The Alpha's Accidental Heir

Chapter 3

Sunvale Clinic didn't look like I expected. I'd pictured something clinical and cold, but the waiting room had soft chairs and warm lighting, more like a spa than a hospital. Nora met me at the front desk in her white coat, looking so at home in this world that for a second I felt like the visitor I was.

"Ready?" she asked.

"No," I said honestly. "But let's go anyway."

She led me back to a private consultation room and pulled up a database on her monitor, dozens of donor profiles organized by everything from eye color to education. I scrolled through slowly, half-overwhelmed, looking for something I couldn't quite name, not just genetics, but some spark of kindness in a photo, in a written answer to why do you want to be a donor.

"This one," I said finally, tapping a profile. A structural engineer with warm brown eyes and a paragraph about wanting to help someone build the family he'd always wanted for himself. "He seems steady. Kind."

"Good choice." Nora made a note, then hesitated, glancing toward the door before lowering her voice. "Can you keep a secret?"

"Nora, I just found out my ex has been drugging my coffee for two years. I think I can keep a secret."

She almost smiled. "Fair. It's just, we had a very high-profile donation come in this morning. I'm not supposed to say anything, but I'm still a little rattled by it." She lowered her voice further. "Logan Vance."

The name meant nothing to me at the time, though I'd learn soon enough that it should have. "Who's that?"

"You really don't follow the business pages, do you?" Nora shook her head. "Billionaire. Runs half the shipping trade on the eastern coast. Terrifying, gorgeous, and apparently has fertility concerns of his own, which, honestly, good for him for taking care of it quietly instead of making it a headline."

"Why does that make you nervous?"

"Because men like that don't come to clinics like this without expecting absolute perfection," she said. "And today has already been a mess. Half my staff called in sick, we're short two nurses, and I've had three deliveries mislabeled at intake since this morning. If anything goes wrong with his sample, it's my license on the line."

I didn't think much of it then. I was too focused on my own fear to hold space for hers, and I've regretted that since. If I'd been paying closer attention, if I'd asked one more question, maybe I would have seen what was coming.

"It'll be fine," I told her, the way you tell a friend what they need to hear. "You're the best at what you do. I trust you completely."

She squeezed my hand, grateful, and got up to prepare the procedure room. When she came back twenty minutes later, something about her seemed off: a little too quick with her explanations, a little too careful not to meet my eyes for more than a second at a time. I chalked it up to nerves about her missing colleagues and the mislabeled deliveries she'd just mentioned.

"Everything okay?" I asked as I settled onto the exam table.

"Everything's fine," she said, and her voice was steady even if her hands, just for a moment, weren't. "Let's get you a baby, Clara."

The procedure itself was quick, almost anticlimactic after the weight of everything leading up to it. I lay there afterward, staring at the ceiling tiles, one hand resting flat against my stomach, trying to imagine the person who might be starting there.

"Ten days," Nora said, helping me sit up. "Come back in ten days and we'll test. Try not to drive yourself crazy in the meantime."

"No promises," I said.

She hugged me tight before I left, longer than usual, and I remember thinking it was because she understood exactly how much this mattered to me. It wasn't until much later that I understood it might have been something else entirely: the first flicker of guilt for a mistake she hadn't yet realized she'd made.

I walked out of Sunvale Clinic that afternoon lighter than I'd felt in weeks, one hand pressed to my stomach, already half in love with a stranger's kindness on a donor profile, already imagining a nursery, a name, a whole life built out of nothing but hope and my own stubborn refusal to let Jason win.

I had ten days to wait.

I had no idea that somewhere in that clinic, behind a locked cold-storage door, two vials had been placed on the wrong shelf, and that in ten days, the life I was imagining would not belong to the kind engineer with warm brown eyes at all, but to a man so powerful he was about to become impossible to escape.