Chapter 164

Chapter 164: Chapter 164

Lysander’s pov

I sat on the edge of the examination table, my bare legs dangling over the side, the crinkling paper beneath me sounding loud and cheap in the small, sterile room. My charcoal sweater was soaked through at the shoulders, smelling of damp wool, mountain mud, and the stale, suffocating ozone of Darius’s house.

I had no idea how I had made it out of that estate. My mind was a fractured, blurry mess of dark hallways, Gideon’s cold hands, and the silent, terrifying blur of running through the pine forest back toward the road. I hadn’t gone back to Drake’s estate. I couldn’t. The thought of stepping over those blood wards and walking into the foyer where Drake was probably waiting with an army of guards had made my lungs lock up until I couldn’t breathe.

Instead, I had flagged down an early-morning supply truck on the highway, using the last of the cash crumpled in my pocket to get into the city.

I was a dirty slut, I couldn’t believe I enjoyed what those monsters did to me.

The door to the exam room clicked open.

A female doctor stepped inside, holding a thin digital tablet in her hand. She was a human, middle-aged, with sharp silver-rimmed glasses and a calm, quiet demeanor that usually brought comfort. But as her eyes landed on me, her expression instantly tightened.

She didn’t look at the tablet first. She looked at me.

I knew what I looked like. My hair was wet and plastered to my forehead. My dark eyes were hollowed out, shadowed by deep purple bruises of exhaustion. My lips were dry and cracked, and beneath the high rolled collar of my sweater, the skin on my neck was raw, red, and inflamed where the iron suppressant collar had sat. My hands were trembling so hard I had to shove them between my thighs to keep them still.

"Lysander," she said softly, her voice dropping into a slow, delicate register reserved for fragile things. She closed the door behind her, setting the tablet on the counter. "I’m Dr. Evelyn."

I swallowed, the back of my throat feeling like shredded glass. "Is the blood panel done?"

She didn’t answer immediately. She pulled a rolling stool over, sitting down a few feet in front of me. She looked down at my hands, then up at the raw, bruised skin peeking out from the top of my collar.

"Before we discuss the lab work," Dr. Evelyn said quietly, her eyes searching mine with a heavy, deeply concerned look, "I need to ask you a few standard safety questions. It is our legal obligation to offer a safe environment."

My heart gave a hard, panicked thud against my ribs. "What?"

"You came in here without an appointment, soaked, bleeding from your thumb, and visibly traumatized," she said, her voice dropping even lower. Her gaze lingered on the faint, dark fingerprints bruising my wrists marks left behind by Gideon’s iron grip. "The marks on your neck and arms... Lysander, is someone holding you against your will? Is someone abusing you?"

A harsh, breathless laugh tore from my throat, a terrifying, unhinged sound that made her blink.

Abused? Trapped? How funny.

"No," I choked out, shaking my head violently, tears instantly hot against my cold cheeks. "No, no one... no one is abusing me. I just fell in the woods. I slipped on the rocks near the trail."

"Lysander, you don’t have to protect anyone here," she urged gently, leaning forward. "We have protocols. We can contact city security—"

"I don’t want security!" I screamed, my voice cracking so loud it echoed off the tiled walls. I grabbed the edge of the exam table, my knuckles turning bloodless as I leaned toward her, hyperventilating. "I don’t need help! I just need the results! Please... just tell me what the test says!"

Dr. Evelyn stared at me for three long, agonizing seconds. She saw the absolute, unhinged panic in my face, the desperate, terrified plea of a man standing on the edge of a cliff.

Slowly, she reached back, picking up the digital tablet from the counter. She tapped the screen twice.

"The full hormone and essence panel finished five minutes ago," she said, her tone shifting back to medical neutrality, though her eyes remained soft with pity. "Given your hybrid physiology, we ran a high-spectrum marker test to check for elemental or pureblood shifts."

She turned the glass screen toward me.

At the top of the interface, written in clear, bold black lettering beneath my name, was a single diagnostic line:

HCG / ESSENCE RECEPTOR STATUS: POSITIVE.

ESTIMATED GESTATION: 4-5 WEEKS.

The air in the room vanished.

My vision went completely white at the edges, a loud, deafening ringing exploding inside my ears. The room reeled, the floorboards seeming to tilt violently beneath my boots.

Positive.

I stared at the black letters on the glowing screen. The word bloomed stark, cold, and absolute, cutting through the fog in my brain like a silver blade.

"The hormonal marker is extremely high," Dr. Evelyn was saying, her voice sounding muffled, as if she were speaking from the end of a long tunnel. "Hybrid pregnancies are rare, Lysander, especially when paired with high-tier vampire bloodlines. Your body is adapting to a massive surge of foreign essence. That explains the severe nausea, the fainting, and the erratic spikes in your own energy..."

I didn’t hear the rest.

I slid off the examination table, my legs barely holding my weight, and stumbled over to the small stainless-steel sink in the corner of the room.

I gripped the cold edges of the basin, leaning over it, my chest rising and falling in short, frantic jerks as tears spilled freely over my lashes, dripping into the drain.

I looked up into the small mirror mounted above the tap.

The reflection staring back at me wasn’t a person anymore. It was a ghost. Pale skin, dark purple circles under my eyes, hair damp and matted. I raised a trembling, numb hand, resting my palm flat over my lower abdomen through the thick wool of my sweater.

There was a life inside me. A real, pulsing, fragile child taking root deep in my core.

And then, the real nightmare hit my chest with a force so violent I almost threw up right there into the sink.

Four to five weeks.

My mind raced backward, tearing through the calendar in my head with frantic, terrifying precision.

Four weeks ago... the honeymoon.𝑓𝑟ℯℴ𝓂