Epilogue #2
"Come to bed," he says.
"Our daughter is going to spend her life knowing when people are lying to her."
"I know." His hands moving. Unhurried.
"She's going to be impossible."
"Yes," he says. "Come to bed."
He is slow tonight.
Seven months in and he has learned the specific patience that is mine—not holding still, but paying full attention and adjusting in real time.
Both hands on my face first. My throat. The changed landscape of me, the full weight of the pregnancy between us, and he reads all of it with his hands in the way he reads everything.
I am not managing what he reads.
Face to face. He has to adjust for the weight of her, for the new angles, for the ways my body is not what it was in November—and he does adjust, without comment, careful with the places that ache and deliberate with the places that don't. The claiming marks warm under his palms, responding before he touches, permanent now, fully settled. I pull him in.
The upper cock, the curve of it at the depth that is mine—the vibration at the frequency I chose during a long afternoon in his rooms seven months ago when I set the pace and said there and felt him hold back everything else until I was ready. That frequency. Still mine.
His eyes on my face. My hands in his hair, the silver-white braids, his dark skin warm-to-me even though his body runs cold.
The bond open between us and carrying everything—his wanting, which is not cold all the way down, which I have known for a long time now, and underneath it the thing we have both been keeping in the same drawer and not opening yet, which is its own kind of agreement, which I think we are almost ready for.
He makes me come twice before he gives me the lower cock.
Both times his mouth is at my throat, at the claiming marks, knowing exactly what that does to me, and my daughter is quiet through it in the way she gets quiet during the vibration, patient and waiting, and I try not to think too hard about what that means for her future.
The dual vibration starts.
I lose the intelligence analysis. I lose the Ember Court question and the relay traffic pattern and the letter I'm drafting for my father.
I lose everything except his hands and the bond and the sounds I am making that are not professional and never have been since the first night I chose not to manage them.
I rock to meet his rhythm. He says my name against my throat.
The bond between us at full volume with nothing underneath it but what is actually there.
I come and hold on.
He gives me both knots.
The expansion in two places, the cool silver release flooding through both cocks—his court magic, cold inside me, the cold that is always correct—and then the heat of his seed after it, and I shudder through both. His forehead drops to mine. My daughter moves once, soft, and then is still.
We lie there for a long time.
"Still angry?" he says. Eventually. Into my hair.
"Not tonight," I say.
He goes very still.
I have been saying still angry for seven months and meaning it.
Tonight is different—not resolved, not finished, just changed register.
The grief for Lena is there. It will always be there.
The anger over what he did and what I did will be there for a long time yet.
And tonight I am lying in this bed in my rooms with my daughter three weeks from arriving and his arms around me and the bond warm and open, and tonight the anger has gone somewhere quieter and left something that is not a category I had before this year.
"Tonight I'm just here," I say.
His arms tighten around me.
The mist moves through the court grounds, slow and silver, the specific quality of Mist Court in spring. The amber lanterns hold steady over the lake.
My daughter moves—soft, the softest thing, settling.
Vaelis puts his hand flat over the place where she moved. His cold palm, careful.
We are both very still.
"There she is," he says.
"There she is," I say.
I think about Rosalind's son, six months old and watching everything.
I think about Oberon's voice: the sixth bond's daughter will know.
I think about the relay traffic and the Ember Court alpha moving and the shape of what comes next, which is not simple and is not going to be simple for a long time.
I think about Lena saying you buried the most important thing in paragraph four. I think about what the most important thing is, in this particular story.
I came here as a spy and I walked into the trap and I was good at every wrong thing.
I spent months assembling a picture I didn't understand the use of until it was too late to change it.
I left, and then I came back with clear eyes and made conditions, and I have been choosing this every morning since.
My daughter is three weeks from arriving.
My nephew is six months old. The sixth bond is moving and I have already been tracking it for six weeks, because I am still a spy, I will always be a spy, and I am also the Mist Court alpha's mate and the mother of his daughter and the woman who came back with clear eyes and said you be real, I'll be real and meant it and has been keeping it.
The gate is visible from this window. It is always visible from this window.
I can leave if I need to.
I am not leaving.
That is the whole story. That is what the most important thing was.
I am staying because I chose to.