Chapter 168

Chapter 168: Chapter 168

Lysander’s pov

"Lysander—"

"He’s been suspicious of me for days!" I blurted out, the words tumbling over each other in a wild, frantic rush. "He smells Darius on my skin, Mom! He locked down the estate! He brought guards into the lower corridors! He thinks I betrayed him, he thinks I’m lying to him... if I tell him about this now, if I tell him I’m pregnant and I don’t even know whose child it is... he will kill Darius.

"He’ll tear the territory apart, or... or he’ll lock me in the vaults under the earth where I’ll never see the sun again! I can’t make it worse! I can’t tell him!"

My mother narrowed her eyes at me, "Are you protecting that monster? After everything he has done?"

I shook my head frantically.

"You have to talk to him!" Elena insisted, her voice rising in a panic that matched my own. She grabbed my hands, squeezing them until my bones clicked together. "You cannot hide this from a man like him, Lysander! He will find out! If his intelligence network uncovers this before you speak to him, it will destroy everything! You have to go to him and explain—"

"I can’t!" I screamed, pulling my hands out of her grip, backing away toward the arm of the sofa, curling into a tight, defensive ball under the fleece blanket. "I can’t look at his eyes! I can’t see the coldness in his face! I can’t, Mom! Please, don’t make me!"

"Lysander, listen to me—"

"No!" I sobbed, hiding my face in my knees. "No, please, just leave it alone!"

Elena stared at me, her chest heaving, her mouth set in a hard, desperate line. She saw the paralyzing fear locking my joints shut. She knew I was too broken to move, too terrified to take the single step that might save my life or end it completely.

She didn’t argue with me anymore. She reached into her coat pocket, pulled out her phone, and tapped the glass screen with a sharp, decisive flick of her thumb.

My head snapped up from my knees, my breath locking up in my throat. "Mom... what are you doing?"

She didn’t answer me. She pressed the phone to her ear, her other hand coming out to hold my shoulder, pinning me to the cushion.

I heard the dialing tone cut through the quiet room, a long, agonizing beep that vibrated straight through my skull like a death knell.

Beep.

"Mom, stop!" I rasped, scrambling forward, reaching for the phone with trembling fingers. "Hang it up! Please, hang it up!"

Beep.

She pulled the phone out of my reach, hitting a button on the screen and setting the device flat on the wooden coffee table between us.

The loudspeaker chimed once, filling the small living room with the hollow, rhythmic hum of the open connection.

Click.

The line connected.

The silence that bled through the small speaker wasn’t just quiet, it was a heavy, suffocating abyss.

Elena swallowed hard, her hand shaking as she reached out toward the device, her voice breaking into a tearful, desperate sniffle.

"Drake...?" she pleaded softly into the speaker, her posture sagging as she spoke to the terrifying lord who held her son’s life in his hands. "Drake, please... please, you have to listen to me. You have to be understanding... my baby... Lysander is—"

"Elena."

Drake’s voice came through the speaker.

It didn’t carry rage. It didn’t carry heat. It was a single, flat word—a cold, razor-sharp bar of iron that cut through the room, dropping the temperature in the apartment by ten degrees in a split second.

"What is happening?" Drake asked smoothly.

The control in his voice was terrifying. Not a single ripple of emotion. Just a low, lethal demand hanging in the air between us.

When my mother didn’t respond, he demanded again. "Did something happen to Lysander? What’s going on, talk to me."

Elena opened her mouth, her throat working as she tried to find the words, tried to construct a bridge, tried to frame the disaster in a way that wouldn’t shatter the universe into pieces. "Drake, he... he’s here with me, he’s so confused and scared, and—"

Panic, hot and unhinged, completely obliterated my brain.

I couldn’t let her spin it. I couldn’t sit there and listen to her try to soften a blow that was going to tear my chest open anyway. The suffocating weight of the secret, the horror of the test results, the terror of his icy red eyes, it all boiled over in my throat at once.

I leaned over the coffee table, my shadow falling over the glowing screen, and blurted out the raw, unvarnished truth.

"I slept with Darius."

The words hung in the air like a cloud of poison gas.

Silence swallowed the apartment whole.

The hum of the open line didn’t change, but the silence coming from Drake’s end turned absolute, a dark, infinite void where no breath, no heartbeat, and no sound existed.

My mother gasped, her hand flying over her mouth, her eyes wide with horror as she stared at me, then at the glowing phone on the table.

"Drake?" Elena whimpered into the dead air, her voice trembling wildly, her fingers hovering an inch over the screen. "Drake... please... he didn’t mean... Drake, say something..."

Nothing.

Not a sigh. Not a growl. Not the rustle of a coat or the click of a heel against marble. Just the cold, digital frequency of a connected call stretching over five agonizing, suffocating seconds.

BEEP. BEEP. BEEP.

The line went dead.

The sudden, mechanical tone of the disconnected call sounded like a gunshot in the small room.

My mother stared at the black screen, her face completely drained of color, her mouth slightly open in shock.

Then, she snapped.

She grabbed my shoulders with a sudden, violent force, shaking me so hard my teeth clicked together, her voice rising into a sharp, frantic scream.

"Get up!" Elena cried out, her eyes wide with pure, unadulterated panic as she dragged me off the sofa by my arms. "Get up right now, Lysander! You have to go to him!"

"Mom—"

"Move your legs!" she sobbed, pushing me toward the front door, her hands trembling violently as she grabbed my soaked coat from the rack. "You go to the estate! You stand in front of him and you explain everything! You do not let him process this alone in the dark! Go! Go to him right now!"

She shoved my boots into my hands, unlocked the heavy deadbolt, and pushed me out into the cold, rain-soaked hallway, the door slamming shut behind me with a final, absolute thunk.