North America / Louisiana (Victoria's Apartment / Master Bedroom, New Orleans): April 24th, 2026.
It was a beautiful night for the world. The city outside still moving with itself as if people were not lying, cheating, stealing and reproducing recklessly all at once, yet if you were to look closely at one upscale apartment in new orleans. To be more specific, inside of the master bedroom. You could see a monstrously built darkly handsome man sitting on the edge of a bed in nothing but a pair of tight black spandex boxers with a laptop open in front of him and a expression on his scarred face that suggested somebody's financial or emotional future was about to become very unfortunate.
The bedroom was silent.
(Malakai's POV)
The glow of the screen reflected faintly against my face.
Blue light.
White folders.
Black text.
A irritating amount of security layers pretending they mattered.
My thick fingers moved over the keyboard with practiced ease.
*Tak* *Tak* *Tak* *Tak*
I stared at the progress bar with a flat look on my face and thought calmly "Pregnancy records. Private clinic reports. Archived file transfer history. If she forged even one part of this then I will destroy her entire peace."
The room was silent.
Victoria's room smelled like expensive lotion, perfume and order.
Annoying.
Everything in here looked arranged by a woman who believed control could be purchased in matching colors.
The bed was too clean. The lamps too soft.
The curtains too expensive for somebody who did not own a mansion.
I clicked my teeth softly and kept typing.
*Tak* *Tak* *Tak*
A secured window opened.
Then another.
Then a older server directory buried under a clinic acquisition file and mislabeled archive chain from years earlier.
Interesting.
Very interesting.
I leaned forward slightly, my elbows resting against my muscular thighs as the tight black spandex stretched harder across them.
There it was.
The old testing department.
The former owner's ex wife had gone through a boutique medical group in london before transferring records twice after relocation.
Expensive.
Concealed.
Needlessly layered.
Exactly the kind of thing guilty people thought looked sophisticated.
I adjusted my reading glasses on the tip of my nose and muttered flatly "Let me guess. More stupidity."
The bedroom was silent.
I opened the first locked report.
*Click*
Then the second.
*Click*
The third fought me for eight full seconds before folding under pressure.
*Tak* *Tak* *Tak*
*Click*
Good.
I did not smile.
I rarely smiled when looking at records involving marriage, money or women with polished lies.
That combination usually led to nonsense.
I scrolled down through lab identifiers, physician comments and archived specimen confirmations.
Blood type markers.
Submission dates.
Paternal probability chains.
Internal correspondence.
A flagged note hidden in the margin.
My eyebrows creased.
I looked closer. Then closer again.
The room was silent.
The former owner's ex wife had not skipped testing.
She had hidden it.
Interesting.
That was worse in some ways.
Because a lie built on certainty was more insulting than a lie built on doubt.
I opened the attached archive.
*Click*
A PDF rendered slowly across the screen.
I stared at it.
Name.
Date.
A sample confirmation from the second pregnancy.
Doctor's notation.
Paternal match.
I did not move.
The room was silent.
Then I opened the next report.
And the next one.
And the next.
Each one uglier than the last in its own way.
Not because they were wrong.
Because they were consistent.
My fingers stopped moving over the keyboard.
The bedroom was silent.
I stared at the screen and thought with a blank face "No"
Not emotionally.
Logically.
No.
That was not the answer I expected and therefore it offended me.
I reopened the first one.
Then cross-checked the embedded specimen reference.
Then the lab branch.
Then the transfer chain.
Then the technician signature.
Clean.
I opened the second file again.
Clean.
Third.
Clean.
Fourth.
Clean.
Fifth.
Clean.
The bedroom was absolutely silent.
All five children were his.
No broken chain.
No altered sample indexing.
No mismatched dates.
No clever affair coverup tucked into the margins.
Just five annoyingly legitimate children attached to the financial corpse of a stupid man whose body I now had to drag through life.
I sat there for a long moment in silence.
Then I leaned back slightly and muttered underneath my breath "Unfortunate. Very unfortunate."
The room remained silent.
That actually made several things worse.
If the children were not his, then they were easy to cut off emotionally.
Administrative nuisances.
Collateral noise.
Irrelevant blood attached to a failed marriage.
But if they were his.
Mine now by consequence.
Then the situation became heavier.
Messier.
More expensive too.
I rubbed a hand slowly down my face and clicked my teeth.
Annoying.
Very annoying.
I looked back at the screen with narrowed eyes.
Maybe the clinic had been compromised later.
Maybe the ex wife had anticipated suspicion and built a cleaner lie.
Possible.
Unlikely, but possible.
I checked the raw metadata.
Then the internal backup stamp.
Then the mirrored entry sitting inside a dormant compliance folder no normal husband would ever think to access.
Same result.
I let out a slow breath through my nose.
"This disgusting gold digging parasite really gave him five actual children and still laundered him dry before climbing onto a billionaire" I thought with creased eyebrows.
The bedroom was silent.
That somehow made her worse.
More efficient maybe.
Definitely crueler.
Because it meant she had not simply tricked a lonely rich idiot into raising other men's children.
No.
She had done something I found even more irritating.
She had taken what was his, confirmed it was his, used it against him and still left him to rot.
I stared at the reports and muttered calmly "An actual demon in heels."
The room was silent.
I pulled one of the external drives closer on the bed and started copying the archived reports over.
*Tak* *Tak* *Tak*
*Whirr*
No reason to leave the originals untouched and alone.
People destroyed things when money became frightened.
People lied even harder when parentage, trusts and inheritance started tightening around their throat.
The loading bar moved.
Thirty two percent.
Forty eight.
Seventy one.
I leaned back against the headboard and thought quietly "Five children."
That number sat badly in my head.
Not because I wanted them gone.
Because five was inconvenient.
Five meant obligations.
Five meant future conversations.
Five meant school, trust disputes, names, custody history, emotional residue, possible resentment and whatever disgusting attachment issues rich children formed when abandoned by one parent and financially devoured by the other.
I looked down at myself.
Black tight spandex boxers.
Scarred body.
Laptop on the bed.
Evidence glowing in front of me.
A 9'11 judge trapped in a dead idiot's ruined life.
Excellent.
Just excellent.
I muttered flatly "So now I also have five children."
The bedroom was silent.
Somewhere beyond the door I could faintly hear the apartment moving softly around me.
Water pipes settling.
A cabinet closing in the kitchen.
The low hum of air.
I glanced toward the bathroom door across the room.
Closed.
Good.
Victoria had been in there long enough to leave me with peace and I appreciated that more than I would ever say aloud.
Because the last thing I needed while confirming paternity records was her mouth opening with another opinion I did not ask for.
The transfer finished.
*Ding*
I immediately copied a second backup to the encrypted folder on my laptop.
Then I took screenshots.
Then exported the physician notes.
Then the submission confirmation chain.
Then the specimen log.
Nothing sentimental.
Everything useful.
I stared at the family names on the reports again.
Child one. Malakai obafemi ellington - nobel jr.
Child two. Vivienne Imani ellington - nobel ashbourne.
Child three. Zariah noelle ellington - nobel ashbourne.
Child four. Sloane amara ellington - nobel ashbourne.
Child five. Cassian adewale ellington - nobel ashbourne.
All his.
All legitimate.
All expensive.
I clicked my teeth once more and muttered "This is why men should never build their life around a pretty woman with soft skin and a hard appetite."
The bedroom was silent.
I thought of the photograph I had crushed.
The wife's polished smile.
The children's stiff posture.
The former owner's dead-eyed stupidity standing in the center of it all like he mistook presence for control.
Pathetic.
And yet.
He had still been their father.
That fact sat there now like a brick I had not planned to carry.
I did not like surprises that came with moral shape to them.
Numbers were easier. Fraud was easier.
Dead men on paper were easier.
Children were inconvenient because they made even ugly truths heavier than they needed to be.
I looked back at the report again and thought with a dark look in my eyes "Fine. Then she did not cuckold him. She simply ruined him honestly"
That almost made me laugh.
Almost.
Instead I grabbed my phone from the nightstand and opened a note.
I began listing names.
Lawyer.
Trust audit.
Child support review.
Education expenditures.
Biological confirmation preservation.
Freeze all informal transfers tied to maternal discretionary control.
My fingers moved quickly.
*Tak* *Tak* *Tak*
The room was silent.
This changed strategy.
A lot.
I could not treat the children like foreign debris anymore.
That would be sloppy.
Emotionally stupid too.
Not because I cared in some soft, fatherly, beautiful way.
Because facts mattered.
And facts had just informed me that those five children were directly tied to this body and therefore this life.
That meant they had moved from nuisance category into controlled variable category.
Still annoying. But now precise.
I set the phone back down and looked at the laptop once more.
Then I leaned back on one hand and stared at the ceiling.
"So the children are his. The ex wife is worse than I thought. The debt is still mine. The mansion is still gone. The show still needs saving and now paternity is somehow the least humiliating part of my week" I thought quietly.
The room was silent.
I ran a hand through my black and white styled hair.
My scar pulled slightly near the cheek when I frowned.
I did not notice until moments like this.
Moments where thinking turned ugly enough to settle into the face.
The bathroom door handle clicked.
I did not look up immediately.
I was still staring at the report.
Still staring at the bold sections confirming paternal probability.
Still quietly offended by it.
Then the bathroom door opened.
*Click*
I turned my head.
Victoria stepped out from the room wrapped in a towel and instantly froze.
The bedroom was silent.
…
THE END…