Ch. paid to leave pregnant with the vampire king heirs 10 paid to leave pregnant with the vampire king heirs 10

Chapter 10 

They were surgical. 

+45 Coins 

They lined up my conception dates against Dorian’s travel records, records only someone inside the Vale 

estate could have. 

They quoted an unnamed “close family friend” claiming I’d been seen with another man in Paris last spring. (Felix. It was Felix. There was a photo of Felix, holding a loupe.) 

They cited “medical experts” who swore no vampire had fathered a child in two hundred years, and suggested, carefully, legally, with every weasel word in the book, that my three miracle heirs were a human affair dressed up as a prophecy. 

And then the real payload: a long, beautifully written essay calling me a gold-digging fraud who had taken fifty million dollars and was now using another man’s babies to steal a vampire dynasty. 

Every sentence was built to make a woman look like a parasite. 

I sat on my bed at twenty-four weeks pregnant, reading that the children kicking inside me were a “con,” and I went cold from the scalp down. 

My mother threw her tablet across the room hard enough to crack the screen. 

“I am going to end these people.” 

“Wait.” My voice came out steadier than I expected. “Rage is what they’re selling. Let’s use lawyers. Lawyers are worse.” 

I got as far as dialing Nina. 

I never finished the call. 

Because by nine a.m., every single article was gone. 

Not corrected. Not updated. Gone. Pulled, scrubbed, cached copies dead, as if fourteen publications had suffered the same act of God at the same moment. 

And in the hole where they’d been, a new story appeared. 

The Wall Street Journal had received an anonymous dossier. Twelve hundred pages. 

Chapter 10 

+45 Coins 

THE MOREAU FAMILY: A CENTURY OF FRAUD 

Insider trading. Tax evasion across five countries. Bribery of three Council inspectors. An offshore 

account in Celeste Moreau’s own name that had paid a Vale legal clerk three hundred thousand dollars the 

week my severance was filed. 

And one more thing. Payments to every one of the fourteen gossip sites, wired the night before. 

That was the line that killed her. 

It put Celeste’s hand directly on the forged Rite, and on every lie about my children. 

Moreau stock opened down forty-five percent and never recovered. The Council stripped her family’s seat by Thursday. My father’s Order opened its own inquiry, which in vampire society is roughly like being told the sun is coming for you personally. 

Later I learned Dorian’s people had built the entire dossier in eighteen hours. 

He hadn’t ordered it. His chief of staff told him afterward. They had simply read what was written about me and handled it. 

That, more than anything, told me what he had become to them. And what I had. 

The last I heard, Celeste was in a Swiss sanatorium with no passport and no one returning her calls. 

That evening, just after sunset, my doorbell rang. 

Dorian stood at the gate with his hands at his sides. And for the first time, my father’s men lifted the silver line without being told. 

He looked at me like a man waiting for a verdict. 

“I’m sorry you read that,” he said. “Again. Because of someone in my world. I can’t take it back.” 

“It’s over,” I said softly. 

“It will never happen again. Not while I exist.” He held my eyes. “I promise you.” 

And I believed him. 

That was the problem. 

Chapter 10 

+45 Coins 

I stood in my doorway, twenty-four weeks pregnant, with the sea breeze coming in and the porch light making a halo around a man I had spent two months refusing, and I felt the entire wall I’d built fall down in 

one piece. 

Then he reached into his coat. 

A small, worn velvet box. 

And Dorian Vale, Prince of the Eastern Court, who had not knelt to anyone in four centuries, went down on one knee on my front steps. 

Chapter 11