Chapter 1367: To Everyone: First Duty as a Father

Melissa shook her head, laughing again while more tears escaped anyway, because every stupid sentence somehow made the happiness worse. Phei had returned from almost a year of violence, cold and impossible growth, carrying new power and an entirely different weight behind his eyes, yet here he was kneeling in front of her stomach and arguing legal definitions with an unborn child.

Then Phei’s expression softened once more, and Melissa saw the joy beneath all the jokes.

"You got bigger," he murmured.

Her brows rose immediately. "Do you have a death wish?!"

"The baby," Phei corrected with impressive speed. "I meant the baby. Gods, motherhood has made you dangerous."

"I was dangerous before."

"True."

He rubbed his thumb gently over the curve beneath his palm and smiled. "Also, I brought you a souvenir."

Melissa blinked.

Phei looked up at her, then reconsidered. "Well, technically I brought your mother a souvenir. You currently share storage space, so I assume communal property law applies."

Melissa stared at him for several seconds before her face crumpled into another helpless smile, and this time she bent down, caught his face between both hands and kissed him while tears of pure happiness continued slipping over her cheeks.

Several people behind them had been staring for an entirely different reason, although neither Phei nor Melissa had remembered they existed for the last several minutes. Somewhere between Phei appearing in front of her, Melissa herself into his arms, the kisses that followed and both of them becoming completely absorbed in the little swell beneath her dress, the rest of the penthouse had quietly ceased to qualify as part of reality.

Maddie’s eyes had widened until amusement disappeared beneath pure disbelief. Delilah’s mouth was slightly open, Victoria had forgotten whatever conversation she had been having with Soraya, and Valentina stared directly at Melissa’s stomach as though the tiny curve had somehow materialized only after Phei kissed it.

Only Roxanne and the Goddess appeared unsurprised, both women watching the scene with soft smiles that became increasingly entertained as realization slowly spread across everyone else’s faces.

Delilah finally managed to find her voice. "Mom is..."

"The Empress is pregnant?!" Soraya finished loudly enough to murder what little privacy remained.

Her surprise was so complete that she temporarily forgot she was standing in the middle of the penthouse holding a small Dragon, although the Dragon Lady herself seemed far less interested in Melissa’s pregnancy than in the white-haired Dragon still kneeling before her.

Something about the sight quietly rearranged her understanding of Phei.

She had spent months watching him turn the Primordial Frozen Zone into a graveyard, seen him soaked in blood and laughing through injuries that should have ended battles, watched him throw himself toward creatures vastly stronger than himself with the unreasonable confidence of someone who occasionally regarded survival as a problem for later, and fought beside him while World Transcendents tore entire sections of the abyss apart around them.

She knew what his Void became when he stopped restraining it, the dreadful bloodlust hidden inside his Primordial Blood and had personally witnessed how terrifying Phei could become when something he loved was threatened.

Yet here knelt that same Dragon on one knee, both hands wrapped carefully around a pregnant woman’s waist while his face rested affectionately against the little curve of her stomach.

The distant longing expression she had caught on him beneath the Frozen Zone’s auroras made complete sense:

There had been nights when Phei grew unusually quiet while staring toward someplace no eye could possibly reach, and she had assumed he was thinking about home in the vague way anyone trapped far from it eventually would.

Now she understood that home had possessed a face.

More than one, apparently.

Somewhere beyond that impossible distance had been Melissa, and beneath her heart had been the child Phei already knew was waiting for him.

Melissa had continued running her fingers slowly through his long white hair until Soraya’s words finally dragged her attention away from him. She looked around, saw every stunned face directed toward her stomach and went still for perhaps half a second before realization arrived with magnificent cruelty.

She looked down at Phei.

"Great," Melissa said dryly. "You just announced to everyone that I’m pregnant."

Phei slowly lifted his head.

He looked at Melissa, then at the room full of women staring at them, then back at Melissa as though patiently reviewing the events of the previous several minutes:

She had kissed him first during part of it, clung to him through the rest, cried while he spoke to their baby and spent a considerable portion of the pregnancy reveal stroking his hair while smiling down at him with enough maternal happiness to illuminate half the penthouse.

His eyebrow rose.

Melissa’s eyes narrowed immediately.

Phei understood fatherhood: "My fault."

The Goddess covered her mouth.

Roxanne turned her face away, shoulders moving suspiciously.

Melissa stared at him because they both knew exactly what had happened, and Phei’s mouth twitched before he returned one hand to her little belly with all the solemn responsibility of a man accepting his first sacred paternal burden.

"I got carried away," he admitted. "Completely my fault. You were obviously an innocent bystander who contributed nothing to the situation."

"I am pregnant with your child."

"And already I’ve learned my first duty as a father."

Melissa’s lips betrayed her with the beginning of a smile. "Which is?"

"When both parents do something together, Dad did it."

That finished whatever remained of her attempt at annoyance. Melissa laughed and placed one hand over his face, while Phei accepted the treatment with remarkable dignity from his position against her stomach.

"You’re learning quickly," she murmured.

"I had almost a year to prepare."

Her smile softened at that, and for a moment the laughter gave way to something warmer as her fingers returned to his hair. Phei looked up at her while his thumb moved gently over the curve carrying their child, and the shared expression between them made it painfully obvious why everyone else had disappeared from their awareness in the first place.

Behind them, Maddie finally recovered enough to speak. "You didn’t tell us..."

Melissa looked toward her.

Then the penthouse exploded.

Questions erupted from nearly every direction at once, and within seconds everyone had somehow forgotten that Phei himself had been missing for what felt to him like almost a year, that he had returned absurdly stronger, that his hair had become long and white, that he could apparently fly now, that he had casually walked through solid glass as though walls were merely architectural suggestions, and that Soraya was still standing there holding a silver-scaled Dragon Phei had introduced as his little sister.