Villain's Breeding System: Evolving 999+ Harem into an SSS-Rank Legion-Chapter 265 - Meera’s Last Hope to Save an Already Dead Relationship

Chapter 265: Chapter 265 - Meera’s Last Hope to Save an Already Dead Relationship

She pressed her hand to her belly.

"I was someone’s wife," she said. The broken quality of the past tense. That devastating past tense of it — not ’I am’ but ’I was.’ The word that had happened when she wasn’t looking.

He was watching her.

The level, attending quality of it — not defending, not moving, not explaining. Just watching with the eyes of someone who was letting a thing land because it had the right to land.

"Leave me alone," she said.

"Meera —"

"I HATE YOU."

The full volume of it. The room absorbed it — the hospital room with its pale walls and its curtain rail and its two beds and the smell of antiseptic and the morning light that was showing everything.

"I hate you," she said again. Lower. The repetition not for emphasis but because it was true in both registers — loud and quiet both. "I never want to see your face again. I never want to — don’t come back. Don’t appear. Don’t snap your fingers or vanish or — just leave. Just leave me alone. Please."

The last word.

’Please.’

Arriving with the exhausted, not-a-weapon quality of a please that was not manipulation and not strategy. Just the last word of a woman who had used everything else.

He looked at her.

The long, seeing quality of the look.

And then — something crossed his face.

Not the flat informational quality. Not the contained, everything-according-to-plan quality she had been looking at all night. Something smaller. The brief, genuine, human-register quality of a man who had been expecting this and had prepared for this and was still, despite the preparation, experiencing it in a way that a thing in the real landing always differs from a thing in the imagining.

He was slightly taken aback.

Just slightly.

One heartbeat of it.

And then it was gone.

The composure returning — the settled, patient, I-know-how-this-ends quality of it settling back over his face like water settling after a disturbance.

The corner of his mouth moved.

Not the smug smile. The different one — the smaller, quieter, genuine-register quality of someone who was smiling because they had understood something and were not trying to make the understanding into a performance.

"Just tell me," he said. Quiet. The low, unhurried quality of it. "When you need me."

She opened her mouth.

"I will arrive," he said.

She stared at him.

He raised his hand.

Two fingers.

The snap —

Empty air.

She stood in the middle of the hospital room looking at the space where he had been standing. The morning light showing the floor where his feet had been, the particular emptiness of a space that had contained a very large presence and was now simply — room.

"What —"

She looked left.

Right.

The bathroom door, still open. The wrecked bed. The curtain rail. The window.

No Raven.

"Again," she said, to the empty room.

The word of someone who had reached a point where extraordinary things happening had become ordinary through repetition, and the ordinariness of it was somehow worse than the shock.

Her knees gave.

Not the partial give of before — the full, comprehensive, bilateral give of both knees simultaneously. The floor came up. The linoleum finding her knees through the thin fabric of her skirt, the hard, cold quality of it.

She was on her knees on the hospital room floor.

And she cried.

The full, total, child-in-the-dark quality of it — not the managed crying of the bathroom, not the fury-mixed crying of facing Vikram. The stripped, simple, nothing-left crying of a woman who was on the floor of a hospital room at nine in the morning with marks on her neck and milk in her bra and her husband in the corridor calling for a doctor and the man who had done all of this gone like smoke.

The sound of it.

Not words. Not sentences. That pre-verbal, chest-emptying sound of a person reduced to sounds below language. The wail of it. She had not known she could make this sound. She had not known this sound existed in her.

It came out of her anyway.

The floor was cold under her knees.

She pressed her face into her hands.

She wailed.

The door.

Footsteps, multiple, the brisk professional quality of hospital staff moving with purpose.

"Ma’am —"

The nurse’s voice — the careful, trained quality of someone whose job was to approach distress without amplifying it. The touch on her shoulder. That practiced quality of a hand designed to help a person back to vertical.

"Ma’am, can you stand? Are you in pain? Is it the baby?"

She looked up.

The nurse. Young, practical, the professionally-neutral face of someone doing their job. Behind her, another nurse, and beyond them, the white-coated quality of a doctor arriving in the corridor with a clipboard.

She looked at them.

She wiped her face with the back of her hand.

The exhausted, comprehensive wipe of someone clearing surfaces that immediately refilled.

"I’m fine," she said.

The words of someone who was the opposite of fine, delivered with that automatic, pre-programmed quality of a phrase that came out of the mouth without consulting the person it was attached to.

She let them help her up.

The careful, two-nurse assisted rise from the floor — the pregnant woman support of it, the attention to her belly, the practiced quality of people who had done this before.

She stood.

She looked toward the corridor.

Toward Vikram.

He was there — visible through the open door, standing in the corridor with the doctor, the clipboard between them, that cold, professional, getting-things-done quality of a man who had decided that clinical machinery was the appropriate response to this morning.

He felt her looking.

He turned his head.

Their eyes met.

The quality of his gaze — the gaze he had had in the parking lot, in the car, in this room fifteen minutes ago — but now with the added quality of someone who had a plan and was executing it. That cold efficiency of a man who had converted his grief into paperwork.

She looked at him.

She thought: ’the test will come back. It will confirm what I know. And then he will have to —’

She held onto that thought.

The way you hold a single plank in a flood.

’The test will come back. The child is his. I know this child is his. We have been together for six years, we tried for this baby, the timing — the math — I know this is his. I know it.’

She followed the nurse into the corridor.

Ignoring the wetness between her thighs that she had been ignoring since she stood up from the floor. That warm, continuous, unbidden presence of it.

Ignoring the twin dark circles outlining her nipples through the fabric of her blouse.

Ignoring the throb at the location that had been pierced this morning and was now simply — continuously, helplessly, insistently — reminding her that it had been attended to.

’The test will come back,’ she said to herself.

’And then everything will be fine.’

The procedure.

The clinical, clean, efficient machinery of prenatal DNA testing in a hospital that served a pharmaceutical research company’s senior employee.

Vikram had not asked — he had stated, and the hospital had responded to his statement with that motivated efficiency of an institution.

The needle.

The amniocentesis — that precise, careful quality of it.

She lay on the examination table with both hands on her belly and looked at the ceiling while the doctor did what needed to be done. The brief, focused discomfort of it.

The clinical light above her. The nurse at the monitor. The whump-whump-whump of the fetal heartbeat filling the small room.