Chapter 30
Thirty
LIANA
Six Months Later
Six months later, we’re visiting my family’s estate. It’s safe now that Silus, Magnus, and the rest of their pack are dead. I’ve been waiting to come back for so long.
Knee-high grass drags at my ankles as I walk.
Ezra walks close beside me, his hand hovering an inch from my lower back. Cole is a half step behind us, quiet, watchful. Julian and August trail a little further back, taking in the boarded windows, the moss creeping up the slate roof, the porch swing hanging crooked from one rusted chain.
I lead them around the side of the house. My feet knows the way by pure memory. It’s my family’s home that I’ve been too scared to visit while Silus and his pack were still looking for me.
The old stone wall comes into view first, waist-high, half swallowed by ivy and bramble. I stop at the gap where the garden gate used to hang.
“This is it,” I say. My voice comes out smaller than I mean it to. I lift a hand and point toward a tangle of brush near the center of the wreckage, where the weeds have grown thick and wild over something low and pale. “That’s where the bench is. Under there.”
“Is that where…your grandma died?” asks Ezra.
“Yes,” I whisper. “Right in front of me. The rest of my family were murdered in the house.”
I press a hand flat against my belly without meaning to. The babies shift, a small rolling motion under my palm.
The garden used to breathe.
She taught me to prune here. She taught me which weeds pulled easy and which ones were tough.
I used to kneel beside her in the dirt with my knees soaked through, and she’d let me cut the dead heads off the roses even though I always cut too much, and she’d laugh and say the roses forgive everything except neglect.
Now there is nothing but bramble and rot and a silence so total it presses against my eardrums. Tears burn behind my eyelids as I try not to cry.
My vision starts to go soft at the edges and the garden tilts.
“Liana.” Cole’s voice, low, close. His hand is already at my elbow.
The world goes gray at the corners, my knees buckle, and then his arm is around my back, solid, taking my weight before I even fully understand I’m falling.
“I’ve got you,” he says. “Breathe.”
I breathe. The gray recedes slowly, in pieces, until the garden swims back into focus, still ruined, still wrong, but visible again.
“Maybe that’s enough for today,” Ezra says, quiet, careful. His pale eyes are on my face, searching it the way he does when he’s trying to decide how much to push and how much to protect. “We can come back another time. When you’re stronger.”
“No.” The word comes out harder than I intend. “I don’t want to leave yet.”
Nobody argues with me. Cole keeps his arm around me, steady, and I lean into it more than I mean to.
August crouches near the edge of the brush, peers into the tangle, and looks back at me over his shoulder, glasses catching the gray afternoon light.
“Let us clear it,” he says. “Just the space around the bench. So you can sit.”
I nod because I can’t speak.
The three of them go to work without another word between them.
Julian rolls his sleeves up, Cole pulling a folding knife from his jacket to hack through the thicker bramble, and August yanking weeds up by the root with his bare hands, not caring that his fingers come away streaked with dirt and green.
It takes them almost twenty minutes. I watch every second of it from where I stand with Ezra’s arms coming around me from behind, his chin resting against the top of my head, his chest a solid warm wall at my back.
Slowly the shape of the bench emerges from the wreckage. Wrought iron, the white paint flaking, one wooden slat cracked clean through. It looks so much smaller than it did in my memory. Everything here looks smaller.
August straightens, wipes his hands on his jeans, and holds his palm out toward me like he’s presenting something precious.
Ezra walks me the last few feet himself. I sink down onto the bench slowly, testing the wood before I let my full weight settle, and the relief of finally sitting rushes through my legs, up through my spine.
The garden spreads out in front of me, ruined and beautiful and impossibly hers. I can almost see her there, kneeling in what used to be the peony bed, sun on her white hair.
“I want to restore it,” I say.
Ezra’s jaw tightens.
I watch the protest gather behind his eyes, the same look he gets before a contract negotiation. He glances at the boarded windows of the house behind us, at the collapsed stretch of stone wall, at the six years of neglect stacked up in front of him.
“Liana,” he starts.
“I want our wedding here,” I say, before he can find a gentler way to say no. “In this garden. Right here, where the bench is.”
Silence drops over all of them at once. Julian’s hands go still on the bramble he’d been dragging aside. August looks up from where he’s crouched by the wall, dirt streaked to his elbows. Even Cole, still standing close enough that I can feel the heat off his arm, goes very quiet beside me.
Ezra doesn’t answer right away.
I watch him look at the wreckage the way I do and the ghosts of my family.
“If that’s what you want,” he says in a low voice. “Then we’ll build it back exactly the way you remember it.”
“It won’t be the same,” I say. My eyes sting again, hot and sudden.
“I know that. I’m not asking for the same.
I just can’t let this be the last thing they touched.
Magnus took my family. I won’t let him keep this too.
I won’t let the last version of this place be the one where everyone I loved bled into the dirt. ”
My hand is still pressed to my belly. The babies shift again, small and insistent, and something in my chest that has been clenched tight since the moment I stepped through that rusted gate finally begins to loosen.
“This was the happiest place I ever knew,” I whisper. “Before. I want it to be that again. I want our children to grow up knowing it as somewhere good.”
Ezra crosses the space between us and kneels in front of the bench, taking both my hands in his.
“Then we’ll bring it back,” he says. “Every flower. Every stone. I promise you.”
Back at the shop, I tip the last of the watering can over the peonies and set the can down on the counter beside the little brass bell jar.
August is up front, wiping down the mahogany counter in slow, even strokes, humming something low and tuneless under his breath.
He’s been beside me all afternoon since we drove back down from the property, doing the small chores I usually do myself.
Grief after visiting my family’s estate this morning still eats at me.
It has been sitting on my chest all day. It’s been there since I stood in that ruined garden with my hand on my belly, trying to imagine my family getting to meet the babies, and I don’t want to carry the grief for one more hour.
I cross the shop slowly and come up behind August at the counter, pressing my belly against the small of his back. I wrap my arms around his waist.
“You okay?” he asks, low, the words rumbling through his back into my cheek. “I can feel your sadness on you. All day.”
“I don’t want to think about the garden,” I whisper, resting my cheek against his back. “I’ve been thinking about it since this morning, and I need a break. Just one hour where my brain isn’t torturing me.” I press my face harder into his sweater. “I need you, August.”
He sets the cloth down without a word.
He turns slowly in my arms until we’re facing each other, and his soft blue eyes find mine behind his glasses, searching, and then he brings both hands up to cup my face. His thumbs sweep once, slow, across my cheekbones, gathering a wetness at the corner of my left eye I hadn’t realized was there.
Then he kisses me.
It’s deep and consuming, and I gasp into his mouth. He’s kissing me until my hands are fisted in the front of his sweater and I can barely breathe.
He turns back, grips my hips, and lifts me onto the counter.
The wood is cool under my thighs even through my jeans, and I gasp at the sudden height of it. He steps between my knees, spreads them with both palms, and runs his hands slowly up the inside of my thighs through the denim.
“Is this alright?” he asks, soft and rough at once.
I nod.
He smiles and works my jeans open, pulls them down my legs with my underwear, lifts my feet free one at a time, dropping them on the floor.
He spreads my thighs wide and looks at me for a long moment.
“Your pink little pussy is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” he says. “Right here. Spread out on the counter of your own shop. Already glistening for me, my pregnant beautiful fiance. Fuck Lia.”
He lowers his mouth to me.
The first lick is slow. Long. Reverent. His tongue drags from my opening all the way up to my clit in one flat stroke, and electricity shoots up my spine so fast my head falls back against the brass bell jar behind me.
He licks me again. Sucks my clit gently between his lips.
Runs the flat of his tongue from my opening up to my clit in slow, worshipping strokes. He moans against me like he’s tasting something sacred. His hands grip my thighs, holding them open, his thumbs pressing into the soft skin there.
“You taste so good,” he groans, his breath hot against my pussy. “So fucking sweet for me.”
He works me slowly. Patiently. Sucks my clit and slides two fingers inside me at the same time, curling them up against my G-spot. I pant above him, my hands gripping the edge of the counter on either side of my hips, my knuckles white.
I come the first time within minutes.
My thighs shake and tighten around his ears. My hips lift toward his mouth. I make a sound I don’t recognize, high and broken, and he works me through it, gentling his tongue but not pulling away, lapping at the fresh wave of slick that pours out of me.
“That’s it,” he murmurs against my clit. “Let me have it all. Soak my mouth, baby. I want to drink every drop.”
He hums against my clit and the vibration makes me jerk.