Villain's Breeding System: Evolving 999+ Harem into an SSS-Rank Legion-Chapter 229- Meera’s Fluids leaking; Tears first, Milk Later

Chapter 229: Chapter 229- Meera’s Fluids leaking; Tears first, Milk Later

He had said that. He had said exactly that. In the toilet, to Karan, with his voice at the low register that he used when he thought no one outside could hear.

He had said it.

And she had been on the other side of the wall.

He rubbed his forehead against the wheel.

’She was outside the toilet and she heard me and I—’

The phone lit up.

The notification was from a number he didn’t recognize. A video attachment. No message.

He picked it up.

He watched it.

The five-second process of a brain trying to reconcile what the eyes were sending with what the brain expected to receive — the way comprehension arrived in stages, the way the first stage was simply confusion, the way the second stage was identification of the elements, the way the third stage was the full-body impact of understanding.

His pregnant wife.

On her knees.

Inside a car he recognized from the parking lot.

Her head moving.

His jaw closed.

His teeth found each other.

The phone screen — the blue-white light of it against his face in the dark car interior, his expression doing the terrible transition from confusion to identification to understanding to something that had no clean name.

He had been sitting here for eleven minutes trying to figure out how to go back and bring her home.

His hand clenched around the phone.

The screen cracked slightly.

"You—"

The word came out very quiet.

"You bitch."

He threw the phone at the passenger seat.

The accelerator found the floor.

The car moved.

He cried.

The particular crying of a man who did not cry — the wrong-register tears of someone whose system had not been designed for this output and was producing it anyway, reluctantly, because the input exceeded every other available response.

He drove fast.

One hand on the wheel. The other pressing against his own mouth.

He thought of the parking lot — her hand on that man’s arm, her face turned toward the man who had taken a punch from her husband and ’not moved,’ the warm proximity of her standing beside someone who was not him.

He thought of the form he’d been filling in the car. The dates. The terrible arithmetic of a husband doing the arithmetic.

He thought of her face when she’d heard him through the toilet wall.

He reached for his phone.

Remembered it was on the passenger seat.

Reached further.

Found it.

Dialed her number while driving seventy-five kilometres an hour on a highway at ten at night.

’This number is currently unavailable.’

He dialed again.

’This number is currently—’

Again.

’Currently unavail—’

"DAMN IT."

His eyes on the road ahead. The yellow lane markers. The truck in the lane ahead — a large, slow truck moving at forty, its red taillights and the distance between its bumper and his car’s nose closing at a rate that his current speed and his current level of attention to the road would not—

His eyes widened.

The wrong-second arrival of information.

"ARRRGHHH—!!!"

The waiting area outside the operating theater at 11:14 PM was the pale-lit, too-quiet space of a hospital at night.

Meera sat.

Her hands on her belly. Both of them now — the two-handed hold of someone who had been waiting for an hour and had nothing else to hold. The chairs were the functional chairs of a private hospital that had spent money on the facility and the approximate minimum on the chairs where family members waited.

She had her phone in her bag.

She had reached for it twice.

Both times, she’d found it dead.

The blank-screen dead of a phone that was not going to turn on regardless of how long the button was held.

She had stared at it for a moment.

Then put it back.

Her neck ached.

The low ache running from the base of her skull down into her left shoulder — the particular, muscular ache of something that had been held in an unaccustomed position for a sustained period. Her jaw too, the joint-level ache that sat in the hinge of it, the honest physiological report of a night that had asked her jaw to do something it had not been trained for.

She pressed her hand against the side of her face.

The doctors had walked past her twice.

Both times with their eyes slightly unfocused, slightly absent — the quality of people who were going about their work with the particular, low-grade inattention of exhaustion. She had tried to ask one of them something. He had answered without fully looking at her, his eyes somewhere around her shoulder, his voice carrying the words without carrying the attention.

She had sat back down.

The baby moved.

The interior flutter — the particular shifting of something small and alive making its own adjustments to position, the movement she had been feeling since month four and still had not found a word for that adequately described it.

Her hand pressed against the swell of it.

’He’s alright,’ she told herself. ’He was walking when they took him. He was talking. He held my hand on the way in.’

She closed her eyes.

The garden bench arrived immediately. The moonlight. His voice: ’I have made enemies. People I’ve made things happen to. Occasionally they try to make things happen to me.’

The blood on his hand in the parking lot.

’Old injury. The impact sometimes—’

She pressed her lips together.

’He held my hand.’

The door opened.

She stood.

The doctor came through — a different one, older, the composed quality of someone who had been in this profession for long enough that composed was now simply resting state. His eyes found her.

"He’s stable," the doctor said. "The rib fractures were the main concern — we’ve set two of them. The internal contusion needed attention. He’ll need rest."

She exhaled.

The full-body exhale of an hour of tension completing itself.

"He’s asking for you," the doctor added, and looked at his chart, and walked away.

She looked at the door.

The room was private.

The high-budget private of a hospital that understood what high-budget private meant — warm light instead of fluorescent, a window with curtains drawn, the equipment present but not dominant.

He was on the bed.

The bandaging — white against his chest, his arms, the orderly binding of two fractured ribs and a contusion that had been given proper attention. His upper body bare otherwise, the bandaging wrapping at the mid-chest and continuing down. The sheets at his waist. The particular, awake stillness of someone who was resting by instruction and was following the instruction.

He looked at her when she entered.

Meera looked at him.

His face — the same face from the Ferris wheel, from the park bench, from the limousine. The clean lines of it. The purple eyes, in the warm hospital room light.

He smiled.

The small, real smile.

"What happened?" he said. His voice — slightly quieter than usual, the slightly-reduced register of someone who had two fractured ribs and was managing his breath volume accordingly. "Why are you crying?"

She hadn’t known she was crying.

She became aware of it in the same moment he named it — the wet warmth at the corners of her eyes, the particular, blurred quality of her vision.

The baby moved.

The small, interior movement — the flutter, the shifting — at exactly the moment his voice reached her. As if the sound had entered through her skin and the small thing inside her had responded to it.

Something broke.