She wasn't being completely irrational in her response, which made it all the more irritating, for some reason. Having two viable pregnancies at the same time meant at least one of them was likely to produce a healthy male — but there were still too many unaccounted for variables for his liking. The soonest he could possibly impregnate someone else would be this week, and that was only if the odds were strikingly in their favor. There would be a delay between Antigone giving birth and the surrogate of several weeks. That might be surmountable in the case that Antigone's child was lost, or ended up the way the last one had. They could pretend she was still pregnant but delayed, or even hold off on announcing until it didn't seem delayed at all, and claim the other baby as legitimate whenever it arrived. If something went wrong and Antigone died, however, the second pregnancy would be useless to him. In the worst case scenario, he could be left with an heir and no way to claim him.

No, it was still too ill-formed to be a viable plan. And then she came out with that ridiculous claim — that he would miss her.

"Hardly," he snapped back. "Mourning would be a relief. No social obligations, no distractions — and at the end, a wife who isn't broken," he said with a snarl. "Keep the pregnancy if you want, but don't expect me to intervene if it puts you on death's door again."