Villain's Breeding System: Evolving 999+ Harem into an SSS-Rank Legion-Chapter 262 - She Needs a Better Man

The question hung in the room.

’How long have you been spreading your legs for that man.’

The specific quality of it — the grammar of it, the way it was phrased, the clinical, degraded reduction of twelve hours and six years and a pregnancy and a marriage down to the single crude, accurate sentence.

Meera stood in the morning light.

Her whole body trembled.

Not the fine, post-sex tremor of hours ago. The different tremor — the deep, structural, full-body shake of someone who had received a sentence that was too true and too wrong at the same time and the body did not know what to do with the combination.

"’What—’"

The word came out of her as a gasp. The single syllable of someone whose brain had produced a beginning and could not locate the continuation.

She looked at him.

At Vikram’s face.

She had seen his face angry before. The small angers of six years — the argument in the kitchen, the argument about money, the argument about his mother’s visit. She had seen his jaw set. She had seen the particular furrow between his eyebrows that meant the anger had arrived and was in the room and would need to be managed.

She had never seen his face like this.

The eyes — the eyes were the thing. The specific quality of them now, looking at her, in the morning light of this hospital room with the dried milk on his gown and the torn sheets on her bed and the evidence of everything she had done visible on her neck and through her blouse.

He was not looking at her the way a husband looks at a wife.

He was looking at her the way someone looks at something they have identified and filed and are now addressing with the flat, precise contempt of a categorization finalized.

She parted her lips.

She was going to say something.

She had no idea what she was going to say. There was no sentence that lived in the space between her mouth and the truth of the room. But she opened her mouth the way mouths open when the person attached to them is desperately trying to produce something that will be adequate.

"’Vikram, I—’"

"’Don’t.’"

The word hit her like a hand.

Not loud. Quiet. The quiet that was worse than loud because it meant the thing doing the hitting was not using full force.

She closed her mouth.

His eyes.

Moving over her again — not the first inventory, that had been the shock of the initial assessment. This was something else. The deliberate, thorough, itemizing look of someone who was deciding something while looking. The neck. The marks on it. The bruise-edge and the bite-purple and the red of skin that had been attended to at very close range by someone’s mouth for an extended period.

Her blouse.

The wet, dark, twin circles of it at her chest.

He looked at those for a moment.

She watched his jaw work.

"’Six years,’" he said.

Low. The voice of a man who was speaking from a place where there was no volume anymore, only weight.

"’Six years I gave you. Six years in that house, that job, that— every morning I woke up before you to make sure the coffee was ready before you left. Every time you were sick. Every argument I walked away from because I thought— because I was—’"

He stopped.

He pressed his mouth together.

The controlled-breathing quality of someone who had identified a cliff and was choosing not to walk off it.

"’And you were on your back for that bastard.’"

"’Vikram—’"

"’Shut up.’"

She flinched.

"’While you were pregnant,’" he said. "’While you were pregnant with what I thought was my—’"

He laughed.

The laugh of someone who was not finding anything funny. The single, short, specific laugh that comes out of a person when the alternative is something that cannot be expressed as a sound.

"’I was outside that door,’" he said. Quiet. The almost-gentle quality of someone who was very, very far past gentleness. "’I was outside that door listening to you. I heard everything you said to him. Your voice. The sounds you made. I heard your—’"

He stopped himself again.

She watched something cross his face.

The flash of it — the involuntary, uncontrolled quality of a man remembering something specific about a sound his wife made, in a context he had never been meant to hear it, the way the memory of a sound lands in a body.

"’You made sounds for him,’" he said. The flatness returning. The flat, wrecked, arrived-somewhere quality of it. "’I’ve heard your sounds for six years. You made sounds for him that you never—’"

"’Stop,’" she said.

"’—never made for me. Not once.’"

"’Stop it. Stop—’"

"’What kind of a woman,’" he said, "’does that? While pregnant? What kind of a woman—’"

"’I know,’" she said.

The flat, wrecked quality of it.

"’I know,’" she said again. Lower. The voice of someone with no defense who was not constructing one. "’I know what I did. I know it was wrong. I know I can’t—’"

"’Wrong,’" he repeated.

The tone of someone encountering a word that was not the right size for the thing being described.

"’Wrong is forgetting an anniversary. Wrong is snapping at someone when you’re tired. What you did—’" He looked at her neck. At the marks there. The detailed, comprehensive evidence of what had been done and had been done willingly. "’—that’s not wrong. That’s a choice. You made a choice.’"

Her tears.

She had not noticed them starting. They were there now — the hot, continuous quality of them, running from her eyes with the automatic, body-level insistence of something that could not be held.

"’Every time I touched you,’" he said. The slow, constructed quality of a man building something word by word, placing each one carefully because each one was a brick. "’Every time you let me touch you. Were you thinking about him? Was it always—’"

"’It wasn’t—’"

"’—performing? Were you performing for six years? Every time you said I love you, was it—’"

"’Stop it, Vikram—’"

"’—a performance? Were you laughing at me?’"

"’I was NOT—’" Her voice broke through the management she had been applying to it. The full, cracking quality of a voice that had been held in check and had just given way. "’I was not laughing at you. I love you. I love you. What happened last night was—’"

"’What,’" he said.

The flat, waiting quality of the single syllable.

She opened her mouth.

She had been going to say ’a mistake.’ She had been going to say ’I don’t know how it happened.’ She had been going to say ’it was him, he did something, it wasn’t—’

None of those sentences were fully true.

She stood with her mouth open and the truth of the night inside her and no sentence that would contain it without lying.

"’You don’t have an answer,’" he said.

"’I—’"

"’Because there isn’t one.’"

He stood.

The full-height standing of him — his hospital gown, his bare feet on the linoleum, the IV mark still beading blood on the back of his hand. He was taller than she had been remembering him. Or she was smaller than she had been this morning.

He walked toward her.

She did not move.

His eyes went down.

To her belly.

He stopped in front of her.

He looked at her belly — the round, five-month swell of it, her blouse fitting over it, her hands not on it for once, her hands down at her sides in the specific, frozen quality of a woman who was not performing the automatic check-in gesture because the check-in was complicated now.

He reached out.

His hand.

The familiar hand — the hand she had held, the hand she knew the shape of in the dark. It touched her belly.

The touch of it — not warm, not the warmth she had always felt from that hand on that specific location. The different quality of a touch applied with something other than tenderness. The flat, examining, checking quality of a man who was touching something he was not sure was his and was experiencing the specific, devastating sensation of that uncertainty through his palm.

"’Even the child in your belly,’" he said. Quiet.

She went cold.

"’...what.’"

"’How do I know,’" he said, and his voice was the voice of someone asking a question they had been building toward for the last several minutes, the question under all the other questions, "’that this child is mine.’"

The cold was total now.

Her entire body — the freeze of it. The specific, ice-in-the-chest, stopped-clock quality of a woman who has just had a sentence land on her that she was not prepared for despite having had every opportunity to be prepared.

She stared at him.

"’Of course—’" Her voice. The changed quality of it — no longer the soft, guilty, receiving-what-she-deserved quality of the last several minutes. Something different arriving in it. "’Of course this child is yours. What are you— Vikram, how can you—’"

"’How can I?’" he said.

The mild, exhausted quality of someone completing the obvious end of a sentence.

She looked at his hand on her belly.

The hand that was touching her belly the way you touch something you are assessing rather than something you love.

"’Don’t,’" she said.

"’Don’t what.’"

"’Don’t touch—’" She looked at the hand. "’Don’t touch my belly like that.’"

"’Like what.’"

"’Like it’s—’" She was trembling again. The different quality of the trembling — not guilt now, not shame. Something that had lived much deeper and had just been disturbed. "’Like it’s not yours. Like— Vikram, this child is yours. This has nothing to do with—’"