Chapter 193: The Devil’s Woman Is Confused
Anastasia took a few hesitant steps further into the office, her heels sinking softly into the dark wool rug. The suffocating silence clung to the air like smoke.
"Seriously," Ana murmured, glancing between the three frozen figures, "what’s going on here?"
Before she could reach the center of the room, Valerie practically scrambled around the edge of the mahogany desk. Her face was pale, her voice tight with an unnatural, skittish tenderness.
"Ana, come here," Valerie urged softly, taking her by the elbow with surprising gentleness. "Just... sit down first. Come on, take a seat on the couch."
Across the room, Henry moved on pure instinct. Without waiting for an order, he hurried to the credenza, poured a glass of chilled mineral water with a slight tremor in his fingers, and carried it over, setting it carefully on the glass coffee table before Anastasia.
Damian didn’t move.
He remained anchored near the center of the office, his tall frame rigid, his dark, obsidian eyes locked entirely onto Ana. His expression was completely unreadable—a terrifying blend of shattered composure, disbelief, and a hollow, burning intensity.
Ana’s gaze flicked from Valerie’s anxious hover to Henry’s strained, cautious posture, and a knot of cold unease tightened beneath her ribs. Whatever was happening, it wasn’t a corporate scandal. They were treating her like spun glass.
Then her hazel eyes caught the sleek slab of dark titanium clutched tightly in Damian’s fingers.
"Is that the replacement?" Ana asked, attempting a light smile that felt brittle against the heavy atmosphere. She stepped away from Valerie’s guiding hand and tilted her head toward him. "Can you give it to me? Clara wanted me to check the creative drives before three."
Damian didn’t answer immediately.
With a sharp, dismissive flick of his fingers toward the open threshold, he broke the spell.
"Out," Damian commanded. The single syllable wasn’t a roar, but the raw, arctic authority behind it made the room shudder. "Both of you. Now."
Valerie opened her mouth as if to offer a desperate, parting excuse, but a single, lethal glance from her brother choked the words in her throat. She stepped back, brushing past Henry. Henry offered a brisk, tense nod, following her out into the executive corridor.
The heavy double frosted-glass doors clicked firmly shut, sealing Damian and Anastasia inside the quiet penthouse suite.
Damian didn’t yell. The terrifying, explosive temper she had braced for never arrived. Instead, he moved with an unnerving, glacial calm.
He closed the distance between them with slow, deliberate strides until the subtle scent of his cedarwood cologne wrapped around her senses. Extending his right arm, he raised the sleek flagship device and turned the glowing OLED screen directly toward her face.
Ana blinked at the bright display, her eyes momentarily skimming past the clutter of icons and calendar alerts, lingering instead on the tight, drawn lines of his jaw. She looked up into his dark gaze, genuinely perplexed.
"Why are you staring at me like that, Damian?" she asked softly, her brow furrowing. "You look like you’ve seen a ghost."
Damian didn’t blink. The muscles in his throat worked as he swallowed down a wave of raw emotion, his voice dropping into a low, gravelly murmur that sent a shiver down her spine.
"How are you feeling, Anastasia?"
Ana gave a faint, bewildered laugh at the sheer randomness of the question. "Right now? Confused."
She paused, noting the persistent, unblinking gravity in his eyes, and decided to just answer him honestly.
"Earlier I felt terrible," she admitted, shifting her weight. "I had this awful wave of nausea during the marketing brief, probably from those heavy antibiotics they loaded me with. But then Clara and I went down to the plaza diner. I had a greasy double cheeseburger and a strawberry shake because I had this bizarre, desperate craving for it... and honestly, I feel so much better now."
A gentle, teasing smile softened her features as she stepped half an inch closer, tilting her chin up.
"Have you had lunch yet? Because if you haven’t, we could sneak out somewhere. I wouldn’t even mind grabbing another snack with you," she joked lightly, shaking her head. "It’s absurd, really. My appetite is suddenly out of control the second I set foot in this building."
𝙧𝙚𝙚𝔀𝒆𝓫𝓷𝙤𝓿𝒆𝙡.𝒄𝙤𝓶
"Anastasia."
His deep, gravelly voice cut clean through her lighthearted ramble.
Damian stepped in closer, his shadow falling completely over her as he raised the phone higher, the cold edge of his thumb resting right beneath the glowing pink banner on the glass.
"When was the last time you had your period?"
Ana’s brow furrowed in deep, startled confusion. A defensive heat crept into her cheeks at the sheer, unwarranted intimacy of the inquiry in the middle of a corporate office.
"Why on earth are you asking me that all of a sudden?" Ana asked, shaking her head. "Damian, what is this?"
Instead of answering with his usual cutting bite, Damian stepped past her and sank onto the leather couch. He leaned forward, his elbows resting on his knees, his hands loosely cradling the phone between them.
Ana turned, watching him closely. She immediately caught the slight, tightly restrained frown etched across his forehead—a subtle tremor of tension in his jaw that told her he was using every ounce of his formidable willpower just to keep his hands from shaking.
He didn’t look up at her. He simply tilted the phone screen slightly toward the cushion beside him.
"Look at the phone, Anastasia," Damian said, his voice dropping into a low, strained whisper. "Just look at it."
Her heart skipped an erratic, warning beat.
Slowly, reluctantly, Ana stepped around the low glass coffee table and lowered herself onto the couch beside him. She leaned in, her eyes traveling down to the glowing display resting between his fingers.
Right at the top of the unspooled lock screen, framed in a stark, unmistakable pink border, the notification glared back at her:
Cycle Tracker Alert: Period is 4 weeks late. High probability. Please log your symptoms or take an at-home test.
The breath vanished from Ana’s lungs.
The world seemed to tilt violently on its axis, the sharp edges of the room blurring into a hollow, deafening hum. The sudden, debilitating nausea during Clara’s presentation. The complete aversion to her morning coffee. The bone-deep, leaden exhaustion dragging at her limbs. The sudden, frantic craving for a greasy burger and sweet shake at ten in the morning. Even the way her clothes had felt faintly tighter around her waist over the past week—
It all slammed into her chest at once, hitting her with the crushing, merciless force of a freight train.
Four weeks.
A month.
Her lips parted, dry and trembling, a cold numbness spreading from the tips of her fingers all the way through her veins. The phantom terror of what had happened two years ago clawed at the back of her mind, clashing violently with the sudden, terrifying realization of the medications she had just gulped over the weekend.
Ana slowly lifted her head, her hazel eyes wide, glossy with unshed tears, and swimming with unadulterated, paralyzing shock.
Damian was staring straight at her.
His obsidian eyes were dark pools of raw, unshielded torment—the agonizing ghost of the child they had buried lingering between them, magnified by a bitter, burning ache of betrayal that cracked through his stony veneer.
"Did you know, Anastasia?" Damian asked, his gravelly voice fracturing under the agonizing weight behind the words. "Or were you going to let the entire building know before your own husband?"
Ana pulled her eyes away from the glaring screen.
The shock that had paralyzed her limbs vanished, burning off under the raw sting of his accusation. Her spine snapped straight, her chin lifting with sharp, defiant pride. She refused to crumble beneath the weight of an algorithm or the suffocating suspicion in his dark eyes.
She looked straight at Damian, her chest rising with a single, steady breath.
"I am not pregnant, Damian."