Chapter 79: Ultrasound: Revealing What He’s Carrying.

"There’s actually a way we can determine the age of the pregnancy. Come on," the doctor said stiffly as she moved toward the examination bed and the ultrasound machine.

Bryce followed her, but the tension inside him only grew.

He was almost certain he had frightened her a moment ago. He couldn’t stop wondering whether the colors he had seen had somehow been visible in his eyes.

What if she saw them?

If she had, then he had already ruined everything.

He stepped toward the bed, forcing himself to act as though nothing was wrong.

"I wanted to know the age of the pregnancy so I could determine whether an ultrasound would show anything," the doctor explained, her tone still somewhat cautious. "It usually works well when the pregnancy is around six weeks, although sometimes we can see something at five weeks."

Bryce nodded.

But the explanation did little to calm him.

If he actually went through with the ultrasound, they were going to see inside him.

His insides.

What if they weren’t the same as a woman’s?

The thought made his stomach churn.

Or worse...

What if he wasn’t carrying a real baby at all?

This pregnancy wasn’t normal. Nothing about it had been normal from the beginning. What if what was growing inside him wasn’t a human baby?

What if it was a real wolf? An animal wolf.

The thought was so absurd that Bryce almost dismissed it immediately, yet he couldn’t completely push it away.

For a moment, he considered walking straight out of the room.

He could still leave.

But then what?

Vincent’s men were already suspicious. If he suddenly disappeared from the hospital without giving them the confirmation they wanted, they would investigate him even more closely.

They would keep searching until they found him again, and Bryce had no intention of changing his identity yet another time or abandoning Alverton altogether in search of somewhere else to live.

Besides, there was another reason he couldn’t bring himself to leave.

Beneath all his fear and uncertainty, he needed to know whether it was truly a baby growing inside him and, if it was, whether it was okay.

Whatever the examination revealed, Bryce wanted the answer badly enough to risk everything for it.

"Could you please remove the sweater and..."

"No."

The rejection came instantly.

The doctor stopped and looked at him.

Bryce swallowed.

The oversized hoodie was the only thing keeping his body concealed. Beneath it, there was nothing that could make anyone mistake him for a woman.

If he removed it, his flat chest would be exposed.

He couldn’t allow that.

His mind suddenly wandered to a question he hadn’t even considered before.

If he really was carrying a baby, how would he feed it once it was born?

Regular milk?

Or would milk somehow form inside him despite having no breasts, except for his nipples?

The thought was so absurd that he quickly forced it aside.

He had more immediate problems to deal with.

He was wearing a dress.

How was he supposed to expose only his stomach without revealing everything else?

He looked around the room.

"Do you have any scissors that aren’t in use?"

The doctor stared at him. The question clearly caught her off guard, and Bryce could almost see the question forming in her expression.

Why does this woman need scissors? But she didn’t ask, she simply walked toward the cabinets, opened several drawers, and searched through them before finally straightening with a pair of scissors in her hand.

She brought them over and handed them to him.

Bryce took them and lifted the edge of his hoodie slightly, the doctor’s expression immediately changed.

"What do you want to do?"

There was alarm in her voice.

Bryce stared at her for a second before realizing what she must have thought.

Did she think he was about to stab himself?

The thought was almost funny.

He had endured enough chaos to last several lifetimes, but killing himself had never crossed his mind. He loved his life, no matter how impossible it had suddenly become.

"No worries, I’m not gonna kill myself." He barely finished the words before positioning the scissors against the fabric of the dress and cutting across it at his waist, creating an opening large enough to expose only his stomach while keeping the rest of his body covered.

The doctor watched him with an expression that made it obvious she had already decided he was weird.

But Bryce didn’t care.

He lowered himself onto the examination bed and lay flat on his back, keeping the altered hoodie positioned carefully so that only his stomach was exposed.

His heart hammered against his ribs.

The ultrasound machine waited beside him.

Bryce stared at it.

This was it.

Whatever was inside him was about to be seen.

The doctor moved closer, took the ultrasound gel, and squeezed some onto his stomach. The clear gel felt cold against his skin.

She picked up the handheld transducer and pressed it against the gel, moving it slowly across his abdomen.

"Relax," she murmured.

Bryce tried.

He really did.

But his muscles remained rigid beneath the probe, his stomach drawn tight as his fingers curled into the sheets.

His heart hammered violently against his ribs, each beat seeming to climb higher into his throat. His breathing came in short, shallow pulls, and no matter how hard he tried to slow it, he couldn’t seem to draw a proper breath.

"How does this work, by the way?" he asked, his voice tighter than he intended. Part of the question came from genuine curiosity, but mostly, he needed something, just anything, to occupy his mind.

If he kept talking, perhaps he could stop himself from thinking about what the screen might reveal.

"The probe sends sound waves into the body and captures the returning echoes. Those echoes are then converted into images on a monitor," the doctor explained briefly. "Five weeks," she added, turning the monitor slightly toward Bryce as the image of what he was carrying inside him gradually came into clear focus.