Chapter 85: Pregnant?

Flora sat on her bath stool, a wet towel knotted at her waist, her golden hair fanning down her naked back like a burned banner. Steam rose in thin ghosts off the water; the room smelled of soap and lemon rind and the faint iron tang she had come to recognize as the thinnest thread between life and want.

"haaaa....." she sighed. "I did not get pregnant.....again."

The words fell like small stones into a well. They made no sound beyond her own chest. The ache at the base of her belly was old and honest, an animal ache that demanded a name: failure.

It was not only the missed child—there was a social calculus behind that single syllable. A noblewoman’s value often wore light and scent and rituals, but beneath all of it there was mana—an ember made visible in the way a noble body could shape magic and blood and lineage. Without an heir, you were paper in a storm.

She rubbed her hands over her thighs, feeling the smooth coolness of the marble step under her bare feet. The bath steam made her lashes cling together. Sunlight from the high window painted her skin in silver, each droplet on her shoulder bright as a bead of glass.

It was a tone of suppressed desire, of grief masquerading as anger. Desire she had wished to fulfill, again and again.

For months she had banked on a single, intimate logic: between her and Aiden a child could be born—her blood and his. If she could give life to him, could anchor him, the scandal of his origin might become a kept secret rather than a threat.

Her mother had been right, in that hard way mothers sometimes are: the greatest problem in a noble lady’s life is often her mana-rich body. It was both blessing and burden—beauty and barrenness in the same coin.

Yes, it was their greatest strength. Noble women often carried more mana than noble men; the ways of the ley-lines threaded through their blood like hidden rivers.

Spells shaped easier around them, charms were stronger, their blossoms of power could level whole battalions. Their lives were gilded, and wealth did not crease the skin.

Time favorably handled nobles like wine getting better with age. Yet that very abundance meant childbirth here was a fraught alchemy; mana did not always mix kindly with flesh. Birthrates fell, whispered records from the registry of houses confirmed it, and the empire watched its noble lines tighten.

She had thought she would be pregnant with his child by now. She had imagined the weight of a small head on her chest, the way his laugh might catch in a different key when he heard his son’s cry.

But here she was again—bleeding. Again. A little shame sat at the edges of the room; shame and worry braided into one.

Her worry was not only for herself. It tucked in behind the greater worry: Aiden.

She had accepted him—remade her own pride, drawn a line in front of the court’s gossip. Once, it had been a private rebellion: a girl’s hand on a laundry boy’s sleeve, passing coins and whispers, the slow theft of dignity from a caste.

She had elevated him first to butler, then to high butler, then layered rooms between them that allowed proximity. He slept below her door, near enough that the night shared its breath. She had done it because he was clever and because she liked the way he laughed, because advantage sometimes wore a quiet smile.

Even so, the thought that he carried a demonic bloodline had been a revelation laced with glittering danger. She had heard the court legends, the rarely spoken lineage names set aside in the empire’s quiet lists—the dark notches on family trees. This was more than rumor: a rare, very rare ancestry. To possess demonic blood was to draw eyes that counted power and cost.

"....incubus bloodline," she muttered to the empty room. The word slid out like a small charm.

It should have terrified her—yet a part of her felt she had drawn the luckiest card possible. He was dangerous, yes, but he was also the one person who made her bloom in ways she had thought lost.

When he touched her, when he crossed the border of social rules and consummated his place at her side, the sensation had been of falling into light.

He could take them to heights most noblewomen had never tasted. The very thing that made him taboo—his raw, natural potency—was also what made him irresistible to houses that had grown dusty.

The worrying part was less the bloodline than the behavior. His fearlessness sat like an ember beneath coal—he did whatever he pleased and took whatever he wanted.

In the world’s ledger, that kind of freedom did not sit well with hierarchy or order. If a servant could take a noble’s pleasures and be rewarded with position and intimacy, then the entire scale of status started to tilt in ways the court would not find comfortable.

In a way she saw him as a plague: a fever that could burst through houses and leave reputations in ash.

Noble women who had banked their secret sexual frustration on thin hope—men who could reach that perfect balance between presence and release—would be drawn to him like moths to a lantern.

Add his arrogance and his ruthlessness, and the future looked like a field of burned flags.

She pictured a possible reprieve: a villa tucked in the hills, an estate with walls and servants and a private chapel—far from the prying eyes of the capital.

If she could bear a child, she would take him away and hide his origins beneath her name, and the rest of the world could rot. In the replay of her mind, they would live simply: him at her side, the scandal a distant thunder.

But this was the work of fantasy. He was only a laundry boy once, a figure who had stepped up not only by affection but by the cold arithmetic of favor, and she had helped him rise.

Yet even as she had placed him nearer to power—knighting paths cleared by influence, the winning of a butler’s bed that led to something closer to a throne—he had not remained naive.

The boy who once bent to her with a laugh while she rode him on a fevered night had grown into something else: quietly, dangerously ambitious. Ambition sharpened him. The knighthood ceremony—so soon—made that ambition visible and fragrant like smoke.

She thought of the name—the ceramony at Merlin dukedom, where he would be sheltered under a different standard, where knights were made and names carved. Her stomach turned in three directions at once: pride, fear, and something like hunger.

"Aiden....why, why are you not just satisfied with me...?" she questioned the ceiling, the moon, the dark.

She rose, wrapping the towel tighter, and went to the balcony, still only in undergarments, moisture clinging to her skin. The night air struck her like a blade: cool, sharp with the scent of rain and roses from the garden.

She loved the exposedness, the way the sky made her unarmored. She set her hands on the low stone wall and looked over the courtyard.

Tang.

Tong.

Tang!

The sound of steel struck steel reached her from the training grounds: rhythm like a heartbeat, a practiced percussion. But what cut inside her was not the noise itself; it was the hollow echo of an aura, a scent almost: not a scent of musk or sweat, but the particular tangle of concentration and power she had felt once when Aiden had laughed in the candlelight. An intangible presence, like the low hum of metal cooling.

Her hair clung to the line of her spine as she leaned forward. Below, in the yard where the castle’s lesser courtyard doubled as a practice ground, a figure moved with a white flash—white hair dazzling in the torchlight, a stance that pushed and pulled like wind on a flag.

As she peeled back the towel to cover her breasts with it, strands of her golden hair slipped and hid half her face. Her golden eyes widened. For a moment, the world refracted oddly: it was not simply an image of the man she loved, but of something larger—an echo of lineage and blade.

She thought at first that it could not be true: a servant, a butler, should not hold the wrist and the weight of a noble blade with the lord’s fluency. But his pose was startlingly familiar. He moved with an economy of motion that whispered of lion-sword forms—stances she’d only seen in the family halls or in the ducal training yard of Leonidus. Everything about the way his sword sliced the air, the set of his shoulders, the pause before a strike, mirrored the noble style: heavy, dignified, and yet designed to fell fast and hard.

"Wait a minute!!...is that lion mane swordsmanship?!!??" she thought, disbelief shivering through her like lightning.