Ch. paid to leave pregnant with the vampire king heirs 12 paid to leave pregnant with the vampire king heirs 12

Chapter 12 Chapter 12 

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“Moreau.” 

Dorian didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t have to. Two hundred people felt it in their teeth. 

“Since when,” he said pleasantly, “does a Moreau have the standing to speak to the future Queen of the Eastern Court?” 

Julian went the color of old paper. “Dorian, it was a joke” 

“Apologize to her.” 

He spun toward me so fast he spilled his drink. “Sloane. Your Majesty. I’m sorry. That was out of line. I’m very sorry.” 

“Leave,” Dorian said. 

Julian didn’t walk. Julian evacuated. 

Dorian guided me out through a set of glass doors onto a terrace, where the air was cool and clean and Los Angeles lay glittering below us like spilled jewels. 

“Are you all right?” Gentle now. All the frost gone. 

“I’m fine.” I exhaled. “I had a better line than yours, by the way.” 

“I know.” A faint smile. “I’ve heard your better lines. I wanted him gone before you wasted one on him.” 

I laughed. 

Then I looked at him. Really looked. Two months of burnt omelets. Two months of sand in his trousers. Two months of a man who had walked into the sun for me, sat in it until his skin broke, and never once used his voice to make me obey, not even when it would have worked. 

He had asked me nine weeks ago. He had never asked again. 

He reached for my left hand, which had been wearing a small golden stone for three weeks now, and which he had never once mentioned, not a single word, as if saying it out loud might break the spell, and pressed a kiss to my knuckles. 

Chapter 12 

“Sloane,” he said. “Marry me. 

No box. No cameras. No audience. 

Just a cool terrace, a city full of lights, and an entirely undefended man 

I looked at him for a long time. 

Then I nodded. 

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“Okay.” 

He went completely still. “Say it again.” 

“Yes.” I was crying and laughing at once, which at thirty-one weeks pregnant is genuinely dangerous. “Yes, Dorian.” 

He pulled me in so carefully, one hand cradling my head, the other spread wide across my belly, holding all four of us at once, and I felt his whole body shaking. 

“Thank you,” he said into my hair. “Thank you for the second chance. I know exactly what it cost you.” 

Three weeks later, at 2:40 in the morning, in the middle of a storm rolling hard off the Pacific, the first contraction hit me like a slammed door. 

I didn’t even reach for my phone. 

I just thought his name. 

The bond, the one that was supposed to be dead, the one three tiny hearts had refused to let go, lit up like a struck match. 

Ten seconds later my bedroom door flew open. 

The cold, flawless Prince of the Eastern Court, who could move faster than the human eye could track, dropped his car keys twice trying to carry me down my own stairs. 

“Breathe,” he kept saying. To himself, not to me. “All right. All right. Breathe.” 

“Dorian.” 

Chapter 12 

“Yes.” 

+45 Coins 

“You don’t breathe. You’re a vampire.” 

He laughed, one wild, terrified crack of sound. Then the next contraction folded me in half, and neither of us laughed again for a long time. 

At the hospital, they rushed me through the double doors. 

And the doors slammed shut with him on the other side. 

The last thing I saw was his face through the little window. 

And the last thing I heard, through the bond, was a prayer. From a man who hadn’t prayed in four hundred 

years. 

Not them. Her first. Please. Her first. 

Chapter 13