Miles comes through the door first, eyes sweeping me as if assessing the damage. Blake fills the doorframe behind him—arms crossed, a human barricade nobody asked for.
Spencer enters last, closing the door with a click that seals the room into something smaller and infinitely worse. Their combined scent hits me in the clinical space like a wall I didn't see coming, and my fingers clamp the hospital blanket hard enough to emboss the weave into my palms.
The heart monitor behind me picks up the pace. Traitor. Three wolves in a room designed for one patient and polite conversation.
"Low blood sugar." I adjust the IV tube with the dignity of a woman wearing a gown that ties in the back. "Twelve-hour shifts, insufficient snacking. The medical establishment is calling it 'predictable.'"
"You collapsed in a conference room." Miles pulls a chair to the bedside, dropping into it like he's settling in for a siege. "That's not a snack deficiency, Bailee."
"You'd be surprised what skipping lunch can accomplish." I keep my voice level—a tightrope act performed over a canyon of information I cannot share. "Fainting, drama, three men in suits terrorising the nursing staff—really, the ripple effects are impressive."
"When did you last eat a full meal?" Blake hasn't moved from the wall. His grey eyes hold mine with a patience that has no business in a hospital room.
The silence stretches long enough to qualify as testimony. My jaw works around three different lies, rejects all of them, and settles on pressing my lips together until they go numb.
"That's what I thought." Blake's voice lands flat as a closing argument. "And the weight loss—also a snack issue?"
"I've been busy." My nails find the blanket seam and pull at a loose thread. "Some of us burn calories through manual labour instead of intimidating people in hallways."
"You've dropped at least seven pounds since I first saw you in that atrium." Miles leans forward, forearms on his knees, his scent thickening in the shrinking distance. "Your colour's been wrong for weeks."
"My colour is always wrong. I'm a half-blood—we come in off-brand." The joke lands… poorly. The monitor ticks upward and I resist the urge to smother it with a pillow.
Spencer hasn't spoken. He stands by the window, storm-blue eyes cataloguing me like someone reading a document he fully intends to memorise. I can feel him registering things I'm desperate to hide—the way my hand drifts toward my stomach before I catch it.
"I'm fine." I aim it at all three of them as if it will turn off the everpresent wellness check system in their heads. "Genuinely, medically, boringly fine. The doctor said rest and fluids, so if we could skip the group intervention—"
"I'll eat a vegetable," I add, when nobody moves. "Possibly two. Revolutionary behaviour. Can we stop hovering like I'm a flight risk in a backless gown?"
Underneath the performance, the doctor's words circle behind my eyes on a track that won't stop running. Elevated hCG. Approximately three weeks. The math assembles itself and I hate it’s accuracy.
And underneath that loop, another—the suite, the heat, the assurance that they used protection. Condoms. Negligible risk. I believed them because I had no reason not to.
"We're driving you home." Spencer's voice cuts through my monologue, low and unhurried and leaving zero room for the negotiation I was constructing. "That's not a question."
"I can take the bus." My legs choose this moment to file for independence—I shift under the blanket and my knees buckle against each other like they've forgotten basic engineering. "Or not."
Miles stands immediately, one hand extended. I stare at it for three seconds—the kind that contain entire arguments—then wrap my fingers around his palm and let him pull me upright. His grip is warm, steady, calibrated to the pressure of someone terrified of squeezing too hard.
The wheelchair to the car is a humiliation I catalogue for future revenge. Miles drives, one hand on the wheel, the other resting on the console like it's waiting for something to hold.
Blake folds into the backseat beside me, saying nothing, his knee a quarter-inch from mine—close enough that heat radiates across the gap without contact, a distance so precise it has to be deliberate. My thigh muscles lock against the instinct to close it.
Spencer takes shotgun and adjusts the rearview mirror by two degrees. I catch his reflection watching mine, and the surveillance makes my skin prickle from collarbone to wrist.
The car smells like all three of them—concentrated, layered—and my hand rests on my stomach beneath my jacket like I’m concealing a secret—which I am. I can hide it for a while longer, before pressing my hand to my stomach won’t suffice anymore. But that’s a crisis for another time.
Either they were wrong about my biology, or they lied. Both options sit behind my sternum like shrapnel I can't reach to remove, and the car hums through streets I don't see.
At my apartment door, Miles lingers—weight shifting, hands pocketed, radiating the specific energy of a man who wants to come inside and knows he shouldn't ask. His mouth opens, and I watch the sentence build behind his eyes before he can get it out.
"Do you need anything? Water, food—I can run to the store and stock your fridge, be back in ten minutes—"
"Goodnight, Miles." I say it gently, which is the cruellest version—a soft door closing is harder to argue with than a slammed one. His jaw tightens by a fraction before he steps back.
The lock clicks behind me and I lean against the wood until the grain presses into my spine. Both hands find my stomach—flat, unchanged, keeping a secret that has no business being this heavy at three weeks old.
I am pregnant. The father is one of three brothers who just carried me home in a car that smelled like the night that caused this. And I have no idea how to tell them without detonating every fragile, unnamed thing we've built since a hotel suite and a door I chose not to open.
My phone buzzes against my hip. A forwarded email from Celeste's office—All staff are reminded that medical leave requires pack-physician approval. Non-compliance may result in benefits review. The timing is a scalpel, and she doesn't even know what she's cutting.
A second buzz. Miles's address, but the language has fingerprints of three men who argued over every word: Following your rotation assessment, we're pleased to offer flexible onboarding across Technology, Legal, and CEO Operations. A week each division, then you choose.
The sign-off reads M. Wallace (on behalf of Wallace, Wallace & Wallace), aggressively casual, practically vibrating with restraint.
Three wolves built an audition process for my attention and wrapped it in HR language, and the competitiveness radiating off every carefully neutral sentence.
My mouth does something it hasn't done all day—it curves. Somewhere across this city, three brothers are pretending this email was a professional decision while probably arguing about font choices.
Then my palm presses flat against cotton and skin and the terrifying mathematics underneath, and the smile dies on my mouth instantly.
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