Page 71 of The Pakhan’s Debt by Leona White

She looks at the paper, then at my face. “I suspected before the clinic.”

“How long, Elena?”

My voice comes out flat, and every man who works for me would know to step back from it.

“A few weeks.” She looks me straight in the eye.

I see fear in her eyes and anger right behind it. She’s braced for me. Chin up, shoulders tight, one hand closed at her side.

Karpov is still moving somewhere. Sergei still has threads in places I haven’t cut yet. Leonid is probably two rooms away, wondering why I threw him out halfway through a crucial discussion. None of that gets my hand off the paper.

“A few weeks,” I repeat.

She pulls her fingers into her palm, then lets them open again. Her eyes flick to the paper, then back to me.

“I missed my cycle. I felt sick. I told myself it could be stress.”

“You confirmed it.”

“Yes.”

“And said nothing.”

Her eyes flash. “Because the second you knew, this would happen.”

I laugh once, but it comes out hollow. “What is this?”

“This.” She gestures around the room, around the papers, around the house with men at every door. “Orders. Doctors. Security. Food watched. Routes changed. Staff reduced. My body turned into another problem for men to manage.”

I move before I decide to. The table is between us, then it isn’t. I stop close enough to see her pulse in her throat, and she doesn’t back up.

“Men tried to take you while you were carrying my child.”

“They tried to take me because my father made me valuable before there was a child.”

“And now you are worth more to every man circling this house.”

“I know.”

“No,” I say, and my voice drops hard enough that her eyes widen. “You know law. You know paperwork. How they write things down so it looks clean.”

I hold her gaze. “I’ve seen what happens when a woman like you gets put on paper with blood, property, and names attached.”

Her mouth parts, but I don’t give her room.

“Karpov would have used this to split the house in half. Moretti would have doubled his price and brought a doctor of his own. Your father would have walked in smiling because you had given him the future he built the structure to catch.”

“My father is the reason I hid it,” she snaps.

I stare at her.

Good. Let the fight breathe. Let her bring Sergei into this room. I already want him on his knees, and she’s about to hand me another reason.

“He put my name in a ledger,” she says, and her voice cracks once before she forces it steady. “He made me useful on paper before I even knew what he’d done. My signatures. My schooling. My trust. My life.”

She presses one hand flat against the table. “If he knew about this baby, he wouldn’t see a child. He’d see blood he could file, claim, trade, and use to keep me where he wanted me.”

“And you thought I would do the same,” I say, not bothering to soften it.