for Rick to have to sit down himself, one hand dragging down his face.
*Damian’s child.*
I pressed both hands flat against my stomach and something in me went still. The panic didn’t leave. The fear for him didn’t leave.
But underneath all of it, a new thing set its teeth and held on, and it was harder and colder and more certain than anything I’d felt in my life.
I couldn’t fall apart. Not now. Not anymore.
If I broke, this child had no one. If I threw myself off a cliff chasing him, I took the last piece of him down with me.
So I would find him. And I’d still be standing when I did.
"Okay," I said quietly. My voice had stopped shaking. When I looked up, both of them were watching me like I might shatter, and I let them see that I wouldn’t. "Okay. Then here’s what happens. I’m not going back to that site—not because I’m afraid, but because I have something now that I can’t afford to lose. So I stay smart. I stay alive. And we tear this whole thing apart from the top down until we find him. Understood?"
Rick looked at me for a long moment. Then something in his shoulders eased, just slightly, like a man who’d finally been handed something solid to hold on to.
"Understood," he said.