Dno't Be His Forbidden Mate

The nurse was very kind about it.

That was what I kept thinking afterward — how kind she was, how gentle her voice was when she said the word *pregnant*, like she understood it might land differently depending on the person. She handed me a paper cup of water I didn't drink and told me I was approximately eight weeks along and asked if I had someone I could call.

I said yes.

I didn't have anyone to call.

I sat in the paper-lined chair in the exam room and stared at the printout she'd left on the counter. Eight weeks. Eight weeks ago I had still believed him. Eight weeks ago I had still been the girl who thought she mattered.

I folded the printout in half. Then in half again. Then I put it in my coat pocket and stood up, because sitting there wasn't going to change anything, and the walls were starting to feel very close.

---

The hallway outside was the ordinary kind of hospital chaos — carts, nurses, the overhead lights that made everyone look slightly ill. I was moving toward the exit, not thinking about anything in particular, just putting one foot in front of the other, when I heard it.

A voice I recognized. Then a sound I recognized less — the flat, hard crack of something connecting with bone.

I turned.

Darius was at the far end of the corridor. He had someone by the collar — a man I didn't know, dark-haired, tall, now stumbling backward into the wall. And beside them, pressed against a row of chairs with her hand over her mouth, was a woman.

Beautiful. Pale. A bruise on her thigh, dark and spreading, visible below the hem of her dress.

Seraphina Vale. I knew her the way you know someone you've been compared to without being told — by reputation, by the way people's voices changed when they said her name around Darius, by the careful way he never mentioned her directly.

I didn't think. I just moved.

"Darius, stop—"

He swung again. The man ducked, and Darius's elbow caught me instead — a glancing blow, but I was already off-balance, already reaching for his arm, and the impact sent me sideways. I hit Seraphina. She went down. I went down with her, my shoulder slamming into the chair's armrest, and for a moment everything was just the cold linoleum and the fluorescent light and the sound of my own breath.

Then nothing.

Then pain, low and sharp, somewhere it shouldn't be.

I pressed my hand to my stomach without meaning to. It was instinct. It was the only instinct I had left.

Above me, the chaos continued. Someone shouting. A nurse rushing in from a side door. And Darius — I heard him before I saw him — his voice dropping into that register I knew, the one that was soft and careful and meant he was frightened of something.

"Are you hurt?"

Not to me.

I turned my head. He was crouched beside Seraphina, his hands on her face, his eyes scanning her like she was something that could break. Like she was something worth worrying about. His voice was shaking — actually shaking — and I had heard that voice before, in his apartment, in the dark, and I had thought it was mine.

"Are you hurt?" he said again, quieter. Just for her.

Seraphina said something I couldn't hear. He pulled her against him.

I felt the warmth first. Then I looked down.

The blood was not a lot. It was enough.

I got up. I don't know how. My legs felt like they belonged to someone else, like I was borrowing them temporarily. The nurse was still shouting. Someone had called security. In the center of all of it, Darius held Seraphina like she was the only solid thing in the room.

He didn't look at me once.

I walked to the bathroom at the end of the hall. I locked the door. I sat on the floor with my back against the wall and I waited, and I breathed, and I told myself very carefully that I was still here. That I was still a person. That the thing happening in my body was not the end of everything, even though it felt like it.

After a while, the bleeding slowed.

I cleaned up as best I could. I washed my hands twice. I looked at myself in the mirror for a long moment — at the girl looking back, pale and hollow-eyed and still somehow standing — and then I unlocked the door and walked out.

---

He found me in the corridor near the stairwell exit.

The man Darius had hit. He had a hand pressed to his eye socket, which had already started to swell, and he was moving carefully, the way people move when they're not sure how much damage has been done. He stopped when he saw me.

"You're the one he knocked over," he said.

"Yes."

"I'm Cassian." He said it like it was relevant. "Cassian Blackwood. I was with Seraphina. I'm—" He paused, seemed to reconsider whatever he'd been about to say. "I'm sorry. What he did — what happened to you — that was because of me, and I'm sorry."

I looked at him. He had an honest face. It surprised me, in this hospital, in this day, that someone could still have an honest face.

"It wasn't because of you," I said.

He didn't argue, but he didn't look convinced either. He reached into his jacket and produced a card — plain, white, a phone number and a name. "If you need anything. Medical bills, or—" He stopped again. "Or anything else. Protection. Whatever you need. I mean it."

I took the card. I wasn't sure why. It felt like the only concrete thing anyone had offered me all day.

He drove me home without asking for my address twice, without making conversation I didn't want to have. He pulled up in front of my building and left the engine running, and when I glanced back from the doorway he was still there, waiting to make sure I got inside.

I didn't know what to do with that. I filed it away somewhere and went upstairs.

---

I heard them before I opened the door.

Voices. Laughter. The particular sound of a group of men who feel very comfortable somewhere.

I turned the key and pushed it open.

Darius was on the couch. His friends were arranged around the room — four of them, maybe five, the usual rotation. And Seraphina was in his lap, her legs draped sideways, her head tipped against his shoulder like she'd been there a thousand times.

Maybe she had.

Darius looked up when I walked in. A quick look. The kind you give furniture.

"Oh," he said. Casually. Like he was explaining something obvious to people who hadn't asked. "She's the house cleaner."

Nobody laughed.

Nobody said anything.

Nobody corrected him.

I stood in the doorway of my own apartment and I felt the words land, and I felt them settle, and I felt something in me go very, very still.

Not broken. Not crying. Just still.

The way things go still right before they change.