Ch. paid to leave pregnant with the vampire king heirs 13 paid to leave pregnant with the vampire king heirs 13

Chapter 13 

+45 Coins 

I only know what happened in that hallway because four different people told me, and they all told it the 

same way. 

Dorian Vale paced for eleven hours. 

He stopped every doctor, every nurse, every orderly who walked down that corridor, and he said the same 

sentence to every single one of them: 

“Whatever happens in there, her first. Sloane first. Do you understand me?” 

They kept explaining, patiently, that it wouldn’t come to that. That everything looked textbook. That this was the best team on the West Coast, and they had planned for this delivery for months. 

He’d nod. 

Then he’d stop the next person and say it again. 

Somewhere around hour eight, my father stood up, kicked the leg of the chair Dorian was about to collapse into, and growled, “Sit down, boy. My daughter has Dawn blood. She is stronger than both of us.” 

Dorian sat. For about four minutes. 

At 1:52 in the afternoon, after eleven hours and a delivery room that held, at its peak, seventeen people, I had three babies. 

Two boys. One girl. 

All breathing. All screaming. All furious about the lighting. 

And here is the thing the archives never mentioned, the thing that made three nurses gasp at once: when the afternoon sun came through the delivery room window and fell across them, they didn’t burn. 

They glowed. 

Trueborn. Children of the night and the dawn at the same time. The first in a thousand years. 

When the nurses wheeled the three bassinets into the hallway, everyone surged forward. 

Dorian got there first and then stopped dead. 

Chapter 13 

+45 Coins 

He looked down at three wrinkled, red, outraged little faces, and he cried silently, the way people cry when something is too big to make noise about. 

He wanted to touch them. He didn’t dare. 

The hands that had signed billion-dollar acquisitions and ended Court wars hovered in the air above a bassinet, trembling, as if he truly believed his strength might break something. 

Finally my mother lost patience, scooped up the smallest one, the girl, in a yellow cap, and planted her in his arms. 

“For heaven’s sake. Hold your daughter.” 

He froze. Didn’t move. 

Then his daughter opened her eyes, looked straight up at him, and wrapped her whole tiny fist around his finger. 

Felix, from the back of the hallway: “He’s going to faint. Someone catch the Prince.” 

Everyone laughed. Dorian didn’t hear any of it. He was looking at four pounds of person like she was the only thing in the universe. 

When they wheeled me out, he handed her back to the nurse and was at my side in a blur. He took my hand in both of his and pressed his forehead to mine, and I felt tears on my cheek that weren’t mine. 

“Sloane,” he whispered. “You did it. You did all of it.” 

I looked at his red eyes and his ruined shirt, and I shook my head. 

It hadn’t been hard. 

Because for the first time in my entire life, I had what I’d wanted since I was a little girl being introduced at dinners as an asset. 

A home. Loud, chaotic, sunlit, and mine. 

What followed was four months of beautiful catastrophe: 

The man who once moved global markets with a phone call could not, at first, operate a diaper. 

Chapter 13 

He stuck the tabs to his own shirt. Twice to his own hand. Once, memorably, to his hair. 

+45 Coins 

His lullabies were four hundred years out of date and so off-key that he regularly woke one baby, which woke the other two, at which point he’d stand in the center of the nursery with two screaming infants, staring at me with the naked panic of a man watching a hostile takeover go badly. 

We had six night nurses. It changed nothing. He did the nights himself. Vampires don’t sleep anyway, he 

pointed out, so honestly this was the first time in four centuries his schedule had made sense. 

Vale Capital moved its headquarters to Los Angeles six weeks after the birth. The board called it “strategic realignment.” 

My favorite thing in the world became standing in the nursery doorway at four a.m., watching him turn slow circles with a baby on each shoulder and one foot rocking a bassinet, murmuring in French, “We’re 

fine. This is fine. We are all fine.” 

My father took deep, unholy joy in it. 

“This is your real work now,” he said, tapping his cane. “You made my daughter cross a continent alone. You’ll pay that back one diaper at a time for the rest of eternity.” 

Dorian never argued. He’d lift a baby to his shoulder, grin like an idiot, and say it was the most important 

project he’d ever run. 

Then, on the morning the triplets turned one month old, he told me to be ready at five a.m. 

“There’s one more document,” he said, “that I need you to sign.” 

Every muscle in my body locked. 

Because the last time a Vale put a document in front of me, it ended my entire life.