19. Mary #2
Mac looked suspicious. “Do you fight villains?”
Mateus considered this. “Sometimes I fight paperwork. It has fewer capes but more staples so it’s just as dangerous.”
Mac nodded gravely. “Staples are sharp. I scratched my finger with the one in the middle of my book.”
“Yes, villains are much easier to handle.”
Dinner was in Hudson and Lincoln’s dining room.
The Thames slid dark beyond the glass, catching the lights from the opposite bank.
Artem sat at one end with Maeve beside him, Mac between Gregor and Ivan, and Mila in a high chair making executive decisions with a spoon.
Hudson sat on my left, Lincoln on my right, and Sienna had been convinced to sit near the door after Maeve told her standing through dinner made everyone feel as if pudding was about to be arrested.
The first half of the meal was almost normal.
“I don’t like carrots,” Mac announced.
“Yes you do,” Maeve said.
“They make you strong,” Gregor told him.
Mac considered this. “Did you eat all your carrots as a child, and that’s why you’re enormous?”
Ivan choked on his water.
“I eat all my vegetables.” Gregor stabbed his fork into a carrot and put it in his mouth.
Maeve looked at him and smiled.
“Are you eating yours?” Gregor asked Mac, grimacing through every mouthful.
Mac answered, “No. I don’t like carrots, or sprouts, or little trees.”
“Trees. Yummy.” Mila picked up her broccoli and put it in her mouth.
Maeve added more broccoli to Mila’s plate. “Good girl, Mila. That’s why you’re going to be the boss. You eat your greens.”
“I eat mine. Look.” Mac speared a carrot, ate it with a great deal of face-pulling, then flexed one arm to display a tiny muscle.
Lincoln kept adding things to my plate when he thought I wasn’t watching. I kept eating them, because twins made a girl hungry.
Later, when coffee arrived, Mateus set a leather folder on the table.
“Before anyone panics,” he said, “this is mostly boring.”
“Lawyers only say that before ruining digestion,” I said.
Pax opened his own folder. “Not ruining. Protecting.”
“Same paperwork, different outfit.”
Pax smiled. “Hudson said you might not enjoy this.”
“Hudson has a gift for understatement.”
Hudson’s hand found my knee beneath the table. Warm. Still. There if I wanted it. I put my hand over his before I could talk myself out of needing him.
Mateus saw it and politely looked at the papers.
“Mary,” he said, “Hudson and Lincoln asked us to look at three things. Your legal independence from your father. Your medical and financial protections during the pregnancy. And the babies’ position once they’re born.”
My stomach swished around like a washing machine.
Lincoln’s knee pressed lightly against mine on the other side.
“Position,” I repeated.
“Parental responsibility,” Pax said. “Birth registration. Guardianship. Protection from anyone using your family name, your age, or your relationship structure to argue you’re vulnerable in ways that suit them.”
“Am I vulnerable?”
The table quieted.
Mateus didn’t soften his voice too much, which helped.
“Yes. In some ways, at this moment, you are. Pregnant people often are. So are young people dealing with powerful families, and omegas with fathers who mistake control for parenthood. The point isn’t pretending you’re untouchable.
The point is making sure anyone who tries to touch your life without permission breaks their hand on the paperwork first.”
I stared at him.
Hudson’s thumb moved under my hand. “None of this signs you over to us,” he said quietly. I looked at him. He held my gaze. “That matters. Nothing in that folder makes you dependent on us. Nothing gives us control over you. Pax and Mateus know that was my first instruction.”
“Second,” Lincoln said.
Hudson glanced at him.
Lincoln’s mouth curved. “First was no one scares Mary.”
“And yet here I am at dinner with two lawyers,” I said.
Mateus lifted one hand. “A fair criticism.”
Pax turned a page without looking up. “Have your own attorney read every line of it before you sign anything. You should.”
Artem leaned back in his chair. “She will.”
I looked at him. “I can speak for myself.”
“I know,” Artem said calmly. “I’m agreeing with you in advance.”
Maeve hid a smile in her coffee cup.
The conversation moved through practical things.
Trusts that protected the babies without making me feel like an incubator with bank details.
Medical consent that kept my father out if he tried to interfere.
A simple document making it clear that where I lived, studied, and gave birth was my decision.
I’d expected the words to make me feel trapped.
Instead, slowly and against my better judgment, they felt like locks being changed on a house I’d never been allowed to own.
“And if Callum challenges any of this?”
Pax’s expression sharpened. “Then he does it in a jurisdiction where Mary has representation, documented support, and a very clear paper trail showing a pattern of coercive behavior.”
Mateus glanced at Artem. “Along with certain witnesses who would make his version of events difficult to sell.”
Artem’s smile was faint. “I do enjoy being useful.”
“That’s not the word I’d choose,” Maeve murmured.
Mac looked up from drawing a potato person on his napkin. “What word?”
“Handsome,” Maeve said without missing a beat.
Gregor snorted.
Artem looked pleased enough that Ivan muttered something in Russian under his breath and earned a kick from Maeve under the table.
For a while, I forgot to be afraid.
After dinner, the men moved to the sitting room with coffee, and Maeve took Mila to the guest room they were using for the evening. Mac fell asleep on Gregor’s chest in front of the fire, one hand still gripping the sleeve of his sweater.
I stood in the doorway and watched. Hudson came up beside me. “Too much?”
“A little.”
“Do you want them gone?”
“No.” I glanced toward the sitting room, where Pax was arguing with Mateus. “They’re useful.”
“High praise.”
“Don’t let them know.”
Lincoln joined us, his hand settling at my lower back. “You ate well.”
“That sounds like something you’d say about a horse.”
“A cherished horse.”
I elbowed him gently.
He bent and kissed my temple, and I should have made a joke. I didn’t.
I leaned into him.
Hudson’s expression changed to quiet and careful.
“What?” I asked.
“Nothing.”
“That was a very loud nothing.”
He reached for my hand. “I like seeing you let yourself be cared for.”
My first instinct was to flinch. My second was to say something flippant. My third, apparently, was growth because I decided not to do either.
“I like it too,” I said, so quietly I could barely hear myself. I looked at the fire because looking at either of them was impossible. “But don’t be smug.”
“Never,” Lincoln said before his phone buzzed in his pocket.
He took it out with the distracted air of a man expecting a work message, then stopped dead.
Hudson noticed at once. “What is it?”
Lincoln looked at him, and whatever passed between them made the warmth in my chest fold in on itself.
“Lincoln?”
He cleared his throat. “It’s Damien.”
I made myself keep breathing. “What does he want?”
Lincoln looked at the screen again, jaw tightening. “He says he’s coming to England at the end of semester, next week. He wants to see us while he’s here.”
Hudson’s hand stopped halfway to his cup.
I looked at Lincoln’s phone as if the words might rearrange themselves into something less awful. They didn’t.
Damien was coming next week.