Page 23 of Bound By Blood and Lies

“Do you understand what you’ve done?” he says quietly.

“I understand exactly what I’ve done.”

“No, you don’t. You may have just given your only viable heir to a man who appears to be selling children,” he says. “If she is pregnant, she becomes leverage of the highest order.”

“Which is why I need her home,” I reply through gritted teeth.

I don’t elaborate. I don’t explain that she is not leverage, or strategy, or breeding stock. That she is the only person who has ever looked at me and seen something other than utility. That she is fire and defiance and the only thing that has ever made this life feel less suffocating. That is not a conversation he is entitled to. He leans back slowly in his chair, with his fingers steepled beneath his chin as he studies me.

“If she is pregnant,” he says, “and if it is a boy…”

“It changes nothing,” I interrupt.

“It changes everything. You know what our lines look like Roman. Don’t be foolish. Your only male heir could be dead.”

He spits outdeadwith such vitriol that I am taken aback. That rule has hovered over every family dinner, every council meeting, every whispered succession conversation since I was old enough to understand what inheritance meant. Having one son per family has never felt accidental to me. Not statistically or biologically. It’s as if they hoard it over us to control the menin this society. We produce daughters in overwhelming numbers and then we guard the sons like rare relics. It is spoken about as fate, as if nature simply favoured us in reverse, but nothing about The Company survives on fate alone.

“There has to be a reason,” I say, taking my chances that todaymightbe the day he finally answers my questions. “We don’t generate that kind of pattern by chance.”

He watches me with a stoney expression.

“Why, Dad?” I continue, “what happened to make that a thing?”

His eyes narrow slightly. I can see as he considers not telling me, but I hold his gaze.

“Eighty years ago,” he says with a sigh, “the founders authorised a biological intervention. There was concern about the number of male heirs after the world war wiped a lot of us out. They believed if they could increase the probability of male heirs, succession could remain stable even after catastrophic events like World War 2. The goal was to keep the bloodlines of The Company pure andalivefor as long as possible.”

“And?”

“And…” he says, “they introduced an injection protocol. It was administered to all of the men including the Founders, council members and senior families.”

“To increase male viability,” I conclude.

“Yes. That was the intention.”

“But it failed…”

“It didn’t just fail, it completely swapped the outcome,” he replies. “What should have increased male births restricted them.”

“To one.”

“Yes, to one viable male per direct line,” he confirms. “As you know, any additional male pregnancies either fail early or never survive childbirth.”

“So, if they engineered it over eighty years ago, why is it affecting us now?”

“The hypothesis is that it altered the genetic coding of every line that followed the injections,” he continues. “It is the men who are in charge of the gender in pregnancy so that one injection had a knock-on effect for us all. Some members have attempted IVF or hormonal correction but none of it worked…It’s as though the change has permanently embedded itself into the line,” he shrugs once. “It is like it is written into our DNA.”

I lean back slightly in my chair as I process what he is saying. It reframes everything I have ever known about The Company. This isn’t some freak accident; it is quite literally the fallout of men playing God. If that intervention locked male viability into scarcity, then any confirmed pregnancy involving a potential heir is not just personal...It is a political currency of the highest order. I drag a hand down my face as I process the scale of it.

“Jesus fucking Christ… They engineered complete control,” I say after getting my bearings.

“Or thought they did.”

“Why not make it known in the society? Surely that would stop so much pain to everyone who kept trying for more male heirs…”

Dad gives a faint, humourless smile. “Why do you think we stopped as soon as we had you?”

“But what I don’t understand is why bury it for everyone else?”