Guarding the Virgin

Chapter 13

The nausea hit before I even opened my eyes.

I barely made it to the bathroom before my stomach emptied itself, leaving me shaking and pale on the cold tile floor. My fingers gripped the porcelain like it was the only thing keeping me tethered to earth.

This was the fifth morning in a row.

I told myself it was stress. Anxiety. The weight of everything pressing down on me—Ashton, Nate, the whispers, the anonymous tension that seemed to follow me everywhere. My body was simply rebelling against the chaos my life had become.

But when I finally stood and caught my reflection in the mirror, I saw dark circles carved deep under my eyes. Hollow cheeks. A body that felt foreign and wrong, like I was wearing someone else's skin.

Angel found me still sitting on the bathroom floor twenty minutes later.

"Okay, that's it." She pulled me to my feet with surprising strength. "You've been sick every morning this week. You couldn't even smell my coffee yesterday without gagging." Her eyes met mine, sharp and serious. "And when was your last period?"

I opened my mouth to answer.

And realized I couldn't remember.

My mind scrambled backward through the weeks—past the whispers, past the distance, past the park conversation, past the party, past that night in Ashton's truck—and came up empty. When had I last...?

"I don't know," I whispered. "I don't remember."

Angel's face shifted from concern to something more serious. Something that looked like fear. "Get dressed. We're going to the pharmacy."

"Angel, no." I shook my head, backing away from her. "It's just stress. I've barely been eating, I haven't been sleeping—there's a hundred reasons this could be happening. We don't need to—"

"Lyra." Her voice was gentle but firm. "Do you truly remember if you used protection or not?"

The question hit me like a punch to the chest. That night. The backseat. Ashton's hands and my desperation and the heat that consumed everything else. I'd been so focused on my plan, so determined to make him cross the line, that I never stopped to think about—

"Oh god," I breathed.

"Yeah." Angel grabbed my jacket and threw it at me. "Pharmacy. Now."

The walk across campus felt like a death march.

My legs were heavy, my thoughts scattered in a thousand directions. I kept replaying that night—the way he'd tried to resist, the way I'd pushed, the way we'd both lost ourselves completely. The complete absence of protection. The complete absence of thought beyond that moment.

I was so stupid. So reckless. So focused on destroying him that I never considered I might destroy myself in the process.

Angel bought the test while I hovered near the door, unable to look at the cashier. The fluorescent lights felt too bright. The cheerful pharmacy music felt obscene. Everything felt wrong.

Back in the dorm bathroom, I stared at the little plastic stick like it was a bomb waiting to detonate.

"You have to actually use it," Angel said quietly from the doorway.

Three minutes later, I watched two pink lines appear.

Positive.

The world tilted sideways.

I sank onto the edge of the bathtub, the test clutched in my trembling hand, and felt something inside me crack open. Shatter. Fall apart in ways I didn't know how to piece back together.

I was nineteen years old. I was pregnant.

The father was my own father's best friend. A man twice my age. A man who owed my father his life, his career, everything. A man I'd been trying to destroy with my reckless seduction plan. A man I'd only just started to understand. A man I had no idea how to face with this truth.

The irony was so sharp it cut. I'd planned to use seduction as a weapon—make him cross the line, get him fired, finally be free of my father's suffocating control. And now I was carrying the evidence of my own reckless scheme. Every consequence I'd ignored, every warning I'd dismissed, every moment I'd told myself I knew what I was doing—it was all growing inside me now, undeniable and real.

Angel held me while I cried. Ugly, heaving sobs that left me breathless and empty, my body shaking against hers while she stroked my hair and said nothing because there was nothing to say.

"What do I do?" I gasped when I could finally speak. "I don't know what to do."

"First, you breathe." Her voice was steady, calm, everything I wasn't. "Then you figure out what you want. Not what Ashton wants. Not what your father wants. What you want."

But that was the problem.

I had no idea what I wanted.

All I knew was that I wasn't ready to tell Ashton. Not yet.

I needed time to process, to decide, to figure out if I even wanted this baby before I involved him. What if he rejected me? What if he saw me as a burden, a complication, a mistake to be managed and disposed of? What if he told my father before I was ready?

The thought of Kian finding out made my blood run cold. He would kill Ashton—that wasn't a metaphor, that was a fact. And then what would happen to me? To this... life growing inside me that I didn't ask for and wasn't prepared for?

"You can't tell anyone," I said, gripping Angel's hands. "Promise me. Not until I figure out what to do."

She hesitated, conflict written across her face. "Lyra—"

"Promise me."

"Okay." She squeezed my hands back. "Okay. This stays between us. For now."

For now. Those two words felt like a ticking clock.

I went to practice that afternoon because staying in my room felt like drowning. The ice, the noise, the familiar chaos—I needed something to anchor me to reality. I moved through the motions on autopilot, taking notes I wouldn't remember, watching drills I couldn't see.

Ashton kept his distance, just like we'd agreed. Professional. Careful. He had no idea that everything had changed.

After practice, Donovan caught me in the hallway.

"Lyra." His voice was warm with concern. "You look pale. Is everything alright?"

I forced a smile that felt like cracking glass. "Just tired."

He studied me with those fatherly eyes, nodding slowly like he saw straight through my lie but was too kind to call me on it. Then his expression shifted into something thoughtful.

"You know, I knew your father years ago. We moved in similar circles before you were born."

I blinked, caught off guard. "You knew my dad?"

"Briefly. Different world back then." A pause, something unreadable flickering in his eyes. "We lost touch when our paths diverged. Business disagreements, you might say."

He patted my shoulder gently, his touch paternal and reassuring. "Take care of yourself, Lyra. Sometimes the people we trust most have secrets we can't imagine."

Before I could ask what he meant, he was already walking away, leaving me standing in the empty hallway with his cryptic words echoing in my mind.

The people we trust most have secrets.

Was he talking about my father? About Ashton? About himself?

I pressed my hand against my stomach—flat, unchanged, betraying nothing of what grew inside—and felt the weight of my own secret pressing down on me.

The people we trust most have secrets.

Donovan was right about that. My father had secrets. Ashton had secrets. And now I had the biggest secret of all.

A new life. A new complication. A truth that would eventually demand to be told. A bomb ticking quietly inside me, counting down to an explosion that would change everything.

But not today. Today, I would keep it buried. Today, I would smile and nod and pretend my world hadn't just collapsed in on itself.

Tomorrow, I would figure out how to survive.