Chapter 480 A Girl

Katia’s POV

The first pain came in our kitchen. It wasn’t a small one, a real fucking one. It put my hand on the marble and took the morning with it. Aiden was talking about toast crusts and whether Clara, if it was a girl, would like dinosaurs. Julian was pouring coffee he would not drink. I waited for the tightness to pass. It did not pass. It came again, lower, harder, and I knew.

“Julian.”

He looked up and read my face before I finished.

“Now?”

“Now. I am not getting in a car.”

He did not argue. That was the difference between our life and everyone else’s. The world came to this house.

He was already on the phone.

“Dr. Lang. It is time. East suite. Bring your team. No hospital run unless she tells me she wants one.” He stopped and looked at me and then spoke again. “Grandma first.” Another call. “Sam, lock the gate. Family only. Aiden stays on this floor until I say, “

Aiden stood on the stairs with his dinosaur book.

“Is the baby coming here?”

“Yes,” I said. “This is home.”

“Can I stay?”

“For a while. When Grandma arrives, you go straight to your room.”

He nodded, trying to look like a person with a job.

Staff moved like they had drilled this in their sleep. The east suite was already lit. Fresh linens. A delivery bed that did not look like a hospital until you saw the panel slide back and the monitors come out. Flowers someone had the sense not to put near my face. A bassinet that had been in this family longer than I had. Our doctor arrived with two nurses and a pediatric kit that belonged in a private wing, not a public corridor. Grandma walked in behind them in cream silk and the kind of calm that only comes from having run this family through worse nights than a birth.

“Lie down, darling,” she said. “You are not performing for anyone. You are having my great-grandchild in your ownhouse.”

Julian hovered until she pointed him to a chair.

“You hold her hand. You do not manage the room. That is my job.”

“I can manage a room.”

“You can manage a company. This is a woman in labor. Sit down.”

He sat.

Labor did not feel expensive. It felt like work. I swore. I told Julian if he said breathe one more time, I would throw him out of his own suite. He kissed my hair and shut up, which was the first useful thing he had done since the coffee. Dr. Lang checked me and spoke to Celeste like two people who had done this dance with this family before.

“How far?” Julian asked.

“Far enough that you stop asking every three minutes,” I said.

Aiden was taken to his room when the sounds got ugly. He kissed my cheek first, brave and small.

“Tell Clara I waited.”

“I will.”

Hours went. Ice. Towels. My nails in Julian’s hand. Celeste wiped my face and did not offer speeches. Sam’s voice came once from the door, then left again. Martha arrived later and cried in the hallway until Grandma sent her to sit with Aiden. David stood downstairs like a man who understood he was not needed in the room and hated that he was right.

There was a stretch where I thought I could not do the next one. The pain sat in my back and my hips and my teeth.Julian’s forehead touched mine.

“I am here.”

“I know. Stay there. Do not talk.”

He stayed. He did not talk.

“Almost,” Dr. Lang said later.

“Don’t almost me,” I said. “Get the baby out.”

Grandma’s voice stayed even at my other side.

“Push when I tell you. You have done harder things than this. You have survived this family. You can push a child into it.”

I would have laughed if I had air.

Then the burn, the push, the cry.

A girl.

They did not whisk her down a public corridor. They put her on my chest in our own bed, in our own house, with Windsor staff outside the door and the city far below the windows.

“Hi,” I whispered. “You took your time.”

Julian made a sound I had never heard from him. His hand covered her back. His other hand covered mine.

“She is here. Katia. She is here.”

Dr. Lang checked her in the suite. Numbers. Color. A cry that filled the expensive quiet and made it human. Celeste cut the talk short when she was satisfied.

“Healthy,” she said. “Loud. A Windsor.”

“Clara,” I said when I could speak.

Julian repeated it like he was signing something.

“Clara.”

Aiden came back in with a nanny and stopped two steps from the bed.

“Is that her?”

“That is her.”

He climbed into the chair Julian pulled close and stared.

“She is tiny.”

“She is supposed to be.”

“Clara. I can say that.”

“Good. You are her brother. That is a job.”

He nodded, serious as a contract. “Does she like me?”

“She does not know you yet. She will. You will tell her about dinosaurs and you will not drop her.”

“I will not drop her.”

People came and went in quiet waves after that. Martha cried and tried to hide it. David stood at the end of the bed like he did not know where to put his hands. Sam looked at Clara, then at me, and said, “You did it,” as if I had closed a deal. Grandma sat and watched the baby sleep with the look of a woman who had waited a long time to see the line continue without a war in the room.

When the suite emptied, it was us. Me. Julian. Clara on my chest. Aiden asleep in the chair with his book on the floor. The mansion quiet in that thick way money buys at night.

Julian sat on the edge of the bed and stared at her like he was still making sure she was real.

“The first wedding was not enough,” he said.

I looked at him.

“We were already married.”

“We were married in a way that kept too many people outside it.” His thumb brushed Clara’s hair. “I want to do it here. Or at the estate. Family in the room. Aiden standing there. This one in your arms if you want her there. No announcement that feels like damage control. A wedding that looks like what we actually are.”

“You are proposing again while I am in a silk sheet covered in birth.”

“Yes. In our house. That is the point.”

“You could have waited a day.”

“I have waited through enough days that did not belong to us.” He glanced at Aiden, then back at me. “I want them to witness it. I want no one able to say this family was built in corners.”

I looked at our daughter. At our son. At the man who had brought the doctor to me instead of putting me in traffic.

“Yes,” I said. “We do it properly.”

He kissed me, then kissed Clara’s head, and for a little while the rest of it stayed outside the suite doors. The threats. The notes. The men at gates. All of it could wait one night.

We had a girl. And Julian had just asked for a wedding the whole family would have to watch.