Seraphine POV
Eight weeks.
The doctor said it like it was just a number. Like it wasn't the most terrifying and wonderful thing anyone has ever said to me in a room that smells like antiseptic and fresh paper.
She left to give me privacy. I'm sitting on the edge of the examination table with a printed ultrasound image in my hands a small gray blur on white paper, barely the size of a grape, with a heartbeat the doctor described as "strong and steady." I stare at it. The blur doesn't look like anything yet. It looks like a secret.
I am very good at keeping secrets.
I fold the image carefully and put it in my purse, in the inside pocket where I keep the things that are only mine. Then I sit with my hands in my lap and do what I always do when something big happens: I take inventory.
Joy. Yes underneath everything else, real and uncomplicated, a warmth I didn't expect to hit this hard. I want this baby. I didn't know how much until this moment, sitting in this paper-covered room with a blurry photograph and shaking hands.
Fear. Also yes. Many kinds, stacked.
The first kind is practical: timing, logistics, the question of how you tell a man about a child when the distance between you has been growing for months and you haven't found the right words to even address the distance yet.
The second kind is harder to look at. I look at it anyway, because I have always believed that the fears you avoid are the ones that kill you.
What if a baby makes him stay without making him choose?
What if Caelan, who married me out of duty and has been slowly drifting ever since, decides that a child is another obligation he should honor and I spend the next twenty years in a house with a man who is present because he thinks he should be, and I mistake that for love again?
I've already made that mistake once.
I slide off the examination table, pick up my bag, and walk out into the city.
I drive without deciding where I'm going. This is unusual for me. I don't do things without deciding. I plan, I assess, I move deliberately. But today I just drive, through streets that are busy with normal people having normal Tuesdays, and I don't think about the baby or Caelan or the hostile positions building in the supply chain.
I just breathe.
I end up stopped outside a small jewelry boutique one of our competitors, a quiet, discreet shop I've walked past a hundred times without going in. In the window there's a simple display: a velvet tray of plain gold bands, nothing elaborate, just clean and honest.
I look at them for a long time.
Caelan gave me a beautiful ring when we married. Expensive, correct, chosen by a man who does his research and gets things right technically. I wear it. I've always worn it. But sometimes I look at it and think about the word he used when he proposed should and the ring feels less like a choice and more like a conclusion he reached.
A simple band on a velvet tray. The kind you buy because you want to, not because you've calculated that it's the appropriate thing.
I sit outside that boutique for twenty minutes. I don't go in. I don't drive away. I just sit with the wanting the specific, painful want of a woman who has everything complicated and is looking at something simple through glass.
Then my phone buzzes. I go home.
The apartment is empty. Caelan is at the office, where he has been before I wake up and after I sleep for the past two weeks. I change out of my doctor's-appointment clothes and make tea I don't drink and open the laptop.
The shared household calendar loads automatically. I update it sometimes dinner reservations, maintenance appointments, the small logistics of a life run in parallel. I'm about to close it when something catches my eye.
Lunch Nadia E. Thursday 1pm.
I scroll back.
Lunch Nadia E. Tuesday 12:30pm.
Two lunches this week. Same name. The calendar entries are in his color-code blue for professional, green for personal. These are green.
I close the calendar tab.
I sit for a moment with my hands flat on the table and my tea going cold and the ultrasound picture in my inside pocket and I think, very carefully, about what I feel. Not what I should feel. What I actually feel.
The answer is: tired. Not angry. Not betrayed. Just the bone-deep exhaustion of a woman who has been carrying too many things alone for too long, and who just discovered she's about to carry one more.
I open my Lumière intelligence brief.
The hostile position has grown. Overnight, the Geneva account moved again a new stake in a third supply-chain partner, larger than the previous two. They're accelerating. Whatever timeline they're working toward, they've moved it forward.
I pick up my phone and call Damien.
He answers on the second ring. "I was about to call you."
That's never a good sign.
"Talk to me," I say.
I can hear him pulling up files on his end the particular sound of Damien switching into work mode, which he does faster than anyone I know. He was born into Lumière the same way I was, except without the weight of succession, which has made him sharper and more dangerous in different ways than me.
"The Geneva account," he says. "I've been tracing it all morning."
"And?"
"It connects to a board faction we've been watching for two years. Old money, old grudges. They've been positioning against Grand-Mère's succession plan since she announced it." A pause. "They've been patient, Sera. Very patient. This play in the supply chain it's not random. They mapped every vulnerable point in Ashford Group specifically."
"Why Caelan's company specifically?"
"Because of you." His voice is careful. The way Damien gets careful is the way other people get loud it means he's worried. "He's a mechanism. They move against his company, force a distress sale, acquire the distribution assets. Those assets connect to three Lumière partner networks. They get the assets, they get leverage, they get a seat at a table they've been locked out of for years."
The kitchen is very quiet.
"They're not after him," Damien says. "He's just the door."
"I'm the target," I say.
"Yes."
I press my hand flat against my stomach without thinking. The same thing I keep doing. Like I'm protecting something.
"How long do I have?" I ask.
A silence that lasts exactly one second too long.
"Months," Damien says. "Maybe less."
I hang up the phone.
I sit in the quiet kitchen with three things in front of me like locked doors: the baby, the marriage, the attack.
And then a fourth thought lands quiet, cold, clarifying.
Someone has been watching me. Mapping my life, my husband's vulnerabilities, my family's network. Carefully. Patiently. For two years.
They know where I live. They know Caelan's schedule. They know exactly how to get to me.
The question that turns my blood cold isn't how.
It's who gave them the information to do it.
Someone close enough to know everything has been talking.