Chapter 23 #2
Two of the changelings were on me like breakers on shore.
Strong hands grabbed shoulders, wrists, pinned me with professional, winged force.
Their grip held more than flesh; it held me from launching off a cliff.
I struggled for a heartbeat, useless and furious, raw rage digitized into tremors across my skin.
Roman stepped forward alone, the air around him folding like thunder. He didn’t shout. He didn’t need to. He closed whatever ancient loop our family had, and I felt it: a pressure, a living braid of force that coiled through my body and took me in.
He laid a hand on my sternum. It wasn’t force so much as command an old, kingly law unspooling into my blood.
His energy seeped into me like ice into a fevered wound, steadying the jagged edges of my mind.
The world no longer threatened to snap in half.
The emptiness in my chest rattled, then quieted into a faint ache.
Roman’s voice was low. “Breathe. Hear me. She’s alive.”
The brothers closed ranks. Lucien’s fingers dug into my shoulder.
Viking grunted, more restraint than reassurance, but it was enough; Draugr remained a dark, unmoving presence.
Together they built a cage around me of muscle and will.
It kept me from moving, kept the angry animal caged until the animal could think.
There was a long, ragged minute where I had to fight against my own muscle memory, fight my hands from ripping through skin, fight my teeth from finding blood. I had to let the calm pull me whole again, because to lose it was to become something nobody would ever bring back.
Slowly, like the tide pulling back, the bond came back. A flicker at first and then her pain, a tiny whimper, and then the steady thumping again. I felt it settle, fragile but there: Runa is alive.
I sagged against Roman. The restraint loosened. The brothers let me breathe without letting me go. Roman didn’t break his contact; his fingers were iron on my shoulder, his presence a map back to the shore.
The doctor’s entrance cut cleanly through the aftermath.
He looked at me, measured and direct. “Mr. Dragic,” he said, and the formality steadied me enough to think, “she’s in recovery.
The procedure went as well as we could hope.
We lost her for a minute there, but she is now stable.
” His gaze flicked to Roman and the others, sharp. “You should come see her. Now.”
The world narrowed again to a corridor and the shuttled transport between rooms. I moved because I had a body that would not be denied the movement; the brothers fell into step around me like shuttle walls.
Roman’s hand left my shoulder only to curl into a fist that flexed white-knuckled at his side.
When the door opened and I saw her, pale under the strips of clean gauze, hair loose and tangled, eyes closed and everything that could have been rational burned away.
I had expected fear, or a hollow, but what hit me first was an animal relief so profound my knees trembled.
She breathed. She was real. She was ours.
And then they showed me the child, a tiny little thing, innocent, fragile laying helpless in the incubator.
He was small as a fist and wild with noise, crying like he’d been dropped straight from thunder. He smelled faintly sweet, like the bloodline and something pure all wrapped into one brittle, tiny package.
I held him with my eyes haltingly at first, this new thing that belonged to me as much as she did, then closer, tidal, until my chest hurt with the fullness of it. The world reassembled itself around that moment.
My tongue felt huge and hoarse when I spoke. “My Son,” as my voice cracked.
Roman stepped forward, that old, grave warmth settling into his face. “You are now a Dragic, little man,” ancient threads attach in the dark. “May you be strong like your father.”
I touched the glass of the incubator near the baby’s forehead, I did it as if making an oath. My fingers trembled with something like holiness and ferocity. The bond hummed warmer than before, braided now with a new, smaller life.
When I finally looked up, my brothers were all there, Lucien with his jaw tight but proud, Viking with that rogue’s grin softened by something very close to tenderness, Draugr a shadow that steadied the light.
Roman met my eyes and said one small thing that anchored me in dangerous, clean clarity: “He’s ours. ”
I let out a sound that was equal parts laugh and sob. I looked at my son as if the whole of the world had narrowed to this single fragile being that was now protected by us, owned by us, and named in a language older than their enemies’ lies.
If Caesar returned, if the world burned, then let it. We would make sure the ashes spelled our names, and Runa’s, and this child’s. And I would be the fire that scorched anything that dared reach for them.
She blinked slow, deliberate, like a dawn breaking against a horizon I’d been starving for.
Her lashes trembled and the room rearranged itself around that small, miraculous motion.
Runa’s eyes opened and found me, and for an instant the whole world contracted until the only thing that existed was the space between us.
I inclined my head towards our child, careful with the way a man handles a hymnbook. He fussed, a tiny, furious protest. He was warm and wrinkled and everything that had ever scared me about my future rewired into a single, urgent certainty: protect this.
Her mouth curved around the barest of smiles, breath ragged but steady. “He’s beautiful,” she whispered, as if the word itself might sew us back together.
“He is,” I said. My voice broke and I hated it, hated that something so small could make me feel like a child again. I eased closer. “Runa…our son.”
She reached out her hand for him as if the world had taught her to be wary of reaching but not of reaching for this.
Her fingers found the glass of the incubator and curled like the tide finding a shore.
The look that flickered through her, equal parts awe and raw, untrained love that hit something in me that I hadn’t known needed hitting.
It splintered whatever leftover cruelty lived inside me and left only an animal softness.
The doctors hovered, professional and efficient; the monitors kept their slow, indifferent watch.
Roman cleared his throat as if to remind us time still had shape.
Lucien’s fingers tightened around Roman’s arm, a private nod across decades of blood.
Viking, who’d been the loudest a week ago, stood quieter now, that grin softened into something like a blessing.
“We’ll give you privacy,” Roman said, but it was more than politeness. It was permission, an unspoken guard around the tenderness in the room. Draugr lingered in the doorway, a pillar of shadow and steadiness, before nodding. “Call when you need us.”
They left like that one by one, a procession of the men who’d build the world I’d dragged Runa into.
Their footsteps faded and the door shut.
The hospital beyond would be humming with plans and patrols and the endless machinery of men who knew how to make things disappear.
For a beat, the noise of that life washed away and the room was only the three of us.
Runa’s eyes tracked the baby, worry and wonder braided together. “Will he be safe?” she asked, voice small.
“He will be safer than the world lets anyone be,” I said, but I could feel the lie in the edge of my promise. Safer, yes. Untouchable? Nothing in this life stayed untouched. Still, the vow came out the same, hard and true. “I will die before they take him.”
She laughed then; a tiny, wet sound that tried to be brave.
She leaned toward me, pushing away the lines of pain with a hand that trembled only slightly.
I caught her wrist and pressed my thumb into her pulse alive, steady and real.
For a second I let myself picture a life that wasn’t a battlefield: a stubborn babe at our feet, laughter in rooms that used to be wilted with danger.
It was a fairy tale, and we’d earned the right to tell it our way.
The doctor murmured instructions about the feedings, checkups, how to spot complications, and my voice translated into promises I would keep.
Nurses came and went. Gideon texted updates on perimeter sweeps.
Ivan reported guard rotations. Even when the world insisted on the grinding business of survival, it was arranged for us like clockwork.
And still, when it came time to leave, I hesitated. Leaving felt like stepping away from a cliff edge. The baby cried once, small and immediate, and Runa reached out as if I might hand him back forever. I kissed my Runa’s forehead, tasting salt and something that felt like an anchor.
“Go,” she told me in the softest voice. “I want you to go. Finish what you have to do.”
It was a permission and a leash all at once. I wanted to refuse. Instead, I nodded, the motion small and terrible.
When I finally rose, Lucien and Roman were already waiting by the door, faces schooled into the masks we wore before battle. Viking clapped me on the shoulder like he was trying to hammer courage into my bones.
I left with them, each step away from that bed a small, tearing thing. In the corridor I stopped once, turned, and watched through the glass as Runa looked down at our son. I felt something new tether me to the ground. The fire I’d promised would be a furnace, not a lullaby.
I took one last breath and then walked out, carrying the name of our child inside me like a live coal.
The meeting room smelled of old leather and colder things, a map pinned on the table, tablets and phones glowing like little stars of business and blood.
My brothers sat around the table, each a different kind of danger: Roman, a calm mountain; Lucien, precise and hungry for logic; Viking, coiled and ready to snap; Draugr, the silent hammer.
Even my absence would have been felt as a missing limb, but tonight I was here, shoulders set like stone.
We didn’t waste time on small talk. There wasn’t time for it. The baby’s name still hung in my chest, warm as a tremor, and every other thought bent toward the shape of a hunt.
Roman folded his hands, eyes dark and tight. “Caesar has air under his feet,” he said. “He slipped out. That was expected. But expected or not, he’s a rat with claws in our bone now. We take him tonight or we cut off his reach for good.”
Viking slammed a fist on the table, the sound like thunder. “I will take the plane. Now. I’ll tear the sky apart myself if I have to.”
Draugr’s face didn’t change. “He has handlers. He moved like someone with an exit strategy. He’s not traveling alone. We need to expect a protector detail, a network. We also need to expect traps.”
Lucien had already been tracing routes, his finger gliding across satellite feeds and flight manifests.
“He paid with cash, and private registration,” he said.
“He’s on a short hop, disposable flight.
We can track it, but the ground nets have to be set before it touches down.
He’ll try to vanish into a hole if we let him. ”
I felt the coal in my chest burn hotter. It wasn’t just legal territory on that line of ink, Caesar had hurt people we loved. He had slipped the leash. He had put a target on Runa and on our child.
Roman’s gaze landed on me and something like permission passed between us.
“Volken,” he said, plain and hard. “You stayed. You’ve watched.
If anyone needs to know the fury of a burned man, you do.
We’ll collar this clean. Viking, Draugr you take the plane.
Find him. End this fucking thing where he hides. ”
Viking’s grin was a blade. “Hell yes. We’ll find that fucker and make him pay.”
Draugr nodded once. “We go now.”
Lucien looked up at me. “I’ll run the data stream. Roman, you hold the network here. Volken you stay near Runa. We don’t move unless you give the nod.”
I wanted to tell him no. I wanted to tell them all that I would walk the fire with them, that five months or a hundred fights wouldn’t keep me from dragging Caesar’s head back to the house on a pike.
But Runa’s face tired and brand new and trusting with our son stopped the movement in my throat.
The doctor’s orders echoed behind my every step: no stress.
No running headfirst into night while the child was still so small.
So, I nodded, hard. “Go,” I said. “Find him. Burn him. Don’t bring him back.”
Viking rose like a coiled spring, his laughter a short, cruel thing.
Draugr shouldered a jacket, and his men fell in with them, silent and precise.
Roman touched each of their shoulders in a quick, businesslike blessing.
Lucien already had his fingers on the pad, burning lines of data into the night.
They moved like hunters who’d been doing it since before most nations had names. Their exit was a choreography of violence. Viking clapped me once, a hard, brotherly blow to the back, and the world steadied because it always did when blood moved with focus.
When they left, the empty room felt suddenly enormous.
I stayed a moment longer, feeling the echo of my son’s heartbeat like a vow.
I drew it down into my chest and locked it there.
Then I walked to the window, watched the dark city breathe beneath the lights, and made a promise that was quieter and harder than anything I’d ever said aloud.
If Caesar returned, I would find him. I would be the fire that scorched anything that dared reach for them.
The engines started in the distance; the first line of the hunt took wing. I stayed behind because I had to, and that waiting was its own kind of war.
When the call came hours later, Viking’s voice on the line, brief and sharp, there would be news, and it would be either a step closer to endgame or the start of something I didn’t want to imagine.
For now, the house slept, guarded and humming with the quiet preparations of men who had learned to live in the shadow of their own tempers.
I wrapped my coat more tightly around my shoulders and, for the first time since this all began, let the weight of the live coal inside me shift into heat that would not be wasted.
The brothers had flown into the night, and when they returned, we would burn the world for those who had threatened our world.