The Alpha King's Unclaimed Queen

UntChapter 8: Frozen

Vivienne POV

The card declined at the pharmacy counter, and for a moment I just stood there, certain it had to be a mistake.

"Try it again," I said, and the cashier did, with the patient sympathy of someone who had seen this exact scene a hundred times before.

Declined again.

A line was forming behind me, and heat crawled up my neck.

"I don't understand," I said, digging through my purse for a second card I already knew wasn't there. "There should be money in this account."

"You could try your bank," the cashier said, already looking past me to the next person in line.

I left the prenatal vitamins on the counter and walked out into the parking lot. The heat hit like a wall after the air conditioning inside. I dialed my bank with hands that weren't steady, my heart already sinking before the call connected.

The automated voice took its time. When it finally spoke, it told me my account had been frozen pending a formal review, and if I had questions, I should visit a branch in person.

I sat in my car for a long moment before I understood.

My fingers tightened around the steering wheel as the implications sank their teeth in. Six weeks in, I already had enough to worry about without adding a frozen bank account to the list.

I pressed a hand flat against my stomach, more out of habit than comfort, and thought, this is the thing he's protecting. Not me.

I didn't visit a branch. I called Killian instead, and he picked up on the second ring, as if he had been waiting for exactly this call.

"My account is frozen," I said, without preamble.

"I'm aware."

The calm in his voice made my breath catch and stay there, like my lungs had forgotten what to do next.

"You did this."

"I did."

"Why?" The word came out sharper than I meant it to. "I haven't done anything. I haven't gone anywhere. I haven't even had time to process what's happening before you... "

"That's the reason," he said, cutting through my building panic with the same flat certainty he had used in the physician's office. "You have no reason yet to trust me, and every reason to run. I'm not willing to find out what you'd do with a head start."

"So you're punishing me for something I haven't done."

"I'm not punishing you." A pause followed, brief but deliberate. "I froze your accounts because the moment word gets out that you're carrying my child, there will be people, rivals, opportunists, men far less patient than I am, who would like to get to you first."

"Money gives you options. It means you can disappear, or be taken, or be turned into a bargaining chip before I can protect you. I'm not willing to risk that over money."

I stared through the windshield at nothing in particular. It should have made me angrier. Instead, it landed somewhere else, an unwelcome kind of sense that I didn't want to admit I understood.

"You could have told me that," I said finally. "Instead of just doing it and letting me find out at a pharmacy counter, in front of strangers."

"You're right." He said it plainly, without defending himself further. "That was a failure of communication. It won't happen again."

I almost laughed.

"That's it? It won't happen again? You freeze my life without warning and that's your apology?"

"I don't apologize for decisions I believe are correct," he said. "But I can do better at telling you why I've made them. That's the best I can offer you right now."

I closed my eyes and rested my head back against the seat, trying to quiet the noise building inside my own chest.

"I have nothing," I said quietly. "No money. No job. No apartment that feels safe anymore. And apparently no say in any of it."

"You'll have everything you need," Killian said. "Housing. Security. Whatever the child requires, and whatever you require to carry it safely. None of that changes."

"That's not the same as having a choice."

He didn't dispute it.

"And if I refuse it? All of it. The housing, the security, you?"

"Then I'd still keep you safe. From a distance, if that's what you wanted. But you'd be safe and alone, with nothing, in a city where I can no longer promise what happens to you after you hang up this phone."

He said it without weight, like a fact rather than a threat.

"I'd rather you were safe and not alone. That's the only preference I'm allowed to have right now."

"That's not a choice either."

He didn't answer right away. I understood, in the silence, that he wasn't going to pretend otherwise. Honesty seemed to be the one thing he wasn't willing to fake, even when it cost him.

"No," he said finally. "It isn't. I'm not going to tell you it is."

The line stayed open a second longer than it needed to. Neither of us spoke, and the silence said more than either of us could have managed in words.

I sat in the parking lot long after the call ended, staring at my own hands. They still looked like mine, steady, ordinary, unfrozen, which felt like a lie, given everything else that had just changed.

Eventually, I started the car.

Not to go home. I didn't know yet what home even meant anymore. My hand hovered over the gearshift, engine idling, and I realized I had two directions and no idea which one was mine anymore.

I pulled out of the lot anyway, and only once I'd merged into traffic did I understand which way I'd turned.