50. CHAPTER 47
Orion
The weeks that followed gave us space to breathe.
Grief still hovered around, but it no longer felt suffocating. It felt more like a mellow drumbeat under a new found melody. You could only feel or hear it when you stopped to listen close enough.
Mornings were slower. I made sure to keep my schedule closed to early morning meetings. Most days I had breakfast with my wife in the garden instead of the dining room, watching her eat her favorite desserts while arguing with me about baby names.
My mother, to my eternal shock, had appointed herself guardian of Léonie’s appetite. She’d send trays of fruit and soups to the our wing, and stern reminders about rest.
“Sit down, Orion,” she told me once, when she caught me standing at the side of the terrace table like a guest. “You’re hovering. You’ll make the child anxious before it’s even born.”
Léa had caught my eye then, muffling a laugh into her tea. I’d sat as she asked. It was a strange new geometry—the three of us, in the same space at the same time, without my mother being her usual imposing self. I’d never had thought it possible but here we are.
My Léa started to show, not obviously at first—a rounding at her belly that only I seemed obsessed with.
I’d catch sight of myself in the glass of my office windows, resting my hand there with my fingers tracing patterns while my wife had her back to my chest, as she sketched and I took business calls.
I resembled a man who finally had things to lose that couldn’t be quantified on paper.
There were days I wandered subconsciously, and found myself in my father’s wing. I’d sit in his old armchair and talk. No long speeches, only fragments. As if I needed to keep him informed of happenings in his absence, just like old times.
“The changes I made to the alliance contract are now in full effect,” I said, staring at the spot on the wall where his favorite painting hung (a sweeping landscape of rolling green fields and a lone manor in the distance.) “You’d hate the terms. The board almost mutinied. I did it anyway.”
I couldn’t help but laugh a bit. I could imagine the look on his face. The way his jaw would have tensed up, the roar of his disapproval. It used to be my greatest fear; now, it was just a memory of a man who didn’t know how to let go.
Sometimes I told him about Léa and her pregnancy cravings.
“She’s craving lemons these days on everything. She used to hate anything with lemon in it, now she can’t stop eating them.” I snorted. “I’m worried she’ll start eating them like apples.”
Or, on the hardest days—when the crown feels weird to carry: “I’m learning you were wrong about some things. You were also right about others. I’m going to try my best to untangle which is which.”
I never stayed long there. I’d sit and look around just long enough to ease the throbbing ache in my chest before heading back to the my wing.
The only place that smelled like my wife’s perfume and fresh laundry and whatever pastry Mrs. Lewis had smuggled up for her against my mother’s warnings.
Mrs Lewis made it a point to spoil Lea through morning sickness and whatever craving decided to take her hostage that week.
At night, I’d lie with my head on her stomach, my ear pressed to the curve of her belly like some lunatic hoping to hear anything through her skin.
“Hey, petit,” I’d murmur, placing a tender kiss there. “It’s your father. I already love you more than anything… and I’ve hired very good lawyers for whatever chaos you inherit from us.”
Léa would card her fingers through my hair, amused. “Don’t tell the baby about the lawyers. You’ll give them a complex before they're even born.”
I’d kiss her belly again, slow, and reverent.
“We’re going to do this differently,” I whispered.
Unsure if I was talking to the baby or to myself.
“You won’t exist for obligation. Or a merger.
Or anyone’s idea of legacy. You’ll exist because two very stubborn people refused to give up on each other. ”
Sometimes, Léonie would watch me with that soft, almost disbelieving look, as though she still couldn’t quite reconcile the man who had once tracked her cycle as a logistical variable with the one who was now planning paternity leave he’d sworn he’d never take.
“How many weeks do you plan to take off work?” she asked one night, while tracing lazy circles over my sternum.
“As long as you both need me.”
I pulled her closer, pressed a kiss to her forehead, and placed my hand down to rest over the small swell of her stomach beneath the thin fabric of her nightshirt.
Her body felt different against mine now—softer in new places, and also fuller in a way that filled me with a strange, aching gratitude.
Holding her made me feel more relaxed and at peace with everything, in a way nothing else did.
“You’ve changed your schedule around us a lot lately,” she said. “Board meetings moved. Trips canceled. Your assistants are even afraid to breathe wrong or say something that might upset you.”
“Is that a complaint?” I asked, turning my head to face her.
“No.” She shook her head, then tilted her face up to look at me. “It’s… a lot to take in. Seeing you do all of this for us.” Her hand moved to cover mine on her belly. “It’s beautiful to watch. Also a little terrifying. But mostly beautiful.”
“I’m still me.”
“I know.” She smiled. “You’re just… more you. Less armor, and so much more heart.”
I didn’t give her an answer. Instead, I pulled her closer, one hand resting over both her hand and the small swell that would eventually upend our entire world.
This is what peace feels like. This is what life is supposed to be.
Exactly what my father meant when he said the weight could end with him.
There was a relief in no longer being trapped in the past anymore, but in looking toward a future rooted in love.
I was finally focused on building a home for the future…
for the the family I’d burn down the world to protect.
LéONIE
We found out our baby was a girl on a Wednesday.
I was lying on an examination table with cold gel on my stomach and paper crinkling under my back when the sonographer—a tall woman with long brown hair and the kindest eyes— tilted her head and smiled.
“There is your baby,” she smiled warmly, turning the screen so Orion and I could see.
On the screen was tiny profile, a curve of a nose, and a blur of movement that was already, somehow, a person.
I looked at the monitor, then at the hand gripping so tightly around mine that my fingers had gone numb.
Orion’s knuckles were pulled taut, his tan skin turning light at the joints from the sheer force of his grip.
He’d barely blinked since we walked in, the usual stoic expression was barely there.
He’d been tense all morning, clenching his jaw as though the universe might snatch this away just because he dared to hope for it.
“It all looks good,” the sonographer said. “Strong heartbeat.” She looked between Orion and me. “Do you want to know the sex?”
My heart skipped a beat. I glanced at him. His eyes were locked on the blurry black-and-white shape on the screen, unwilling to look away for even a second.
“Yes,” he said, his voice dropping an octave.
“You’re having a girl.”
He seemed speechless, as though he hadn’t heard properly. Then his fingers crushed mine in a quick, brutal squeeze. His throat bobbed once. Twice. No words came out.
“A girl,” he finally repeated, like he needed to hear it on his own tongue to believe it.
I felt a smile spread across my lips. “You sound surprised.”
He huffed out a breath that wasn’t quite a laugh.
“I shouldn’t be. I asked for trouble, didn’t I?
” His gaze finally tore from the screen and found mine, and the look there…
it was a fierce devotion at its peak. The look of a man finally coming to terms with the fact that his life was about to change.
“Of course we were going to get a daughter.”
I snorted. “Trouble?”
“Have you met yourself?” his hand traced my knuckles. “She’s going to have your stubbornness and my temper. We’re doomed, Maia.”
“She has long legs,” the sonographer noted.
“Good,” Orion smirked, his eyes looking towards the screen. “She’ll need them to outrun the boys I’m going to have to keep away from our house.”
I couldn’t help but chuckle at the look on his face. It was the first time I’d seen him look so utterly out of his depth, and yet so completely certain of his mission.
The sonographer asked if we wanted a printout, and he requested all of them like a greedy man at an art auction. When she left, he kissed my forehead and placed his hand on the swell of my stomach.
“Ma mère is going to pretend she wanted a boy,” he said. “She’ll talk about heirs, succession and all her usual nonsense.” His mouth curved. “Then she’ll meet her and melt.”
“I thought she already melted,” I teased. “She brings me soup and lectures me about resting whenever I so much as breathe too fast.”
“That’s not melting,” he said. “That’s controlled terror that something might happen to her granddaughter.”
Her granddaughter.
Things had smoothed out between Lady Kade and me since the funeral. It was as if the grief had stripped us both down to our barest parts, and we’d found a strange, silent truce in the wreckage. I didn’t overthink it. Peace was good for Orion. It was good for the baby.
I let the words granddaughter… daughter… sink in.
I looked at the screen again. This little girl was going to grow up in a house that used to be a fortress.
She was going to run down hallways where men once spoke mainly of mergers and power.
She was going to be the first Kade in three generations who’ll be born in a home filled with love instead of family obligations.
For once, the future didn't seem threatening. It was a little girl with a blurry face and a fast, pounding heartbeat.
Our daughter.