[Sophie’s POV]

Adrian returns from the symposium carrying tension like a physical weight.

I see it in the rigid line of his shoulders, the way his jaw is clenched so tight the muscles jump beneath his skin. The air in the apartment seems to shift when he enters, growing heavier, charged with something that makes the hair on my arms stand up. He sets down his bag by the door with mechanical precision and stands there for a moment, not moving, not speaking, just breathing. Each inhale seems labored, each exhale a controlled release of something he’s barely containing.

“Adrian?” I push myself up from the couch, my body protesting the movement. The pregnancy makes everything harder now—standing, sitting, existing—but the look on his face overrides every physical complaint. My heart begins to race, fear and anticipation tangling in my chest. “What happened?”

He looks at me, and there’s something in his eyes—a mixture of triumph and trauma that doesn’t quite make sense. The combination is disorienting, like watching someone smile while tears stream down their face. Whatever happened at that symposium has marked him, left fingerprints on his soul that I can see even from across the room.

“She approached me. At lunch. Said exactly what we expected her to say, and then some.”

The words land in my gut like stones dropped into deep water, sending ripples of dread through my entire body. We knew this would happen. We planned for this. But knowing and experiencing are two entirely different species of reality.

Cassian emerges from the kitchen, drawn by our voices. He takes one look at Adrian’s face and moves to his side, his hand finding Adrian’s shoulder in silent support. The gesture is automatic now, instinctive—these two men who started as rivals have become each other’s anchors in ways none of us anticipated. Something in my chest loosens at the sight of them together, even as fear continues to coil in my stomach.

“Tell us everything,” Cassian says quietly. His voice is steady, grounding, the calm center we all need right now.

We settle in the living room, Adrian in the armchair with Cassian and me on the couch across from him. The afternoon light is fading, casting long shadows across the floor that seem to reach toward us like grasping fingers. I turn on a lamp to push back the darkness that feels too appropriate for this conversation. The warm glow does little to dispel the chill that’s settled over the room—the sense that something fundamental has shifted, that we’ve crossed a threshold we can’t uncross.

Adrian recounts the encounter in detail—Lisette’s approach, her veiled threats, her pointed comments about our family and the pregnancy. His voice is steady, clinical almost, as if he’s reading from a script rather than describing something that happened to him mere hours ago. But I can see the cost of maintaining that control in the whiteness of his knuckles where he grips the armrest, in the tiny muscle that jumps in his jaw, in the way his eyes go distant when he quotes her words. Each sentence he speaks paints a picture of calculated cruelty that makes my blood run cold.

“She knew about Maggie,” I say when he finishes, the violation of it making my skin crawl. The thought of Lisette’s eyes on my belly, her mind calculating how to use my daughter as a weapon—it makes something primal and protective surge through me. My hand moves instinctively to my stomach, as if I could shield Maggie from a threat she doesn’t even know exists. “She’s been watching us. Gathering information.”

“She always does. It’s part of her pattern.” Adrian’s jaw tightens, the muscle working beneath his skin like he’s chewing on words he doesn’t want to release. “But she got overconfident. Said too much. Admitted that this isn’t over, that there are ‘consequences’ still playing out. That’s closer to an explicit threat than anything else we have.”

“It’s still deniable,” Cassian points out, ever the analyst, but I can hear the frustration beneath his measured tone. “A good lawyer could spin it as dramatic rhetoric, not actionable harassment.”

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