Dark Lord Seduction System: Taming Wives, Daughters, Aunts, and CEOs novel Chapter 1004

Chapter 1004: Unexpected At the Estate 2

Patt, who hadn’t even stepped foot on the estate. Who hadn’t contacted me. Who hadn’t replied when I’d reached out.

I asked ARIA.

"She’s busy," ARIA had said, in that tone she used when busy was a polite translation for something more complicated. "And also experiencing a midlife crisis of sorts. The sex was good. Everything was good. But now there are feelings involved, and she feels alien to herself. Her old independent self—no attachments, no feelings, no man with any kind of claim on her—that woman is looking at the new version and doesn’t recognize her.

"She needs time to reconcile the two."

So I’d let her take her time. Reach out softly from afar—a message here, a small gesture there.

Not overwhelming. Not pressuring.

But also not disappearing entirely. Walking the razor’s edge between space and neglect with the kind of care most men reserve for defusing bombs and I intended to walk it carefully.

Patt was worth the patience.

The most stubborn ones always are. Especially when they’re finally learning they don’t have to win every war alone.

The most stubborn of my mature women was still Margaret.

Okay—stubborn was overselling it. Margaret wasn’t stubborn. She was cautious.

Specifically cautious about Charlotte.

Her daughter.

The woman who— in one of the more beautifully fucked-up overlapping circles of my existence—is in love with me without knowing her own mother is carrying my child.

Margaret was pregnant. Very pregnant. And she still hadn’t pulled the trigger.

Still hadn’t told Charlotte about our relationship. Still hadn’t told Charlotte about the baby.

When we spent time together, it was in the guest mansion.

Or at the estate when Charlotte was at work—doors closed, curtains drawn, stolen hours that felt like a secret we were both tired of keeping but too careful to drop.

The kind of afternoons where the light leaked in anyway and we pretended it was normal to be this careful with something this dangerous.

And private dates.

Yes, I did so many private dates with all three of my pregnant women—

They’d insisted on spending time together, even dragging me into it, and since all three of my children would be roughly the same age... they wanted the bond to start now.

Before birth. Before names. Before the world got complicated and tried to decide what any of this meant.

They spent time together while the babies were still inside them. And the mothers created something between themselves that was unbreakable—a sisterhood forged in shared cravings, shared complaints, shared wonder at the absurdity of all three of them being pregnant by the same man at the same time and somehow being fine with it.

The unhinged ARIA had even declared she’d make sure they all gave birth almost simultaneously if they wanted to.

The fact that nobody told her no said everything about the kind of world we were living in.

Dominique and Catherine had joined this pregnancy group when they weren’t busy—bringing food, rubbing feet, offering the kind of practical, unsentimental support that women who’d been through it understood instinctively.

I usually wasn’t there when they visited.

It felt like their space.

Sacred in a way that didn’t need me in it.

But unlike what I’d expected, Catherine wasn’t asking me for a child.

She just continued her relentless, steady support for the three women—organizing doctor visits, managing schedules, being the logistical backbone of a situation that would’ve overwhelmed anyone less capable.

If she wanted a baby, she kept it to herself.

And Catherine keeping something to herself meant it would surface exactly when she was ready and not a second before.

Dominique usually had that look, though.

The one that said I’d love a baby too... if only I wasn’t running seventeen things for the agency, at once and sleeping four hours a night.

She’d glance at the pregnant women, something would flicker in her eyes—soft, longing, quickly buried—and then she’d check her phone and the moment would pass.

Paris.

The other she’d taken to the Ghost Mansion and rebuilt. From A to Z.

I was looking forward to seeing it. That mix of excitement and terror that came with any ARIA creation—the certainty that it would be extraordinary and the equally strong certainty that it would be unhinged.

In the kind of post-sex, post-confession, everything-has-changed quiet that made the air between us feel new.

And stopped. 𝗳𝚛𝗲𝕖𝚠𝚎𝚋𝗻𝗼𝕧𝗲𝐥.𝚌𝚘𝐦

Standing beside her—same height, same bone structure, the kind of resemblance that wasn’t just familial but genetic blueprint—was another woman.

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