Chapter 77 Solomon
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Solomon
The contractions started at dinner.
Mira was mid-sentence, arguing with Percy about whether burnt pancakes constituted a legitimate cuisine or a cry for help, when her hand froze on her fork and her face went blank.
“Mira?” Lucian set down his glass.
“I’m fine. The babies just kicked.”
“All three at once?”
“They’re coordinated. Team effort.” She picked up her fork. Took one bite. Set it down again. “Actually, that wasn’t a kick.”
The second contraction hit forty seconds later. I timed it because timing things was what I did when the alternative was panic, and I did not panic.
Mira gripped the edge of the table with both hands. The color drained from her face and returned in a flush that spread from her chest to her hairline.
“Okay,” she said. “That was definitely not a kick.”
Percy was on his feet before the sentence ended. Lucian’s chair scraped back. I remained seated for three additional seconds because someone needed to maintain operational clarity.
“Breathing,” I said. “Count of four in. Count of four out.”
“I know how to breathe, Solomon.”
“You’re holding your breath.”
She exhaled with a glare that would’ve been more effective if her hands weren’t white-knuckled on the table.
“The midwife,” Lucian said to Percy. “Now.”
Percy was already gone. The door hadn’t finished closing before his footsteps disappeared down the corridor at a speed that suggested he’d shifted mid-stride and was covering ground on four legs instead of two.
Lucian moved to Mira’s side. His hand reached the small of her back, the position that had become muscle memory over the past months.
“Can you walk?” he asked.
“I can do a lot of things. Walking is the least impressive.”
“The birthing chamber is two floors up.”
“Of course it is. Because nothing in this castle is on the ground floor. You people built a kingdom on stairs.”
I stood and crossed to her other side. Between us, we helped her to her feet. The gown she’d worn to dinner was Veyndral silk, loose enough to accommodate the belly, and she gathered it in one fist while her other arm hooked through Lucian’s.
We moved through the corridor. The contractions came in intervals I tracked against the rhythm of our footsteps.
“I need to stop,” Mira said on the first landing.
We stopped. She braced against the wall, forehead pressed to the cool stone, breathing through a contraction that lasted twelve seconds. I counted. Lucian’s hand stayed on her back. His jaw was clenched so tight the muscle jumped.
“You’re doing well,” I said.
“Don’t manage me right now.”
“I’m not managing. You are, factually, doing well.”
“Solomon, if you time one more contraction, I will find your stopwatch and shove it somewhere creative.”
“I don’t have a stopwatch. I’m counting internally.”
“Then stop counting internally.”
I didn’t stop. I simply stopped reporting the results.
The birthing chamber was warm.
The bed was oversized, built for exactly this purpose, and Mira lowered herself onto it with the careful coordination of a woman whose body was doing several impossible things at once.
Percy arrived with the midwife, a lycan woman named Orinne who’d delivered more pups than anyone in Veyndral’s recorded history. She assessed Mira with the efficient calm of a professional who’d seen this thousands of times and still treated each one as singular.
“The heartbeats,” Orinne confirmed, hands on Mira’s belly. “All strong. The first is already in position.”
“How long?” Lucian asked.
“Lycan triplets? Could be hours. Could be less.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“Birth doesn’t operate on your schedule, Your Majesty.”
Mira laughed through a contraction, which turned into a groan, which turned into a string of words I chose not to catalogue for the sake of diplomatic record.
Percy positioned himself on her right side. Pressed his mouth to her knuckles and stayed there. Lucian took her left. His hand engulfed hers, and through the bond I felt his emotions: terror dressed in composure.
I stood at the foot of the bed. Orinne beside me. The position of assessment. The vantage point that allowed me to see all of it.
The hours passed. Mira cycled through pain and fury and dark humor.
Orinne checked again. “First one is ready.”
The room shifted. Percy tightened his grip on Mira’s hand. Lucian leaned forward. I remained where I was.
“Push,” Orinne said.
Mira pushed.
The sound she made wasn’t a scream. It was deeper, primal. The effort contorted her face into an expression I’d never seen on her before. Not in battle or in the compound. Not in any of the horrors she’d survived.
Percy was murmuring in her ear. Encouragement, endearments, words I couldn’t hear clearly but could feel through the bond. Lucian hadn’t spoken. His knuckles were white around her hand and his eyes never left her face.
“Again,” Orinne said.
Mira pushed again. And the sound that followed wasn’t hers.
A small cry.
Orinne lifted the first baby.
“A girl,” she said.
Mira’s sob broke through the room before the words had fully landed. Her head dropped back against the pillow, tears streaming, and through the bond the emotion that hit me was so concentrated I had to brace against the bedframe.
“Mireille,” Mira whispered. “Her name is Mireille.”
Percy pressed his face into Mira’s hair. His eyes were red and his shoulders shook.
There was no time to hold her. The second contraction came hard and fast, and Orinne passed Mireille to the attending nurse while Mira bore down again.
The second baby arrived twelve minutes after.
“A boy,” Orinne announced.
Mira was laughing and crying simultaneously, a sound that shouldn’t have been possible and was the most human thing I’d ever heard.
“Solian,” she said.
My throat tightened and my vision blurred at the edges.
“What the hell, Sol? Your face is wet,” Percy points out.
I was crying.
I, Solomon Theron, the man who’d maintained composure through centuries of warfare, political upheaval, and the systematic dismantling of my emotional responses, was standing at the foot of a birthing bed with tears running down my face because a woman named her son after me.
I didn’t wipe them.
Lucian looked. His gold eyes found mine across the bed. The expression on his face was not surprise. It was recognition. The look of a man watching me finally do the thing he’d been waiting centuries to see.
Percy stared. His hand reached across Mira and gripped my forearm.
The third contraction came. Mira screamed. The kind of scream that would’ve sent me through a wall if the source had been anything other than childbirth, and I gripped the bedframe and let the tears fall and did the only thing I could do: stay.
The third baby was quiet. No immediate cry. Three seconds of silence that stretched into an eternity, and in those three seconds every person in the room stopped breathing.
Then a small, offended sound. A hiccup that became a whimper that became a cry that grew until the room rang with it.
“A boy,” Orinne said, and her smile was the first genuine expression I’d seen on a woman who’d done this work for centuries.
“Percius,” Mira said. Her voice was barely there, shredded by effort, but the name carried clearly.
Mireille. Solian. Percius.
Three names. Three echoes of the people she loved, stamped onto the people she’d made. A girl named for herself. Two boys named for the men who’d followed her into darkness and back.
Orinne laid Solian in my arms.
The weight was impossible.
He weighed next to nothing. But the gravity of what I held, the concentrated potential of a life that shared my blood and carried my name and would grow into a person I’d teach and protect.
His eyes were open. Silver. Actual silver, ringed with the faintest edge of gold. My eyes in a face that carried Mira’s nose and the stubborn set of her jaw.
He looked at me with the raw, unfocused attention of a creature experiencing consciousness for the first time and finding it bewildering.
“Hello,” I said. My voice cracked. I let it.
Lucian held Mireille.
The king cradling his daughter with hands that had wielded swords and signed treaties and mapped wars, now supporting a head that fit in his palm.
Mireille had stopped crying. She stared at Lucian’s face with the intensity of a child who’d already decided this person belonged to her.
Percival held Percius. The boy was asleep against Percy’s chest, one tiny fist gripping the collar of his shirt, already possessive, already claiming territory.
Mira lay on the bed. Exhausted but radiant. Her copper hair was matted with sweat, her face blotched with tears, her body wrecked by the effort of bringing three lives into existence.
“Come here,” she said. “All of you.”
We converged.
Three men carrying three babies, settling onto the oversized bed beside the woman who’d made them.
Mira took Solian from me and held him against her chest. Reached for Mireille with her free hand, touching her daughter’s cheek.
Looked at Percius sleeping on Percy’s chest and smiled with a weariness so complete it bordered on transcendence.
“We did it,” she said.
My tears had stopped. The evidence remained on my face and I didn’t care. Percy’s head rested against the headboard, Percius rising and falling on his chest. Lucian’s arm wrapped around Mira’s shoulders, Mireille tucked in the crook of his elbow.
Solian opened his silver eyes and stared at me from Mira’s chest. I stared back.
“He has your eyes,” Mira said softly.
“I noticed.”
“And Lucian’s frown.”
“He’s minutes old. That’s not a frown. That’s a facial muscle reflex,” Lucian protested.
“It’s a frown. A tiny, grumpy, Lucian frown. He came out judging the world.”
Percy laughed. Quiet, wrecked, still wet with tears. “Born disapproving. That’s the most Lucian thing I’ve ever heard.”
Mira’s hand found mine. Laced our fingers together over Solian’s sleeping body.
Through the bond, I felt all of it: her exhaustion, her triumph, her bottomless love for the three men and three children in this bed. And beneath it, aimed specifically at me with a precision that rivaled my own, gratitude so pure it almost started the tears again.
“Thank you,” I said. “For choosing us.”
“I’ll always choose you.”
“And we will choose you,” Lucian answered.
The room went quiet.
Six heartbeats against mine. Three new, three familiar.