Chapter 15
Chapter
Fifteen
Sixteen weeks, and my belly has opinions about everything.
About how I sit. About the exact angle I'm allowed to sleep at, which is narrow and changes nightly.
And lately, loudly, about what I eat, which is a sentence I never expected to think, because I haven't wanted food since the night I turned, and now I want it constantly, specifically, and at hours no kitchen keeps.
The twins have made themselves visible in the last week, the swell gone from suggestion to statement, and I've stopped trying to hide it under stolen shirts.
The compound knows. The coalition will have to know soon.
Konstantin, presumably, already does, and if he doesn't, his network is worse than Julian thinks.
Tonight the compound sits down to a meal, and for once nobody is bleeding.
The weekly meal is back, the one tradition the war couldn't kill for good, and tonight the long hall fills slowly at first, then all at once, voices layering over voices until the room sounds like a thing that's alive on purpose.
Blood from the warmer for the rest of us.
Food from the kitchen for the humans among us, cooked by Simone, who picks up a wooden spoon when she needs her hands to do something that isn't crisis management, even though she won't taste a bite of it herself.
Tonight she's made pasta from scratch, the kind that takes the whole afternoon and fills the corridor with garlic and basil, and Carson hasn't had a home-cooked meal since before the contamination started, and his plate says he knows it.
And in front of me, where the whole table can see it, a plate.
I've been eating for weeks, at three in the morning, behind a closed door.
Tonight is the first plate I've let the room watch.
The pregnancy has done a thing to my body that no vampire's body is supposed to do, and Simone has known for a while now and has not recovered from the joy.
She cooked the pasta for the humans. She cooked twice as much because of me.
Every time I take a bite she looks away too fast, pretending she isn't watching her sister eat for the first time in longer than either of us has counted, and I let her pretend, and I eat, because the twins want it and because the look on her face is worth the strangeness of chewing.
"There's more," she says, not quite looking at me.
"Simone."
"I made too much on purpose." She refills a bowl that doesn't need refilling. "Eat."
The table notices. Of course it notices.
A vampire with a fork is not a thing this hall has seen before.
The survivors watch with the open curiosity of people who've stopped being surprised by this household and started enjoying it.
Marcellus's brows go up a fraction and come down, and he says nothing, which from Marcellus is a toast.
Julian waits until my third bite. "For the record," he says, to the table at large, "I've known about the midnight snacks for weeks. I run intelligence. Knowing things is the entire job."
"Keep running it toward my plate and see what happens to your budget," I say, and take another bite.
"Withdrawn," Julian says, without missing a beat. "I know nothing. I never did."
"Whatever's making her eat," Carson says, not looking up from his plate, "leave it alone. It's working."
And from the head of the table, through the bond, warmth arrives, steady and enormous, a man watching his wife eat dinner with his family, and his face gives the room nothing and gives me everything.
Catherine watches from her periphery.
Carson is on his second serving. Sullivan sits beside him with a glass of wine he has no use for, wearing the human-doctor manner he keeps for the outside world and never quite takes off at home, and the survivors like him for it, because Sullivan treated their wounds, and a man who treats your wounds can keep whatever manner he wants at dinner.
The table runs the full length of the hall, the largest communal meal in weeks, and the noise fills the vaulted ceiling with the layered acoustics of conversations running in parallel.
Laughter from Julian's end. The low murmur of Marcellus and Elena's private frequency, audible to nobody but each other and me.
Simone's voice, warm, narrating something to the freed-farm survivors about the sanctuary expansion that has them leaning in.
Marcellus and Elena sit across from each other as they always do, close enough to touch and not touching, the practiced stillness of two people whose connection runs so deep the proximity is enough.
Elena's hand rests on the table, three inches from his, and every few minutes Marcellus's little finger moves a fraction toward hers and then stops, and the restraint is so practiced and so tender it makes my chest ache.
He found this late, and the lateness shows in the care.
The love moves in increments. You have to watch for it, a finger crossing half an inch toward a hand and then stopping, the whole declaration in the space it doesn't close.
Julian runs the far end, one hand wrapped around a glass he hasn't drunk from, deep into the story of the Edinburgh job.
"Three nights," he says. "Three nights in a rented flat with a telescope, logging every visitor to the wrong building, because the address on the intercept dropped a digit.
Beautiful intelligence. Meticulous logs.
Of a retired piano teacher." He turns the glass.
"On the fourth night she crossed the road with a tin of shortbread and asked if the surveillance was going well, because her whole street had been taking turns watching me watch her, and she felt someone ought to say something. "
The table breaks, the loud helpless kind of laughing, and even Mira presses her lips flat in the expression she uses instead of laughing, and Julian sits in the middle of it with an open, unguarded ease I've never seen from him before, sitting in the room for once instead of running the war from behind it. It's good on him.
Alexei sits quietly beside Simone, taking in the room, all of it, the whole time, and every now and then Simone's shoulder brushes his and he doesn't move away.
Seraphina is in the garden alcove by the window, a glass of something amber that she sips with the patience of a woman who's been alive long enough to let wine happen to her instead of the other way around.
She's watching the table with an expression that's almost soft and is entirely satisfied.
She has watched more people than she could ever count, and the family at this table is still showing her something new.
The candles throw soft light across faces I would kill for, have killed for, will kill for again if anyone makes me, and the truth of that is not violent.
It's the simplest truth I have. These people are mine.
The table is mine. The noise is mine. And the fact that I can sit in the middle of it and feel it instead of guarding it is the longest-running miracle of my life.
Maximus sits at the head of the table, and he's watching all of it, and there's no threat-scan in the watching, no cost math.
A man at a fire he built, in a house he's learning to believe is his.
The family he assembled, eating alive and loud, and I can see what it costs him to sit in it and not wait for it to end.
All those centuries of training himself to expect every good thing to be the last one, and a dining table is the thing that breaks him.
I set my glass down and I let myself sit in it.
This table. This noise. These people. Every broken, brilliant, stubborn one of them choosing to be here on a night when nobody's bleeding, and the choice is miraculous, and the miracle is as ordinary as roasted potatoes, and if Konstantin could see this he'd call it a fault line and he'd be right, because it is, and I would die on it, and the dying would be worth it.
Catherine is at the periphery. She's quiet.
She's watching. Since the garden she's pulled back to exactly the distance I asked for, and the pulling-back makes her more sympathetic, not less, which is the thing about drawing a line you meant, the moment the other person respects it, you start seeing them clearly for the first time.
She's watching the family she's not part of.
The glass in her hand that nobody refilled.
The table she sits at without belonging to.
And the look on her face doesn't read as the campaign. It reads as the cost.
I see it, and I don't look away from it, and I don't let it change what I built in that garden.
A surge of desire hits.
No warning. One second I'm watching Catherine.
The next my whole body rewrites itself, the heat climbing from below my navel and pouring through me in a wave that whites out the table and the candles and the concept of dinner.
This is all me, the pregnancy's hormones finding their favorite target, and their favorite target is sitting at the head of the table watching his family and looking like that.
Terrible timing. Again. Let's go.
I find him across the table. His sleeves are rolled past the forearms, the muscles flexing as he turns his glass a slow quarter-turn against the wood, the casual strength he doesn't notice and I can't stop noticing, pale skin in the candlelight, old scars on cool muscle, and it goes straight through my nervous system.
Well. That does it.
I catch Maximus's eye across the table. The bond flares. And the surge, which was already running, detonates.
I set down my glass. I stand.
I cross the room. I get both fists in my husband's collar, and his composure cracks down the middle, and the look he gives me is the one that says he knows exactly what's happening and never had a vote, and I pull him out of his chair and he comes, he always comes, and we leave.