Chapter 206: 206. Petricia Knock On My Door Just To Tell Me That She’s Pregnant! (I Know...)

The knock arrived at two in the afternoon. It wasn’t the heavy, impatient thud of a visitor or the frantic rap of an emergency; it was soft, rhythmic, and specific.

It was Petricia’s knock, a signature she had developed in their first week together, a sound so uniquely hers that Mike could identify it even in his sleep.

He pulled the door open, and the world outside seemed to fade into a blur, leaving only her.

She stepped into his space with the heavy, electric energy of someone carrying a secret that had been burning in her chest since the moment she woke up. It wasn’t the frantic energy of panic, but something far more profound: a presence so immense it seemed to fill the entire hallway.

Before the door had even clicked shut behind her, she was in his arms. She wasn’t sobbing, not exactly, but she was close; it was that deep, shuddering exhale of a person who had been holding their breath for a lifetime and had finally found the only safe place on earth to let it out.

Mike wrapped his arms around her, pulling her muscular, tan frame against his, anchoring her. He felt the tremor in her shoulders, the sheer weight of the moment.

In the back of his mind, the system sat in a rare, respectful silence. It had already signaled the shift in the atmosphere; it had whispered the probability of this moment hours ago.

He had known since noon. That was the curse and the gift of his existence: the agonizing, godlike gap between knowing a truth and hearing it spoken aloud.

He had long since grown used to the strange, lonely sensation of being the only person in the room who already knew the ending of the story.

"I just took the test," she whispered into the crook of his neck, her voice thick with a vulnerability that made his chest tighten.

"When?" he asked, his voice low, steadying her, though his own heart was beginning to hammer a new, frantic rhythm against his ribs.

"This morning," she said, her breath warm against his skin. "I took the first one, and then... then I took a second one just to be sure."

"And then I sat there... I sat with it for two hours, Mike..."

"I just sat there because I wanted to be absolutely, undeniably certain of the feeling before I brought it to you..."

"I wanted to make sure it was real before I let it change everything."

She pulled back just enough to look up at him. Her eyes were bright, shimmering with a mixture of awe and a terrifying kind of joy.

She looked like a woman who had been wandering a desert and had suddenly, miraculously, stumbled upon an oasis still blinking, still trying to reconcile the mirage with the reality of the water.

"It’s real," she breathed, her gaze searching his, pleading for him to see it too.

"It’s real, hm...?" he replied, the words feeling heavy and sacred as they left his lips.

[YOUR REACTION IS REMARKABLY MEASURED,] the System interjected, its digital voice cutting through the sudden, overwhelming intimacy of the room. [FOR SOMEONE RECEIVING NEWS OF THIS MAGNITUDE, YOUR PULSE REMAINS WITHIN AN UNUSUALLY CONTROLLED PARAMETER.]

Mike didn’t bother to defend himself. He didn’t care about his pulse, or his composure, or the clinical observations of a machine.

He didn’t even acknowledge the system’s presence. His entire universe had narrowed down to the woman standing in his arms, the life beginning to stir within her, and the terrifying, beautiful realization that the stakes of his game had just become infinite.

He was looking only at Petricia.

Her eyes were doing that thing they always did: the shimmering, crystalline tension of a woman who refused to let herself break, where the pressure of unspent tears was visible in the slight tremble of her lower lid.

"I didn’t think..." she started, her voice catching. She stopped, shaking her head as if to clear the fog. "I mean, Mike, I’m forty-one..."

"The books, the doctors, the statistics... they say there are all kinds of considerations, all the risks and the—"

"It’s real, alright," he interrupted, his voice serving as a low, grounding force. "No need to think about it twice."

He wasn’t concerned about the statistics or the medical journals. He only cared about the truth standing in front of him.

"And that’s the only part that matters right now."

A short, breathless laugh escaped her, the kind of sound that breaks through when a reality is too massive to be contained by a normal reaction.

"God," she whispered, "I’ve been sitting in my office for two hours just... thinking about this."

"What were you thinking?" he asked, stepping closer, his hands finding her waist to pull her back into his heat.

She turned her gaze toward the window, watching the light shift across the room.

"Everything," she admitted. "In no particular order. The building, the timing, Gerald, my age..."

"Whether the spare room is even the right size or if I even know the first thing about being a mother." She paused, her expression softening into something profound. "And then, eventually, I just stopped thinking about the ’what ifs’ and just sat with the fact of it."

"The fact won," Mike said, a small, triumphant smirk tugging at the corner of his mouth.

"You’re right... the fact did win it," she echoed, a weary smile touching her lips. "It usually does."

He searched her face, his mind already calculating the ripple effects. "Did you call anyone? Anyone at all?"

"No," she said firmly. "I wanted you to be the first... Only you."

He nodded, though a thought tugged at him. Gerald--"

"Not yet," she cut him off.

The brightness in her eyes didn’t fade, but it became more controlled, more deliberate—the look of a woman who was learning how to carry two massive truths at once. "I don’t know how to tell Gerald right now, not with everything else that’s happening in the district."

"Yeah, it’s better to not tell him today," Mike promised, his voice dropping into that smooth, reassuring tone that had charmed women from London to Lagos. "We’ll have to wait on that."

"We do it when the time is right."

"Yes, I get it... when the time was right, and I don’t want it to be risky for us," she repeated.

She let the phrase settle over her like a heavy, comfortable blanket, finding a sense of order in his certainty. "That sounds right to avoid any kind of suspicion from him..."

[FOR WHAT IT IS WORTH, THIS IS NOT YOUR FIRST TIME NAVIGATING THIS TYPE OF CONVERSATION,] the System interjected, its tone clinical and unyielding.

Mike’s expression didn’t flicker. He was a master of the poker face, a man who had spent a lifetime masking his depths.

"[FIVE CONFIRMED INSTANCES ACROSS FOUR COUNTRIES,] the System continued, relentless in its data retrieval. [NONE OF THEM PROGRESSED WITH THE SAME LEVEL OF STABILITY AS THIS ONE.]

He knew that. He didn’t need a digital ledger to remind him of his history.

The difference wasn’t the category of the conversation; it was the texture. The women before him had been Chapters in a long, hedonistic book, but Petricia was the whole damn novel.

She was looking at him as if he were a fixed point in a turning world, a man she could actually lean on, and he had no intention of letting the ghosts of his past five women intrude on this moment.

"You’re healthy," he said, shifting the focus back to her, his tone shifting from lover to strategist. "I mean it like... you’re forty-one, and you’re healthy, Petricia."

"That is a world away from being ’old.’ "You’ve been running a high-stakes building for eleven years; your system isn’t fragile."

"It’s ironclad."

She looked up at him, a playful, skeptical glint returning to her eyes. "You are incredibly confident about my biology for a man who studied economics."

"I’ve lived in many places," he countered with a shrug, his playboy charm bleeding into a rare moment of genuine wisdom. "I’ve known many people."

"Some of the most capable, most formidable women I’ve ever met had children much later than the ’conventional’ timelines suggested they should."

"Biology is a suggestion; strength is a fact."

She studied him for a long, silent moment, her gaze searching his dark eyes. "You always do that."

"Do what?"

"Say exactly the thing that makes the scary version of the truth smaller, without ever pretending the fear isn’t there."

Mike remained silent. She had hit the mark with surgical precision, and there was no point in arguing with the truth.

[YOU WERE CONSIDERABLY LESS WARM DURING THE SECOND INSTANCE,] the system whispered, almost provocatively. [BERLIN, IF WE RECALL THE TEMPERATURE OF THE ROOM.]

Berlin was irrelevant. He filed the memory away with the ruthless efficiency of a man who knew how to compartmentalize his soul.

Petricia sank into the chair near his desk. Her posture was a complex contradiction: she looked entirely full, overflowing with the life growing inside her, yet beneath that fullness, there was a profound, bone-deep exhaustion, the kind of fatigue that only comes to a woman who has spent a lifetime managing everything and everyone all by herself.