Chapter 10 The Nighttime Husband
For the first two weeks, I live inside a panic that never fully surfaces and never fully goes away.
I am terrified Leo will make a mistake and the pack will realize what he is. I am terrified the thing that wears his face during the day will go back out there. I look at Luca, so small in this stone house of monsters, and I panic about what happens if we stay.
I want to run. Every night, I tell him we have to run.
And every night, Leo talks me down.
He is never impatient. He never treats my panic like it is unreasonable or exhausting.
He just holds me in the dark while I talk, and more precisely while I spiral, and he dismantles every fear methodically, one by one, until there is nothing left but the sound of his heartbeat under my cheek.
"You came back late tonight," I whisper against his chest. "Did they notice?"
"They won't." His palm moves slow and heavy across my back, tracing circles. "He knows he loses consciousness at night. He'll hide that weakness. His performance is seamless."
"But what if there's a war?" My voice drops. "What about the people still out there, the ones still surviving?" The question has been eating at me since the study.
"And he uses your hands, Leo. You could get hurt. You could —" My voice breaks. "Don't leave me again. Don't leave me and Luca."
His hand pauses. Just for a fraction of a second. Then it resumes its steady rhythm.
"I won't. I swear. I will always come back to you."
I pull back slightly and look at him in the dark. "You said that last time."
"I'm here now." His voice is low and certain. "I'll watch him. I'll monitor his military deployments. I check every night. There are no orders pointing outward right now. I won't let him do it."
"We can't stay here forever." I press closer. "Leo, will he hurt me? Will he hurt Luca?"
"Rosie." He finds my eyes in the dark. "He won't."
"But —"
He laughs, soft and quiet. "He can't, Rosie. Because I'm here. As long as I'm here, he can't. Trust me. Give me a little more time, I'll find a way to control him during the day."
"Wait," he murmurs, drawing me back against him, his hand smoothing my hair. "Wait until your body heals. Until Luca is a little bigger. We'll find a solution."
So I wait. I let his certainty become my certainty. The anxiety dulls, smoothed over by the sheer physical exhaustion of a newborn and the quiet, narcotic effect of having my husband back in the dark.
It happens gradually, without announcement.
I start anticipating the creak of the floorboards outside the door, hoping it's Leo rather than something else. I eat the food Nia brings without setting any aside, without the small hidden reserves I'd been keeping for plans I no longer make.
I let myself sleep deeply, without reservation. I start to trust the dark, because my husband is in it.
The days fall into a pattern I stop questioning.
Daytime: Luca. The weight of him, the smell of him, the way his mouth works even in sleep like he is practicing for something. Nia brings food, changes the light, moves soundlessly through the room.
I learn not to look out the window when the courtyard is occupied.
Nighttime: something else entirely.
He comes back every evening and it is always the same. The door, the footsteps, the weight of him sitting on the edge of the bed.
He handles Luca with a competence that should probably unsettle me more than it does. He knows how to position him for feeding, how to hold the burp cloth, how to stand and rock in the dark in a way that costs almost no effort and yet works every time.
I don't know when he learned any of it. He just knows.
Three weeks in, Luca falls asleep against his shoulder, and he tucks him into the crib and turns back to me and I am already moving toward him because I do not know how to stop myself, and maybe I am not trying very hard.
I kiss him first.
He goes still for a breath. Not hesitation, more like a man who was not expecting a gift and needs a second to accept it.
His hands come up to my face and then he is kissing me back, deeply, and I have my fists in his shirt and neither of us are thinking about anything useful.
I look up at him in the low light and his eyes are dark. Very dark. Something flickers in the depths of them, a hot, contracted brightness, and then it is gone, so fast I am certain I imagined it. The lamp. The angle. It doesn't matter.
He walks me backward to the bed.
The kiss he gives me there is thorough enough to make me forget, briefly, that I have a functional nervous system. When he finally pulls back, his breathing is uneven and his voice has dropped to something I feel more than hear.
"Sleep," he says.
I look at him. At his state of affairs, which is evident.
I extend one hand, my best attempt at an innocent expression.
"Need a hand, husband?"
The laugh that comes out of him is caught off guard, low and a little ruined. His eyes go darker than before, some private amusement burning in them.
"I have a better plan than that," he says. "Something that doesn't involve hands."
He pulls the lamp cord.
Later, much later, I am tucked against his side with his arm a warm weight across my back, and I am most of the way to sleep and not bothering to fight it, and my last coherent thought is: good, he's still here.
That is the only thing that matters.