Epilogue #2
“Four of which were one-goal games,” Bardon said mildly from the food table. “Deepest run the Terrors have made. Next spring we finish it.”
“Next year,” Dakvaar said.
That was all. Two words. But the way the whole circle went quiet and nodded—instant, unanimous, a little scary in the firelight—told you everything you needed to know about what next season was going to cost the rest of the league.
Then Torrk sighed again, mournfully, at his phone, and the entire group swiveled back to him like weathervanes.
“Okay, what?” Holly demanded. “Who is she?”
“There is no she.” Torrk rose from his hay bale with tragic dignity and pocketed the phone. “It’s just, before the solstice, I have to figure—” He bit down hard on what he was about to say. “It’s complicated, okay?”
“That’s the most suspicious sentence I’ve ever heard in my life,” Lila stage-whispered.
“The Torrk Method does not explain itself.” He sniffed, as if offended, lifted his chin, and strode toward the fermented jug, bearing his great secret or possibly just going back for thirds, leaving a whole circle of people exchanging looks over their cider.
I caught my husband’s eye across the fire. He gave me one mountainous shrug.
Later, it said. Whatever it is, we’ll find out by Christmas.
Christmas. Gods help me, Christmas. Dakvaar had already started a list—an actual written list, with columns, laminated, I wish I were joking—of everything Rosa had pointed at since October.
I’d caught him researching which sled brands held up best “to orc-assisted speeds.” I’d told him he was not allowed to buy her a pony.
He’d said nothing, which in husband means we’ll see, and last week I found a browser tab open to a hobby farm outside Granby, so the pony situation remains fluid.
“Dad!” Rosa drummed her mittens on top of his head. “Dad, Torrk says the solstice bonfire is gonna be even bigger than this one, can we—”
“We’ll ask your mother.”
“Mama, can—”
“Ask me tomorrow, baby.”
“That’s not a no, Dad!” she crowed to the entire yard, arms flung up in victory, and everybody laughed, and not one of them—not a single soul around that fire—so much as blinked at the word she’d used.
Dad. Three months now since Dak had become Dad. I thought it had to do with starting kindergarten, but it was impossible to deny the legalities probably helped.
The adoption decree had arrived in a flat government envelope, and my enormous, unshakeable husband opened it at the kitchen counter and then had to sit down—actually sit, knees folding him onto a chair, one hand pressed over his sternum where his Kteer lives.
At the courthouse, Rosa had signed her own name on the line the judge showed her, tongue between her teeth, and then informed the entire courtroom she was keeping “Rosa” and her daddy was taking her last name.
The judge lost it. The bailiff lost it. The court reporter had to stop typing.
She started saying Dad about a week later.
No announcement, no ceremony. Just—mid-sentence, one ordinary breakfast, I want more milk, Dad, and Dakvaar poured that milk with hands I watched shake, and neither of us said anything.
But that night I held him and stroked his back as he cried silently against my chest.
The fire burned down slow. Neighbors drifted off in twos and threes with foil-wrapped plates and promises about the solstice.
The team stayed the latest, because these males were like brothers.
Rosa fell asleep mid-argument against Bardon’s arm and got passed hand to hand down a line of enormous males who all considered her their mascot, until she reached her father.
I stood on my back porch in the smoke-smell and the cold and watched my husband carry our daughter toward the house—her cheek smashed against his shoulder, one hand still clutching a cinnamon roll she hadn’t been able to finish but had somehow rubbed all over her hair, under a sky crammed with stars and, presumably, satisfied gods.
Let them look. Let them see exactly what this clan protected this year.
A year. One single year, from that window booth to this.
From a woman who flinched at loud noises to a woman who had this—goodnights called across a dark yard, Lila’s laugh, Torrk’s mysterious solstice deadline, a pond lying quiet and harmless in the dark, keeping the only secret that no longer kept me.
Dakvaar paused at the door and looked back at me over Rosa’s sleeping head. One eyebrow went up. Coming?
“I love you,” I said. Out loud, easily, into the November air—me, the woman who once needed weeks to admit I knew his coffee order.
His whole face went soft above the tusks.
“I love you too, dkaar,” he rumbled. “Come inside. Our future’s in here.”
So I went in.
And it was.
Sofia
Our bedroom faced the back of the house, and through the window I could watch the last of the fire dying down in the yard—embers now, a heap of orange jewels in the dark, one abandoned hay bale, Mrs. Legare’s ambrosia salad sitting on the picnic table untouched and immortal.
Cleanup could wait until morning. Everything, lately, could wait until morning. I’d been asleep by nine-thirty four nights out of the last seven, which was one of several clues I’d been collecting like a smug little detective for about two weeks now.
I felt him before I saw him. Anyone could hear Dakvaar stomping down the hall from Rosa’s room, but he was my Mate, and thanks to our Bond, I knew where he was at any point. He eased our door open, saw me propped against the pillows, and blinked.
“You’re awake.”
“Barely. I’m horizontal, though. Compromise.”
“Rosa is down.” He shut the door with that absurd gentleness of his, a male who could put an opposing winger through plexiglass folding a door closed like it was made of meringue.
“She woke while I carried her up. Made me do the whole routine while she brushed her tusks. Two songs and the dragon voice.”
“You love the dragon voice.”
“I love the dragon voice,” he agreed, and started getting undressed, and I lay there and shamelessly watched, because I’m married now and I’m allowed.
Halfway through his buttons, he stopped. Just stood there in the lamplight, half out of his shirt, staring at the middle distance with a little grin on his lips.
I loved the way he smiled more these days.
“What?”
“She said, night, Dad. You did the voice good.” He shook his head slowly. “I can’t get over it. Dad. Every time she says it, it sits on my chest like—” He pressed a fist to his heart, shorthand for everything too big for either of his languages. “I keep waiting to become accustomed to it.”
“It’s only been three months.”
“It’s been a year,” he said. “That’s the part I can’t hold in my head, dkaar. One year ago, I was sitting in your section pretending I liked eggs that much.”
I laughed out loud. “You ate a ten-egg omelette every other morning. That was pretending?”
“I ate,” he said, with great dignity, climbing into bed, “with purpose. The eggs were a strategy. The eggs worked—look where I am.” He stretched out on his side facing me, one arm crooked under his head, and the whole mattress dipped toward him like the tide going out. “One year from the café to night, Dad.”
“Just in time, too.” I found his free hand and laced my fingers through it. “The adoption cleared with a few months to spare.”
“To spare before what?”
Careful, said the voice in my head, but it was laughing while it said it. Not yet. Let him find it.
“Christmas,” I said, innocent as pie.
He grunted, accepting this, and pulled me in against him, and I went, tucking myself into that space against his chest that fit me so exactly it was ridiculous, like the gods had taken measurements of us both.
His hand made a slow pass down my spine.
His nose dropped to my hair, because that’s how my husband ends every single day of his life—one long inhale of me, the Kteer taking attendance.
He inhaled.
He paused.
He inhaled again, longer, and his whole body went from bedtime-loose to alert underneath me.
“What?” I said into his chest, already grinning where he couldn’t see it.
“There’s something—” He drew back enough to look at me, nostrils flaring, brow crashing down into that thundercloud of concentration I’d watched him aim at opposing power plays. “Your scent is off.”
“Rude.”
“Not bad,” he said it like I’d accused him of blasphemy.
“Never bad, just… Different. It’s been—faint, for days, I thought it was the festival cooking, the smoke, but—” He leaned in and pressed his nose to the curve of my throat, dead serious, conducting an investigation, and I bit down hard on my lip because laughing would ruin the forensics.
He sniffed down to my collarbone. Back up under my jaw. One big hand splayed across my back, holding me still, while three hundred pounds of apex predator sniffed me like a bloodhound in a police procedural.
“It’s warmer,” he muttered, mostly to himself. “Rounder. It’s you, but it’s—there’s me in it, which happens, we share a bed, but this isn’t that, this is under your skin, it’s you and me both at once, it’s coming from you, it’s—”
I felt it hit him.
The whole male stopped.
Everything—hands, breath, the low idle of the growl he doesn’t know he does. He pulled back so fast the headboard knocked the wall, and he stared at me, and his eyes were enormous, and his mouth opened, and nothing came out.
My unshakeable husband. The Wall.
Speechless in his marital bed with his hand hovering over my stomach like it had gotten stuck mid-air between asking and knowing.