Chapter 304 - 0304: The Baby Is Coming

Chapter 304: Chapter 0304: The Baby Is Coming

Graham’s Point Of View

The air in my home office felt like it was made of lead, thick and suffocating, vibrating with the frantic hum of my own desperation. I sat hunched over my mahogany desk, the surface littered with spreadsheets that felt like a death warrant. Numbers... cruel, red, uncompromising numbers, stared back at me, each one a testament to my failures.

They mocked me in a language I had once mastered, a language that now seemed to conspire against everything I had built. I was trying to stitch together the bleeding wounds of the Sinclair empire, desperately hunting for an investor, a savior, anyone who hadn’t heard that we were currently a sinking ship.

Every phone call I’d made that day had ended the same way: polite refusals dressed up in corporate language, old allies suddenly too busy to take my calls. My coffee had gone cold hours ago, a bitter film forming on its surface, but I couldn’t bring myself to care. Nothing as trivial as temperature mattered anymore. The door creaked open. I didn’t need to look up to know who it was.

The rhythmic, heavy gait, the soft sigh of expensive silk, it was Lillian. Even her footsteps sounded tentative now, as if she were approaching a wounded animal, as if some part of her already understood that the man she’d married had become something else entirely. "You’ve been in here all day, Graham," she said, her voice soft, almost melodic, as she walked in.

She was cradling that massive belly of hers, her hands moving in small, possessive circles over the fabric of her dress... a gesture I imagined she made a hundred times a day, seeking comfort in the one thing in our lives that still felt certain.

The gesture should have moved me, should have reminded me of what was at stake beyond the company. It didn’t. I felt nothing but the dull throb of irritation at the interruption. "The sun went down hours ago. Even the staff has gone quiet. Come to bed." I didn’t answer. I didn’t even blink. I just kept my eyes glued to a projected loss statement that made my stomach do slow, nauseating flips.

The numbers blurred together, but their meaning remained crystal clear: ruin. If I didn’t find a way to pivot by morning, the board was going to have my head on a silver platter, and decades of my family’s legacy would crumble along with my own reputation.

"Graham? Did you hear me?" Her voice carried a note of pleading now, a fragile thread stretched thin. "I told the cook to keep your dinner warm, but at this rate, it’ll be leather by the time you..."

SLAM.

The sound of my hand hitting the files was like a gunshot in the silent room. I felt the vibration rattle up my arm, a jolting release of the fury simmering under my skin, fury that had been building for weeks with nowhere to go. Papers scattered across the desk, some fluttering to the floor like wounded birds. I finally looked at her, my eyes bloodshot and my tie loosened to the point of looking like a noose.

The expression on her face... hurt, confused, afraid - only fueled my anger further, as if her vulnerability were somehow an accusation against me. "Can’t you see that I’m working here, Lillian?" I spat, the words jagged and sharp. "Or have you suddenly gone blind along with everything else? I am trying to save what’s left of our lives while you’re worrying about dinner and thread counts!"

Lillian flinched as if I’d struck her, her hands tightening protectively over her stomach, a reflex as old as motherhood itself. Her face went pale, all the color draining from her cheeks in an instant.

Her lower lip trembled just enough to irritate me further, as though her pain were an inconvenience I hadn’t the patience to accommodate. "Don’t talk to me like that, Graham," she said, her voice barely above a whisper, each word visibly costing her something. "I’m carrying your child. I’m pregnant, in case the massive bump in front of me didn’t tip you off."

I let out a harsh, jagged scoff, turning my chair back toward the glowing monitor. The light from the screen cast harsh shadows across my face, making me look like a stranger even to myself, someone I barely recognized and certainly didn’t like. "Congratulations. Truly. You’ve achieved the basic biological function of a mammal. Now, leave. I have work to do."

The silence that followed was deafening. I could hear her breathing, shallow and uneven, could sense her standing there, waiting for me to take it back, to apologize, to be the man she thought she knew. I wasn’t that man anymore. I wasn’t sure I ever had been, and some small, buried part of me mourned that fact even as the rest of me refused to care. "You are cold," she whispered, her voice thick with unshed tears. Each word seemed to cost her something. "You weren’t like this before. You weren’t this..."

The door didn’t just open; it was thrown back against the wall with a violence that made the crystal decanter on my side table rattle. I jumped, my heart leaping into my throat, adrenaline flooding my system.

For one wild moment, I thought the creditors had finally found my home address, that they’d come to seize assets in the middle of the night. But it wasn’t the bank. It was my parents. They stormed in like a two-person hurricane, their faces flushed with a mixture of righteous fury and something that looked suspiciously like a twisted kind of triumph.

They didn’t even acknowledge Lillian’s presence, didn’t seem to notice or care that she was standing there, pregnant and trembling, as though she were simply furniture in the room.

"What are you doing here?" I demanded, standing up so fast my chair nearly tipped over. The sudden movement made my head spin. "It’s nearly midnight. I told you I’d handle the press release in the morning."

"Graham, you wouldn’t believe what we saw today," my father said, his voice booming, vibrating with a manic energy I hadn’t seen since the last time we’d successfully hostile-takeovered a competitor. He was practically vibrating out of his Italian loafers, his eyes wild with whatever news he was bursting to share, the thrill of scandal animating him more than any business triumph ever had.

I rubbed my temples, the headache behind my eyes pulsing like a strobe light. Each throb felt like someone was driving a nail deeper into my skull. "What? Did the stocks drop another five points? Did the bank call in the loan early? Just give it to me straight."

"We went to Elena’s company," my mother announced, her chin held high, her eyes glittering with a toxic sort of glee. She looked like a cat that had just cornered a particularly satisfying mouse, savoring the moment before the kill. My head jerked up so fast I heard a distinct, sickening pop in my neck. The pain was sharp, shooting down my spine, but the shock was sharper. My hands gripped the edge of the desk so hard my knuckles went white.

"You did what? I thought I told you to stay away from her! I told you to leave her alone! We’re in enough legal trouble without you harassing my ex-wife in her own lobby!"

"Graham, that’s not the matter!" Matilda snapped, waving her hand as if dismissing a minor annoyance. Her diamond bracelet caught the light, sending fractured rainbows across the wall. "The issue here isn’t that we went there. The issue is who we saw with her. Who she’s been hiding behind that ’independent woman’ facade of hers."

A cold, oily sensation began to pool in the pit of my stomach, spreading outward like poison through my veins. My mouth went dry. I didn’t want to ask, didn’t want to know, but the words came anyway, pulled from me by some masochistic need for certainty. "Who? Who did you see?"

My father stepped forward, his face darkening, his voice dropping to a low, dangerous growl. The transformation was instant, from manic excitement to barely controlled rage. "Jaxx. We saw Jaxx with her. And Graham..." He paused, letting the name hang in the air like an accusation, savoring the dramatic weight of it. "From the looks of it, from the way he was holding her, the way he looked at us when we confronted them... it seems they are together."

The room tilted. Everything I thought I knew shifted on its axis, and for a moment, I couldn’t breathe. Jaxx. My half-brother. With Elena. My Elena... no, not mine anymore, I reminded myself bitterly. But still. The thought cut deeper than any financial loss ever could, deeper than any number on any spreadsheet, deeper than the prospect of losing the company my family had spent generations building.

The world seemed to tilt on its axis. Air left my lungs in a silent rush, as if someone had punched me in the gut. I stumbled backward, my hip colliding with the edge of my chair as I struggled to process the words that had just shattered my reality.

"No. No, that’s impossible," I managed to say, my voice hoarse, grasping for any explanation that would make the words untrue. "Elena with Jaxx? That doesn’t make any sense. They don’t even move in the same circles. Jaxx is... he’s a ghost. He’s a street-fighting thug who got lucky with some investments."

"Oh, he’s more than that now," my mother sneered, venom dripping from every syllable. Her perfectly manicured fingers gripped the armrest of her chair until her knuckles turned white. "The barren whore has been sleeping around, Graham. And not just with anyone, but with that bastard. With your own father’s mistake."

She paused, letting the poison sink in deeper, clearly relishing the way each word landed like a blow. "Who knows how long it’s been going on? She was probably cheating on you long before the divorce papers were even signed. All that talk about ’finding herself’ was just a cover for her to spread her legs for a Sinclair reject."

The crude words hit me like physical blows, each one designed to wound. My mother had always been cruel when cornered, but this felt different... more desperate, more vicious, as though she sensed the ground shifting beneath all of us and had chosen cruelty as her last defense. "No," I whispered, shaking my head fiercely, refusing to let her narrative take root. "Elena is not like that. She didn’t cheat. I... I was the one who messed up. I caused the rift."

My throat tightened around the admission, old guilt resurfacing with a vengeance I hadn’t expected. "Elena has integrity. She wouldn’t..."

"Integrity?" Sebastian roared, slamming his fist on the desk with such force that a crystal paperweight jumped. "She’s with the man who wants to dismantle this family! She’s with the man who has been systematically buying up our debt!"

His face had turned an alarming shade of crimson, the veins in his neck standing out like cords, his whole body rigid with a rage that seemed to have been building for years. "If she’s with Jaxx, then she’s part of the coup, Graham! Wake up!"

My mind started racing, dredging up memories I had tried desperately to bury. Each one surfaced now with painful clarity, like shards of glass cutting through my denial. I remembered seeing Jaxx months ago, long before Elena had even brought up divorce. We were in that high-end boutique on Fifth Avenue, and he had looked at me with that same smug, lethal confidence that had always set my teeth on edge, a confidence I had once dismissed as mere arrogance born of new money.

The memory crystallized: the way he had leaned in close enough for me to smell his expensive cologne, the way he had told me how blind I was. I hadn’t understood it then. I thought he was talking about business, about the markets, about anything but what now seemed so obvious.

Then came the night of the opening of Elena’s second office in the East Side. I had seen him in the parking lot, leaning against a car that cost more than my first house, a sleek black beast that screamed new money and dangerous ambition. He’d looked at me, a wolf in a designer suit, and said those words that had haunted my dreams ever since: "You’ve had your fun, brother."

Brother.

The word had always been a mockery, a reminder of the family connection we both despised, a connection built on betrayal long before Elena had ever entered the picture.

My eyes widened as the pieces finally, cruelly, clicked into place like a puzzle I should have solved months ago. The way Jaxx had always been lurking on the periphery of my life, watching, waiting, patient in a way that should have terrified me from the start. The way Elena had suddenly found the strength to leave after years of enduring my neglect and my family’s contempt.

The timing of it all, the confidence in her eyes when she’d finally walked away, a confidence I had mistaken for simple resolve rather than the quiet certainty of a woman who already had somewhere else to go.

Was he hinting at this the whole time? Was he waiting in the tall grass for me to fail so he could swoop in and take the only thing I ever truly regretted losing?

"He was... he was hinting at it," I breathed, my voice barely audible over the sound of my own thundering heart. The realization made me feel sick, foolish, utterly outmaneuvered, as though I’d been the last person in the room to understand a joke everyone else had been laughing at for months.

"He knew. He’s been planning this." I shook my head, trying to clear the fog of shock and betrayal. My hands trembled as I reached for the edge of the desk, needing something solid to anchor me to reality. I couldn’t breathe properly, each inhale felt shallow and insufficient, as though the air itself had thinned.

The thought of them together, of Jaxx’s hands on the woman I had once called mine, of him touching her in ways I had taken for granted, was like a physical weight crushing my ribs, squeezing my heart until I thought it might burst.

I couldn’t stay in this room. I couldn’t listen to my parents’ venom or see Lillian’s pathetic, searching gaze that begged me to notice her, to care about the life growing inside her that I had never wanted. Guilt flickered somewhere beneath the anger, quickly smothered before it could take hold.

"I have to go," I rasped, turning toward the door with jerky, uncoordinated movements. "I have to find her. I have to..."

A sudden, sharp scream ripped through the tension of the room like a knife through silk. It wasn’t my mother, and it wasn’t the sound of my father’s rage. It was Lillian. I spun around, my heart nearly stopping in my chest.

Lillian was clutching her swollen belly with both hands, her face contorted in a mask of pure, unadulterated agony. Her knees buckled beneath her, and she gripped the back of a guest chair for support, her fingers digging into the leather upholstery, her knuckles white with the effort of staying upright. I looked down, and my blood turned to ice in my veins.

A dark, heavy splash of water was flowing down her legs, soaking into the expensive cream-colored rug that my mother had imported from Turkey. The room fell into a stunned silence, broken only by Lillian’s labored breathing, every eye suddenly fixed on her in a way they hadn’t been moments before.

She looked up at me, her eyes wide with terror, her breath coming in short, panicked gasps that made her whole body shake, every ounce of hurt from moments ago seemingly forgotten in the face of this new, more urgent fear. "Graham..." she choked out, her voice trembling with fear and pain. "The baby... the baby is coming."