Chapter 14 #3
Kara snorted softly. “Fantastic. I’m growing a tiny warrior princess with violent tendencies.”
“Given her mother, that tracks.”
She shot him a look. “To be fair, the stabbing was justified.”
His mouth twitched at the corner. “You cut up an ancient elf king with a fae blade.”
“Again,” she said, very carefully, very deliberately, “justified.”
“I’m not arguing. It’s sexy as hell.”
“You sound like you’re arguing.”
“I sound impressed.”
“I can’t decide if that should be disturbing or not.”
Another sharp kick landed low enough to make her wince and flatten her hand against the spot.
“Okay,” she muttered, glaring downward at her own stomach as though that had ever once worked on anyone in her family line. “You are entirely too tiny to be throwing elbows with this much confidence.”
The baby kicked again, lighter this time, almost smug.
Kara was going to have words with this child the second she was old enough to understand them. Possibly sooner. She was already drafting a stern lecture in her head, complete with hand gestures and several pointed silences.
Nick’s expression shifted into something quieter as the baby moved again beneath his palm.
The lines that had carved themselves between his brows for the past week eased.
His shoulders lowered a fraction. His wolf, the one that had been pacing visibly behind his eyes since they’d left the chamber, settled.
Kara caught the change and rolled her eyes affectionately.
“I swear she already likes you more.” She knew she sounded a tad petulant. But she didn’t really care. She was pregnant. She got to sound however she wanted to sound. Or so Jen told her.
Nick grinned. “She has excellent instincts, yeah?”
Kara sighed. “She hasn’t even been born yet and you’re already recruiting allies against me.”
“Smart girl.”
Despite herself, warmth spread through her chest. It was a slow, dangerous kind of warmth, the sort that made her brain glitch and forget for several seconds at a time that they were currently in an underground troll kingdom being summoned to a king’s audience while something weird vibrated through the bedrock beneath them.
That warmth softened some of the fear that had lived under her ribs since the moment the Great Luna had spoken over their unborn daughter and called her blessed instead of broken.
Blessed.
It was such a small word for the weight it carried. She’d turned it over in her head a hundred times since that night. Every time she did, it felt heavier, like the meaning was still expanding inside it, slowly, the way her own body kept expanding around the small life it was carrying.
Nick leaned closer. The cloak hood brushed against the side of his jaw as he pressed his mouth briefly to her forehead. The contact was light. The kind of kiss most people wouldn’t bother to register.
Kara registered it down to her toes.
“She’s strong,” he said quietly against her skin. “Just like her mother.”
And God help her. That still did something dangerous to her heart every single time he looked at her like that: low voice, soft mouth, eyes the color of woods at dusk and twice as steady.
This was her mate. The man who would do anything to protect her but could also treat her like a precious, delicate treasure.
She was not going to cry. She was absolutely not going to cry in a hallway full of stone-faced trolls carrying glowing axes. She was Kara Luisa, renowned warrior. She had standards.
She blinked hard, cleared her throat, and tipped her chin up at him with all the dignity of a pregnant woman in a borrowed cloak who was, in fact, two seconds away from emotional collapse.
“Save the sweet talk for when we’re not being summoned by a troll king with a flair for dramatic entrances.”
Nick’s mouth curved. “Noted.”
“And stop being attractive in tunnels. It’s distracting.”
“I’ll do my best.” The smirk said he wasn’t about to try and do his best in the least.
“Try harder.”
The vibration rolled through the floor again before he could answer, deeper than the last one. The mineral veins overhead pulsed once, twice, and dimmed, then flickered back to full brightness with a quiet, almost-audible hum that Kara felt more than heard.
The trolls in the corridor ahead of them stopped walking all at once.
Every one of them.
The hallway went still. No shifting boots. No muttered words. Just the slow, even breathing of a dozen massive bodies frozen mid-step, axes lowered, heads tilted toward the floor as if they were listening for something only they could hear.
Kara’s hand pressed harder against her stomach.
The baby had gone still, too.
“Nick,” she whispered.
His fingers curved fully against her lower back, anchoring her against his side. “I know.”
The largest of the troll warriors, the one who had knocked at their door earlier, slowly turned his enormous head and looked back at them. His gaze didn’t lock on Nick.
It locked on her.
On the curve under her cloak.
And in a voice that rumbled through the corridor like the mountain itself was speaking through him, he said one word.
“Hurry.”