Seb’s eyes moved to the baby, and his voice dropped into something that was almost tender, which was somehow the worst version of it, which was somehow more violating than anger would have been, and he said it softly, said it like a man speaking to someone who already belonged to him.

"Daddy loves you, little Divina." He let the name sit there.

"Divina Creed." The smile that followed was small. Private. The smile of someone who had just planted a flag.

Then he turned and walked out.

Kalian followed without a word. One last glance at Julian, measuring, unreadable, and then he was gone too, the door swinging shut behind them both, the room suddenly containing only the two of them and the babies and the machines and the enormous, reverberating aftermath of what had just been said.

Divina Creed.

Amara stood very still.

The baby girl was still making small sounds against her shoulder. Still restless. Still searching for the calm that kept being interrupted by a world that was already too loud, too complicated, too full of things she was too new to understand.

Amara pressed her lips to the top of her head. Felt the impossibly soft warmth of her there. And the fury that had been holding her upright began, at the edges, to fracture.

Because he had named her.

He had stood in this room, her room, their room, and he had looked at her daughter, and he had given her a name like a claim. Like a deed. Like a flag pressed into the ground, he had already decided that it was his to plant things in. Divina Creed.

Not a question. Not a suggestion. A declaration. The opening move of something she had hoped, prayed, bargained with everything she had to avoid.

Seb was not going away. He had never been going away.

And now he had a reason, a small, seven-pound, still-crying reason that no court and no distance and no amount of Julian’s careful, methodical dismantling of his empire could simply remove from the equation.

Amara’s eyes burned. She did not look at Julian.

She could not look at Julian right now because if she did, she would fall apart entirely, and she needed ...needed... to hold herself together for just a little longer.

For the baby in her arms who could feel everything she felt and would not stop crying. For the boy, quiet in Julian’s arms, who deserved a mother who was present.

For herself. Just a little longer. She pressed her lips to her daughter’s head again and closed her eyes.

"Maybe you should feed her."

Julian said it gently. The way you said things in rooms that had already held too much carefully, without pressure, the words placed down rather than delivered.

Amara nodded. Once. The automatic nod of someone moving through motions because the motions were there to move through.

She crossed to the small couch by the window and settled herself down slowly, still tender, still careful with her own body, the way you were careful with something that had been through what hers had been through, and she adjusted the baby girl against her and tried.

The baby turned her face away.

Amara tried again. Shifted her. Changed the angle. Tried to remember what the nurses had said, what she had read, what any of it had said about this moment that was supposed to be instinctive and natural and was currently feeling like neither.

The baby would not feed.

She tried again. The baby made a small, unhappy sound and turned away again, and Amara sat on the couch with her daughter in her arms and felt something she had not expected to feel in this specific moment, on top of everything else this day had already stacked inside her.

Helpless.

Completely, quietly, helpless. 𝓯𝓻𝓮𝙚𝙬𝓮𝙗𝒏𝙤𝒗𝙚𝙡.𝒄𝒐𝓶

She was her mother. She was right here. This was supposed to be the one thing... the one thing.. that required nothing except presence, except the basic biological fact of her. And her daughter was turning away from her.

She was refusing the one offering she had available. And Amara sat with that and felt it go somewhere deep and dark and join the rest of the things already living there.

"I’ll get the nurse," Julian said.

She didn’t answer. He pressed the bell anyway.

The nurse came in with the particular unhurried confidence of someone who had sat with this specific moment, this exact combination of exhausted mother and refusing newborn more times than she could count. She took in the scene without judgment. Not a flicker of it.

"Don’t worry," she said, already reaching, already taking the baby from Amara’s arms with practiced ease. "It happens. It happens all the time."

She settled the baby girl against herself, reached for a prepared bottle from the warmer by the crib, and within moments...within moments that felt obscene in their ease, the baby was feeding.

Contentedly.

Quietly.

Amara watched.

She sat on the couch with her empty arms, and she watched the nurse hold her daughter and feed her daughter, and she felt the tears come not dramatically but simply, the way things came when they had been waiting long enough, they just arrived, just moved down her face without asking permission, without announcing themselves.

She felt like a failure.

The thought arrived fully formed and sat in her chest with the particular cruelty of thoughts that felt true even when they weren’t entirely.

Her daughter had been in her arms and had wanted nothing she had to offer. Had accepted immediately from the hands of a stranger what she had refused from her own mother.

And Amara knew, somewhere rational and distant inside herself, she knew that this was biology, that this was the ordinary and common difficulty of new mothers, that it meant nothing about her love or her worth or the future of the thing between her and this child.

But the rational part was very quiet right now. And the other part was very loud.

She can feel it, the loud part said. She knows. She already knows that you sat in that room and prayed for a different result. She already knows you wanted something other than what she is. And she is four days old, and she already knows, and she is already turning away from you.

Amara stared at the nurse holding her daughter.

At how naturally it was going. At how immediately her daughter had settled. At how the thing that was supposed to be hers... hers... was happening in someone else’s arms, with someone else’s ease, in a way that made Amara feel like a piece of furniture in the room. Present. Irrelevant.

She did not look at Julian. She couldn’t.