Chapter 7 Her Fathers Eyes
Birdie woke up the next morning completely, miraculously, herself.
"Mama! I'm hungry! Can we have pancakes?
Do they have pancakes here? Is this a castle?
It kind of looks like a castle." She was sitting up in bed, fever gone, color back in her cheeks, talking at the volume and speed of a toddler who had spent an entire day being sick and was making up for lost time with enthusiasm.
"Good morning to you too." I laughed — actually laughed, the first real laugh I'd managed in what felt like days — and pressed a hand to her forehead, just to check, even though I could already tell from her face that the fever was completely gone.
"I don't know about pancakes, but I bet we can find you something good to eat.
And it's not a castle, baby. It's just a really big house. "
"It's a really big house," Birdie agreed solemnly, like this was an important distinction. "Can I get up now? The lady said I could get up today if my head wasn't hot anymore, and my head's not hot, Mama, feel it—"
"I felt it. You're right, it's not hot." I helped her out of bed, and she immediately demonstrated her recovered health by attempting to climb onto the windowsill to look outside, which I gently redirected. "Let's get you dressed first, okay? And then we'll find some breakfast."
The healer who checked on her a few minutes later confirmed what was already obvious — fever fully resolved, no lingering symptoms, cleared to move around freely — and by the time we made our way down to the guest suite Petra had shown me the night before, Birdie had transitioned fully into exploring mode, peering into every doorway we passed, asking questions about everything she saw with the relentless curiosity of a kid who'd spent the last day confined to a bed and was determined to make up for it.
"Who lives here?"
"A lot of people. It's like — a really big family, kind of."
"Is it our family?"
The question caught me off guard, and I didn't answer right away, which Birdie — perceptive in the way small kids often were, picking up on hesitation even when they couldn't articulate what it meant — seemed to notice, glancing up at me with the particular searching look she got when she sensed something important was happening that she didn't quite understand.
"It's complicated, baby," I said finally, which wasn't an answer, but was the most honest thing I could manage. "We're staying here for a little while. And some of the people here knew me, a long time ago, before you were born."
"Did they know Daddy too?"
I stopped walking.
It wasn't the first time Birdie had asked about her father — she'd been asking, in various forms, for almost a year now, the kind of questions that came from a kid old enough to notice that other families had a structure hers didn't, but young enough that the questions were curious rather than wounded.
I'd always answered them carefully, honestly within the limits of what felt appropriate for a three-year-old — he's not part of our life, baby, but that doesn't mean anything's wrong with you, it's just how our family is — and Birdie had always accepted those answers with the easy equanimity of a kid who'd never known anything different.
But I'd never had to answer that question here . On the land where her father lived. With the very real possibility that, at some point in the next twenty-nine days, she might end up in the same room as him.
"Some of them did, yeah," I said carefully. "A long time ago."
"Is he here?"
I crouched down so I was at her eye level, in the middle of a hallway in a packhouse three years and an entire lifetime away from the version of myself who'd last walked these halls, and tried to find the right words for a question I'd genuinely never expected to have to answer.
"He might be, sometimes," I said slowly. "We're staying here for a little while, and it's possible we might see him. If we do — I just want you to know, it's okay. He's not someone to be scared of. But he might not — he might not know you very well yet. Does that make sense?"
Birdie considered this with the particular gravity small children sometimes brought to things adults expected them to brush off. "Like he's shy?"
"...Something like that, yeah."
"Okay." She seemed satisfied with this, in the way kids often were when given an explanation that fit comfortably into a framework they already understood — shy was a concept Birdie had encountered before, in playground contexts, and apparently extending it to the father I've never met might be shy of me resolved the question to her satisfaction. "Can we still have breakfast?"
"Yeah, baby. We can still have breakfast."
We found our way, eventually, to a smaller dining area off the main kitchen — Petra's doing, I suspected, given how quickly a plate of food appeared in front of Birdie, complete with the kind of small, kid-friendly portions that suggested someone had specifically anticipated a toddler's needs.
Birdie ate with the single-minded focus of a child who had, in fact, been hungry for longer than she'd let on, and I sat across from her with a cup of tea I mostly just held, watching her, and tried not to think too hard about anything at all.
It didn't last.
"Marlowe."
I looked up to find Roman standing in the doorway of the small dining area, and the pull in my chest — which had quieted slightly overnight, settling into something more like a low hum than the overwhelming wave it had been the day before — surged back to full intensity the moment I saw him.
He looked different in daylight. Less like the carefully composed Alpha from the council room, and more like a man who hadn't slept — there were shadows under his eyes, and something in his posture that suggested a long night, though he was dressed and groomed with the same precision I remembered, the kind of precision that probably took effort even on the worst mornings.
"I'm sorry to interrupt." His eyes moved past me, to Birdie, and something in his expression shifted — careful, deliberate, like a man approaching something he didn't want to startle. "I just wanted to check in. On both of you. The healers said—"
"She's fine. Fever's completely gone." I kept my voice neutral, though every part of me was hyperaware of the pull in my chest, of Birdie's presence three feet away, of the impossible, tangled situation I'd woken up still inside of.
"She's been cleared to move around as much as she wants, which, as you can probably tell, she's taking full advantage of. "
"That's good. I'm glad." Roman's attention stayed on Birdie for a moment longer than felt entirely casual, and Birdie — oblivious to any of the tension in the room, the way only small children could be — looked up from her plate and regarded him with open, unselfconscious curiosity.
"Are you the wolf man?" she asked.
I felt my entire body go still.
Roman blinked, visibly thrown, and for a moment neither of us said anything — the silence stretching just a beat too long, long enough that I could feel it start to become its own kind of statement.
"I—" Roman started, then seemed to reconsider, crouching down slightly so he was closer to Birdie's eye level, the same instinct I'd seen from him in the healing wing — careful, deliberate, like a man approaching something fragile. "I'm a wolf, yes. Why do you ask?"
"Mama said maybe we'd see a wolf man, and he might be shy." Birdie said this with the breezy confidence of a kid relaying information she considered settled fact. "Are you shy?"
Something crossed Roman's face — not quite a smile, but close to it, soft in a way I hadn't seen from him before, not in the council room, not in the healing wing. "A little, maybe. I don't know very many kids."
"That's okay. I don't know very many wolves." Birdie seemed to find this an entirely satisfactory basis for a relationship, and went back to her breakfast with the easy contentment of a kid who'd successfully navigated a social interaction and moved on.
Roman straightened up slowly, and when his eyes met mine, there was something in them — not quite alarm, but close to it, the look of a man who'd just had an experience he hadn't been prepared for and was still processing the aftermath.
"She's—" he started, then stopped, glanced at Birdie again, and something in his expression did something complicated, something that made my chest tighten with a feeling I didn't entirely want to name. "Her eyes."
I knew exactly what he was seeing. I'd known it the moment Birdie was born, had spent three years occasionally catching my own breath at the sight of my daughter's face doing something — a tilt of the head, an expression, the particular gray-green of her eyes — that belonged unmistakably, undeniably, to someone else.
"Yeah," I said quietly. "I know."
"They're—" Roman's voice was low, careful, and I watched him visibly stop himself from finishing the sentence, the way I'd watched myself stop similar sentences a thousand times over the last three years.
They're exactly like mine. He didn't say it.
He didn't have to. The recognition was right there on his face, raw in a way that the careful, composed Alpha from yesterday hadn't shown at all.
"I should—" He took a step back, toward the doorway, and something in the movement was abrupt, almost too quick, like a man retreating from something before he could examine it too closely.
"I should let you two finish breakfast. I'm sorry for the interruption.
I just — I wanted to make sure you were both doing all right. "
"We're fine." My voice came out quieter than I intended. "Thank you. For checking."
He nodded, and for a moment his eyes lingered — not on me, but on Birdie, who was humming to herself over her plate, entirely unaware that she'd just become the center of a moment neither of the adults in the room knew how to navigate — and then he was gone, footsteps retreating quickly down the hallway, and I sat there with my barely-touched tea and tried to breathe through the tightness in my chest.
"Mama?" Birdie looked up, finally noticing something in the atmosphere had shifted, the way kids sometimes did, a beat too late to catch the cause but not too late to sense the effect. "Was that the wolf man you said was shy?"
"Yeah, baby." I managed a smile, even though it felt thin. "That was him."
"He seemed nice."
"Yeah." I reached over and brushed a strand of hair out of her face, and she leaned into the touch the way she always did, easy and trusting in the way small kids were before the world taught them not to be. "He seemed nice."
I didn't say anything else. There wasn't anything else to say — not to a three-year-old, not about a moment that had lasted less than two minutes and had somehow managed to crack something open in my chest that I'd thought, until yesterday, was permanently closed.
Her eyes.
He'd seen it. The same thing I saw every time Birdie tilted her head a certain way, every time she fixed someone with that particular searching look that was unmistakably, achingly familiar.
He'd seen it, and something on his face — something raw and unguarded, something that hadn't been performance, hadn't been the careful composure of an Alpha managing an awkward situation — had cracked through for just a second before he caught himself and retreated.
I didn't know what to do with that. I didn't know what to do with any of it — the bond that hadn't faded, the gap in his memory that genuinely seemed to disturb him, the way he'd looked at Birdie like he was seeing something he recognized without understanding why.
Three years of careful, protective certainty, and in less than twenty-four hours, I'd watched almost all of it start to come apart.
Twenty-nine days left. I had no idea, anymore, what I was waiting for the end of them to reveal.