Chapter 304 There Must Be An Heir

Chapter 304: Chapter 304 There Must Be An Heir

Emilia’s POV

"What did you say? She can’t, she can’t have a child?" Through the door, Titus’s voice cracked wide open. "How is that possible? How could Emilia not be able to give birth?"

"I don’t know," Mila said. "I’ve thought about nothing else since then. But I can’t carry this. It’s crushing me."

Titus was quiet for a beat. Then, low and flat.

"If she can’t get pregnant, then Sebastian has to have a child with another woman. An illegitimate one, if that’s what it takes. A pack this size needs an heir. There’s no way around it."

I shut my eyes, and the floor felt like it dropped away.

What Abigail had thrown at me in the elevator that day came slithering back, word for word. "A barren Luna is a burden no pack can stomach. The day will come when they cast you aside and forget you ever existed."

I’d told myself she was just being rude and mean.

Standing in that hallway, I wasn’t so sure anymore.

"How can you even say that?" Mila’s voice climbed. "Emilia is still in treatment. It isn’t over. And she has her pride, Titus. You think she’ll simply nod along while Sebastian goes off and has a baby with some other woman?"

"I meant we would talk to her. We do nothing without her agreement."

"And if she doesn’t agree?"

The silence stretched long enough that I heard my own pulse in it.

"Then it gets very hard," Titus said at last. "But it still has to be done. This is about the future of the pack. She can’t dig in her heels like a sulking girl."

"And even if Emilia agreed, do you honestly think our son would? He’s not the type to sleep around or cheat."

"Then he faces reality, whether he likes it or not."

I stood there shaking, and made myself listen to every word of it.

They’ll fix us before they even ask us, Eve murmured. Like we’re a crack in a wall.

I made it back to the guest room somehow.

I shut the door, turned the lock, and slid down it to the floor, my back against the wood.

My chest had been strapped to a roller coaster. Thirty percent up in the clouds, then straight to the bottom of a canyon. I clapped a hand over my mouth so nothing would get out, and then it got out anyway.

I cried the way you cry when there’s no one left to hear you and you’re glad of it. My shoulders shook. Even my grief came out small and swallowed, because a lifetime of being an afterthought had trained the volume out of me.

Dorothy and Linda had done their worst to me for years and never once made me feel this. This was new. This was fear, cold and total. Not fear of them. Fear that whatever Sebastian and I had built might not be strong enough to hold this weight.

Eve pressed close, no words now, just there.

"Emilia? Emilia."

Sebastian’s voice, right outside.

I scrubbed my palms across my face, fast and hard, dragging the wet away. He was not going to see this.

I was living in a burning house, but I wasn’t about to reach out and pull him into the flames with me.

I opened the door with a smile.

"Looking for me?"

"You went to hand my mother her medicine. She said you never came."

"Oh. I got a call." I dropped my gaze, tucked the bottle into his hand, and kept my voice light. "Give it to her for me, would you? I need a shower."

I slipped past him into the bedroom and shut the door. Then I leaned my forehead against the wood and let the tears come back up.

When I was done in the shower, I stood at the window, staring out at nothing.

He crossed the room and folded his arms around me from behind, chin dropping to my shoulder.

"What’s going on in that head of yours?"

"Nothing. Counting stars."

"There aren’t any tonight. Cloud cover." A pause. "Something’s eating at you."

"No."

He sighed, turned me by the shoulders, and tipped my face up until I had nowhere else to look but at him. His green eyes had gone serious.

"There comes a point," he said, "where you find one person, and with them you stop needing to win. You stop caring how you look, whether you’ve got it all together. They can have a hundred flaws and it doesn’t matter. That person is your other half. Your mate."

I stared at him, thrown.

"So if you need to cry, cry. You’re not alone in this. Whatever it is, I’ve got you."

That did it. The tears spilled over before I could catch them, because he’d reached straight past every wall I owned and found the one soft place I kept buried.

"Thank you," I whispered.

I leaned into him. I didn’t have the first idea how to hold up under any of this, and his arms were the only thing that felt like solid ground. I couldn’t even imagine my life without him in it now. That was the terrifying part.

"Everybody hits the wall eventually," he said, smoothing a hand over my hair. "But when the real happiness comes, you’ll look back and realize all the pain was a kind of savings account. It made you tough. It taught you to hold on to the people worth holding on to." 𝘧𝓇ℯℴ𝓂

I said nothing.

"Nothing can break you if you refuse to let go. The strength that counts is the kind inside you."

I pulled back and looked up at him, my lashes soaked. "Don’t you want to know why I’m crying?"

He wiped his thumb under my eye, and something in his face went gentle in a way I wasn’t used to from him. "We’re married, not fused at the hip. A person’s allowed her own space. I don’t need a report on everything. If you want to tell me, you’ll tell me, no prying required. And if it’s something you’d rather keep, then I won’t go digging."