Chapter 901: What Margret and Patricia Wants 1 (r-18)

They gave me exactly four minutes.

Four minutes of Rory climbing me like a jungle gym that owed her money. Four minutes of Vanessa’s shy smile as I asked about her new place, her cheeks going pinker than the paint on her new walls.

Four minutes of my women orbiting closer—touches on my arm, fingers brushing my back, the gravitational pull of a harem that hadn’t been fed in days and was now exhibiting classic signs of starvation:

dilated pupils, shallow breathing, and the subtle threat that if I didn’t start distributing affection soon, someone was going to

start biting

.

Four minutes before Margaret and Patricia couldn’t take it anymore.

"Eros." Margaret’s voice cut through the noise. Polite. Controlled. "A moment?"

Patricia was already moving. Didn’t wait for my answer. Just caught my elbow and steered me away from the group with the efficiency of a hospital administrator clearing a hallway—

"Ladies, I was in the middle of—"

"Now," Patricia said. A verdict.

Margaret fell into step on my other side. Two women flanking me like escorts to my own execution. My women watched us go—Madison raised an eyebrow that said

this ought to be good

, Charlotte tilted her head like she was already mentally drafting the group chat recap. Amanda crossed her arms with the look of someone who’d seen this movie before and knew the ending involved someone getting

railed,

and Sofia just smiled that serene, terrifying smile that meant she was either blessing the moment or already planning the eulogy.

Nobody intervened. They knew when something was happening that was bigger than

welcome-home

kisses and bigger than the collective horniness currently threatening to spontaneously combust the front lawn.

We crossed the grounds to the guest mansion where Margaret still lived. She hadn’t moved into the main house despite being mine now—

I suspected the real reason was that Margaret Thompson didn’t share bedrooms. She shared a man, apparently.

The door closed behind us.

The lock clicked.

And in the next thirty seconds, everything made sense.

"Linda told us,"

Margaret said.

Three words. No preamble. No warm-up. Just the verbal equivalent of a guillotine blade dropping cleanly through butter.

I stared at her. "Told you what?"

"About the baby." Patricia’s voice was quieter. Steadier. But her hands were shaking. Actually shaking—"She told Margaret, Catherine, and me."

My jaw tightened. Mom. My sweet, secret-keeping,

I’ll-handle-this-myself

mother had apparently handled it by telling women in my orbit within forty-eight hours.

And ARIA—my omniscient, all-seeing, always-in-my-ear goddess—hadn’t said a word.

That traitor. That beautiful, treacherous, strategically-silent traitor. She’d known.

And she’d chosen silence.

Because she’d known what would come next.

Because she’d known

THIS

would happen.

"We want the same thing," Margaret said.

There it was.

"I want a child," Patricia added. And the way she said it—

Gods, the way she said it

—stripped every layer of composure she’d been wearing since I walked through the door. Her voice cracked on the word.

Actually cracked—her voice broke on a single syllable like cheap glass under pressure.

Because Patricia couldn’t have children.

She couldn’t conceive. Biology had written its verdict in scar tissue and hormone levels and the specific cruelty of a reproductive system that simply... wouldn’t.

She’d spent years making peace with it. Years of quiet acceptance. Years of being the

rock

for other women in fertility groups, the one who smiled and said

it’s okay, there are other ways

while privately mourning the one thing she couldn’t buy, negotiate, or outwork.

But Divine Seed didn’t care about biology’s verdict.

Divine Seed looked at

"impossible"

and laughed so hard it rewrote the rulebook.

Any woman. Any condition.

Any impossibility the human body had decided was permanent—Divine Seed looked at it, laughed, and

planted life

anyway. It was one of my most profound abilities, and I fully understood what it meant to someone like Patricia.

Hope. Real, terrifying, dangerous hope.

"

We want what Linda has

," Margaret said. No hesitation. No shame. Just the calm certainty of a woman who had spent her life getting what she wanted by refusing to accept any other outcome.

Patricia’s hand found mine. Squeezed. Hard enough.

"Please,"

she whispered.

And in that single word—

please

—I heard everything she’d never said out loud.

I looked between them.

They were

undressing

me.

Margaret’s fingers found my shirt buttons first—quick, practiced, the efficiency of a woman who knew what she wanted and had long since stopped pretending otherwise.

Each button parted with a soft, deliberate pop, the cotton falling open like a confession, revealing the hard planes of my chest inch by inch.

Sunlight slanted through the guest-mansion windows and caught the ridges of muscle, the faint scars from older fights, the steady rise and fall of breathing.

Patricia’s hands went to my belt. Slower. Trembling. Not from nerves—from the sheer, crushing weight of what this moment meant to her. Every motion carried intention so heavy it was almost visible, a gravity all its own.

This wasn’t seduction. This wasn’t lust.

This was a woman reaching for something she’d been told—

by doctors, by tests, by years of quiet grief

—she could never have.

Her fingertips brushed the leather, hesitated, then tugged the buckle free with a small, metallic clink that sounded obscene in the sudden hush.

I caught

Patricia’s

hand.

Gently. Not stopping her—just holding. My fingers wrapped around hers, steadying the tremor that ran from her wrist up her arm like a current.

She looked up at me. Eyes wet. Jaw tight.

The mask she’d worn for years—Morrison wife, the hospital tyrant, the woman who I’d once thought had made Linda’s life hell with nothing more than a raised eyebrow—all of it gone.

Stripped down to the raw thing underneath.

Just a woman who wanted to be a mother.

"Hey,"

I said. Soft. Just for her.

"Breathe."

She exhaled—shaky, fractured—and I pulled her closer. Tucked her against my chest. Let her feel my heartbeat against her cheek, strong and steady and alive.

Her hands flattened against my bare skin—warm, desperate, clinging like she was afraid I’d vanish if she let go.

"Is it true?"

she whispered into my sternum. "Can you really—"

"Yes."

"Even

though I—"

"Yes."

She made a sound. Small. Broken. The sound of a dam cracking.

Margaret, meanwhile, had finished with my shirt and moved on to more aggressive territory. Where Patricia trembled with fragile hope, Margaret burned with hunger.

She’d already pushed the shirt off my shoulders, fabric whispering to the floor, and now her mouth found my neck—open, hot, teeth scraping the tendon just hard enough to sting.

Her hands raked down my sides with the impatience of a woman who had been thinking about this since Linda’s confession and had apparently decided that patience was for people who hadn’t waited long enough.

She dropped to her knees.

Not gracefully. Not slowly. Margaret Thompson didn’t do slow when she wanted something.

She

kissed

the center of my chest—

open-mouthed, wet

—then

dragged her lips

lower, tracing the line of my sternum, the shallow valley between pecs, the hard ridges of abs that flexed involuntarily under her tongue.

Every kiss left a faint red mark, a brand of possession. She nipped the skin just above my navel, sharp enough to make me hiss, then soothed it with a slow, deliberate lick that ended in a low, satisfied hum against my flesh.