I shower. Dress. Apply makeup with the same precision I use for client presentations. Nico kisses me goodbye at the door. His hand rests on my lower back. "Have a good lunch."
"I will."
"Elena?"
"Elena."
He nods. Trusts it.Why wouldn't he?Elena is family. Elena is my friend.
The security detail follows me to the restaurant. Two men in a black sedan, professional, discreet. They'll park across the street and wait. They won't enter the restaurant — Nico's rule for social outings. They watch the perimeter, not the person. I've observed the protocol for weeks. I know the gaps.
I arrive ten minutes early. Tell the hostess I'm waiting for someone. Then I walk back out the side entrance, turn east, and cover two blocks in four minutes. The pharmacy is a chain. Anonymous. I pay cash. The box goes into my bag beside my wallet and my phone and the gun I'm not carrying because formal lunches don't require a Beretta and today, I need a different kind of weapon entirely.
Back to the restaurant through the side door before the detail notices the gap. Three minutes to spare. Elena arrives, warm and polished, and I smile and stand and hug her and feel the pregnancy test box press against my hip through the leather of my bag.
Lunch is normal. Elena is good at normal. She asks about Nico, about the penthouse, about whether I've adjusted to the Greek world. She tells me about New York, her father, the Drakos family obligations that keep pulling her back. She's sympathetic and curious and she makes me laugh and I keep thinking,I need this woman to keep talking for twenty more minutes so I can excuse myself to the bathroom without it seeming urgent.
Twenty-two minutes. Close enough.
"Excuse me. I'll be right back."
The bathroom. Single stall. I lock the door and the sound of the bolt sliding home is the loneliest sound I've ever heard.
I take the test. Set it on the edge of the sink. Two minutes.
I sit on the closed lid and stare at the opposite wall. Cream tile. A crack near the ceiling. The muffled sounds of the restaurant beyond the door. I count seconds because counting isthe only thing my mind can do that doesn't involve calculating the implications of two possible outcomes.
One hundred and twenty seconds. I stand. I look.
Two pink lines.
The world tilts. Not a crash. Not a collapse. A shift of two degrees that rearranges everything. The cream tiles, the muffled restaurant, the woman in the mirror with concealer under her eyes and a pregnancy test in her hand — all of it slides sideways and resettles in a new configuration where nothing is what it was, and everything is different and I am standing in a restaurant bathroom holding proof that I am carrying Nico Konstantinos's child.
I sit back down. My hand finds my stomach. Presses. There is nothing there that anyone could see. Nothing that shows. But the test is absolute, and my body has been telling me for three mornings in a language I refused to translate and the math is clean: eleven days. A cluster of cells the size of a grain of rice that will become a heartbeat that will become a person that will become the heir to an empire built on blood and loyalty and the particular stubbornness of men who refuse to die.
My first thought,Tell Nico.
Walk out of this bathroom. Call him. Say the words. He loves me. He told me so four days ago with blood on his jaw and his body still warm from mine. He'd want to know.
My second thought arrives with the precision of a risk assessment: if I tell him, I lose everything I've fought for.
I know this man. I know the man who doubled security after a photograph. Who taught me to shoot because the danger was too close and then couldn't sleep because the fact that I needed to learn meant he'd already failed to protect me. Who held his mother's hand in Cambridge and said "everything is on me" with fifteen years of guilt in his voice.
If I tell Nico I'm pregnant, I become the most protected thing in his world. He will wrap me in security and send me somewhere safe and make every decision about my life in the name of keeping me and this baby alive. He'll do exactly what my father did. What Cormac did. What every man in my life has done: choose for me.
He'll break "together" in the name of keeping me safe. And he'll believe he's right.
It's not lying. It's timing. I'll tell him when Viktor is dealt with. When the war is over. When telling him won't cost me the partnership we've built across every negotiation and every fight and every night I walked toward him instead of away.
I wrap the test in toilet paper. Consider the trash can. Consider taking it with me. The penthouse trash is collected by building staff who answer to Nico's security — anything unusual would be flagged. The restaurant trash goes to a dumpster tonight and a landfill by morning. I bury the test beneath a stack of paper towels, deep enough that casual contact won't uncover it. The risk assessment professional in me calculates the probability of discovery at under two percent. Acceptable margin.
I wash my hands. Wash my face. Look at myself in the mirror one more time.
The woman who walked thirty feet of hallway and knocked looks back at me. She has a secret now. It's the heaviest thing she's ever carried, and it weighs nothing at all.
I unlock the door.
Elena is at the table. She looks up and her eyes sweep my face with the attentive warmth that made me trust her in the first place. Except today the sweep lingers. On the pallor I couldn't fully conceal. On the faint sheen at my temples. On the careful composition of a smile that takes more effort than it should.