Chapter 16 The Wrong Ears
Rosalind
He walks past Luca without looking at him.
My son is on the carpet with his arms out, sobbing, and the man who wears my husband's face crosses the room without a glance, as though the crying child on the floor were furniture.
He pulls me into his chest. His arms close around me and he's solid and warm and he smells like Leo, and I can't stop shaking.
Nia appears in the doorway. She scoops Luca up without a word and leaves, and the door clicks shut, and those ears are gone but I can still see them, gray and bristled and wrong on top of a baby's head.
"That's not possible," I say into his chest. My voice doesn't sound like mine. "Leo, it's not possible. I was pregnant before the outbreak. Before any of it. How is he—that can't be our—"
"Hey." His hand moves between my shoulder blades. "Look at me."
I can't.
"Rosie."
I pull back enough to see his face. He looks at me with that patient, steady expression and his thumbs move across my face and he says: "Listen to me.
You've been here for months. You've been around them.
And the delivery, remember? You were bleeding, Nia was right there, maybe something got into the wound. Environmental exposure. It happens."
I stare at him.
"It's going to be fine," he says.
I nod. I let him pull me back in. I cry until I can't anymore, and then I lie still and listen to him breathe, and at some point his breathing deepens and slows.
I keep my eyes open in the dark.
The room is black when I surface.
Not groggy. Not gradual. One moment I'm under and the next I'm completely awake, staring at the ceiling, every thought moving at a speed that feels almost painful.
I catalogue what I know.
He told me, early on, that the higher the integration between wolf and human body, the lower the infection rate.
He told me the senior pack members, the ones who'd held the form longest, had almost no transmission capacity left. He told me I was clean. Fully human. Uninfected.
If I'm uninfected, Luca's wolf biology didn't come from me.
It came from his father.
I was pregnant before the outbreak.
The ceiling doesn't move. The man beside me breathes in the slow, even rhythm of deep sleep. I watch a strip of moonlight cross the wall and I follow the logic to where it ends, and where it ends is a place I can't look at directly, so I look at it sideways:
If he wasn't human when I conceived—
If something was already in that body before the virus was ever announced—
And if that's true, then the man holding me now—
I close my eyes.
The breathing beside me doesn't change.
I open my eyes. I turn my head and look at his face in the dark, Leo's face, the jaw, the angle of his nose. I think about everything I've been told. Everything I've been shown. The distance between those two things is enormous.
I roll carefully onto my side.
I face away from him.
I don't sleep again.
***
Three days later, on the terrace, I lean my head against his shoulder and ask: "What month was it? Our first kiss?"
He doesn't miss a beat. "March. Outside the precinct. You'd just failed your driving exam for the second time and you were furious about it."
I laugh. I feel him smile against my hair.
"The name," I say, the next night at dinner. "When we were deciding on Luca, what did you want to call him first? Before I talked you out of it."
"Marcus." He says it with the rueful expression Leo always wore when conceding an argument. "After my grandfather. You said it sounded like a Roman emperor and you didn't want a child with that kind of pressure."
I shake my head, fond. "I can't believe you remember that."
"I remember everything."
I look at him. I smile.
At the wedding, I ask on the fourth day, his arm around me on the sofa while Luca naps in the next room, what color was the bridesmaids' dress?
He answers. Correctly. The exact shade. The small stain on Carla's hem from the champagne at the reception, the way the fabric had caught the light during the outdoor ceremony.
He describes it the way you'd describe something you'd watched closely.
I tuck my face against his neck. "I'm sorry," I say quietly. "About the last few days. I think I just needed to hear your voice."
He presses his mouth to my hair. "You never have to apologize for that."
I stay there for a while. Still. Quiet.
His arm tightens around me, easy and settled, the arm of a man who believes the hard part is over.
Four nights later.
The moon is past full now, a waning disc throwing pale light through the gap in the curtains. I've been lying still for two hours. Beside me, his breathing is deep and regular, the profound unconsciousness of someone who has stopped calculating threats.
He trusts my scent.
I've understood that for a long time: that the olfactory familiarity registers as safe to whatever is behind Leo's eyes, that I have become something categorized as known and therefore lowered in the threat hierarchy.
I've understood it. I've waited.
I sit up.
Millimeter by millimeter. No shift in his breathing. The mattress takes my weight as I redistribute it and I've been doing this for days, practicing this movement in the afternoons when the room is empty, learning exactly how much pressure triggers the springs and how much doesn't.
I reach under the far edge of the mattress.
The handle is cool and thin, lighter than I expected the first time I held it. Silver, solid, taken off a desk in the east study and kept flat and wrapped against the bed frame in the place I identified as the single spot in this room he never checks.
I stand.
He doesn't move.
I look at him for a moment. Leo's face. Leo's chest rising and falling. The expression of someone who has no reason to be afraid, because the woman sharing his bed has been sanded smooth by days of questions answered correctly.
I raise my arms.
No hesitation. No pause where doubt could move in. I bring the blade down with everything I have into the left side of his chest.
The sound is ugly.
His eyes open.
Green, fully, immediately, without the slow surface that Leo always needed, and the pupils contract down to nothing in the dark. He stares at the handle protruding from his chest. Then he stares at me.
I don't move. I keep both hands on the hilt.
"Rosie." His voice is wrecked. Still, somehow, attempting warmth. "Baby, what are you—"
"You're not him."
The warmth drops out of his expression. What's underneath it is difficult to read. His hand comes up slowly toward the blade and I press down and he stops.
"I answered correctly," he says. "Every question. Every detail."
I close my eyes.
A tear tracks down my face and I let it. I keep my hands on the knife.
"Nobody remembers that perfectly. Nobody keeps every single detail."
I open them again and look down at him, at the blood on my hands, at the knife still buried in his ribs.
"Nia told me her name was Nia. She makes perfect chicken soup, the way a human would. None of you are mimicking us. You're not learning." I pull in a breath.
"You read us."
My voice doesn't shake. "You have a perfect record because it's not your memory. It's his."
The green eyes hold mine.
He doesn't deny it.