Chapter 61- Home
Elias kept his promise.
Seven days after he told me to hold on a little longer, I stood at the edge of the manor beneath a sky that had not yet fully decided to become morning.
The world around me looked softened by exhaustion.
Mist rested low over the grounds, curling between trees and stone paths, hiding the lower hills beneath a pale silver veil.
The lanterns along the drive still burned, though dawn had begun diluting their light.
Beyond the manor gates, the road stretched forward in a long dark ribbon, damp from the night and waiting.
Home lay somewhere at the end of it.
That thought should have made everything inside me lighter.
Instead, it hurt.
Not in the sharp, physical way pain had become familiar to me these past weeks.
This ache lived deeper. Beneath ribs. Beneath breath.
Beneath all the careful reasoning I had used to survive the waiting.
It had grown quietly while I slept in unfamiliar rooms, ate at unfamiliar tables, and learned the turns of hallways designed specifically to make strangers feel foolish.
I had told myself every day that the manor was safe.
Warm. Beautiful. Full of people who cared for me. All of that was true.
It simply was not home.
I had not understood how much that mattered until I was forced to live somewhere else.
Before the palace, home had always been a complicated word.
It meant rooms where I knew which floorboards creaked and which doors refused to close properly.
It meant a father I kept waiting for and a household where kindness had to be rationed carefully.
It meant familiarity without safety. Blood without protection.
A place that knew my name but did not always seem pleased I existed.
Then I went to Elysium. At first, the palace felt like another prison.
Larger.
Colder.
More beautiful.
Still a prison.
I had entered through those doors believing I was walking toward an earlier grave.
I had known almost nothing about the man waiting inside except that the world feared him and my family considered me expendable enough to offer.
I had not expected warmth. Or laughter. Or routine.
Or a husband who placed books on my desk and pretended the servants had done it.
I had not expected the east garden, the river, the sound of Achille's boots in the corridor, Elias entering rooms without permission, Veronica sharpening blades on furniture she absolutely should not have been allowed near.
I had not expected belonging.
And now, after only a few weeks away, the need to return had become almost physical. It clawed quietly at the back of my mind.
With the same instinct that animals must feel when they travel too far from familiar ground and begin following something invisible toward home.
Every day at the manor had made that pull stronger.
At first, I believed knowing the date of my return would help.
It did not. The promise of leaving only sharpened my impatience.
I counted mornings. Counted meals. Counted how many times Elias told me to rest. Counted each sunset as though the sky were deliberately moving too slowly.
The closer I came to home, the more unbearable distance felt.
I placed one hand against the carriage door and prepared to climb inside.
Even that required planning now.
Pregnancy had taken ordinary movements and made negotiations of them.
Stairs. Chairs. Beds. Turning. Breathing after walking too quickly.
Standing from anything lower than my dignity approved.
My body no longer accepted commands without discussion.
It considered every request, objected where possible, and punished impatience with aches that seemed to migrate purely for amusement.
I lifted one foot into the carriage.
A dull pain pulled across my lower back.
I paused.
Not because it was severe.
Because it had become constant enough to demand acknowledgment.
For the past few days, my back had hurt in a way that rest did not fully solve.
The pain sat low, close to my hips, deep and stubborn.
Sometimes it eased when I walked. Sometimes walking made it worse.
Sometimes lying down helped until lying down became the problem.
Every position seemed to become uncomfortable if I stayed in it long enough, as though my own body had grown tired of containing me.
I tightened my grip on the doorframe and climbed inside.
The movement took more effort than it should have.
By the time I lowered myself onto the cushioned bench, I was breathing slightly harder.
I told myself it was because I had slept poorly.
That was true enough. Sleep had become unreliable.
I woke often, usually because the child moved, my hips ached, my bladder protested, or some other small betrayal reminded me that pregnancy was a full-body occupation.
I settled against the cushions.
Then immediately shifted.
The position felt wrong.
I moved one pillow behind my back and tried again.
Better.
For perhaps half a minute.
Then pressure built low in my stomach, firm and uncomfortable, spreading slowly before fading.
I frowned.
The sensation was not exactly pain.
It was a tightening.
A gathering.
My whole stomach seemed to harden beneath my hands, then soften again as though nothing had happened.
I had experienced it before in recent days, enough times to stop being frightened by it.
The physicians called such things preparation.
The body practicing. A rehearsal for labor that could still be weeks away.
Weeks.
I held onto that word.
Thirty-seven weeks was early.
Not impossibly early, perhaps, but early enough that everyone had continued speaking of time as though I possessed plenty of it.
My due date remained somewhere in the future, large and distant in my mind.
I had been taught to expect birth near forty weeks.
Some women went longer. Forty-one. Forty-two, even.
I knew numbers were not promises, but they gave me something orderly to hold.
Outside, servants moved quietly around the carriage.
Luggage had already been secured. Horses stamped against the damp ground, breath visible in the morning cold.
Someone checked the wheels. Someone else spoke softly to the driver.
The manor stood behind all of it, warm windows glowing against stone, the house looking almost innocent in dawn light despite everything I now knew lived beneath it.
For one strange moment, I felt guilty for leaving.
Not enough to stay.
But enough to ache.
I had come here sick, frightened, angry, and so tired that every day felt like a negotiation with my own body.
I had expected isolation. Instead, the manor swallowed me into its strange life.
Children greeted me in corridors. Lillian complained beside me as though we had known each other years.
Servants watched without hovering. Elias fed me, insulted me, explained horrors over meals, and somehow became another person I did not want to lose.
I had arrived believing safety would feel like relief.
Instead, it had felt like distance.
That was not the manor's fault. Some places could be safe and still not be yours.
The door remained open.
Cool morning air drifted inside, carrying damp earth, horse sweat, and the faint scent of wood smoke. I leaned back and closed my eyes for a moment, listening to the preparations outside. My back throbbed again, steady now. Not sharp. Not urgent. Just present.
I pressed one hand against it and rubbed slowly.
Nothing helped much.
My body no longer belonged entirely to me.
The change had been gradual enough that I had almost missed it.
There had been no single morning when I woke and suddenly felt different.
Instead, discomfort had quietly woven itself into the smallest parts of my day until it became impossible to remember what moving without thought had once felt like.
Standing had become an exercise in negotiation.
I would remain still for only a few moments before my weight shifted almost unconsciously from one foot to the other, my body searching for a position where the pressure eased.
It never found one. Sitting relieved one ache only to awaken another, a heavy fullness settling low beneath my stomach until I found myself adjusting again.
Lying down made my hips throb with a dull persistence that sleep could no longer disguise.
Even walking, something I had once done without consideration, exhausted me far sooner than my pride wished to admit.
The cruelest part was that resting no longer felt like rest.
It merely exchanged one discomfort for another.
My appetite had become just as unpredictable.
Some mornings I woke so hungry I wondered whether I had somehow forgotten to eat the day before.
Others, the smell of breakfast drifting through the manor was enough to turn my stomach before I had even reached the dining room.
Nothing made sense anymore. My body seemed to belong to someone else, answering to rhythms and instincts I could neither understand nor control.
Then there was the restlessness.
It lived beneath my skin.
An endless, nagging certainty that something was unfinished.
I found myself folding blankets that had already been folded, straightening books whose edges were perfectly aligned, moving cups from one side of the room to the other only to return them a few minutes later.
The basket beside the bed changed places so often that I no longer remembered where it had originally belonged.
Every arrangement felt wrong almost as soon as I finished it.
I knew what I was truly searching for.
It wasn't order.
It was certainty.
And certainty refused to live here. The closer my due date crept, the louder another feeling became.
It was no longer a quiet longing.
It was a need so deep that it seemed to settle into my bones.
I needed to go home.
Not because the manor lacked comfort.
It lacked nothing.
Elias had filled it with skilled physicians, experienced caretakers, enough medicines to rival a royal infirmary, and children whose medical knowledge often surpassed that of trained adults. Rationally, I knew there were few places in the empire where I would receive better care.
Reason, however, had never carried a child.
This was not where I had imagined meeting my child.
Every room in the manor carried memories that did not belong to them.
The walls had witnessed grief before they had ever witnessed joy.
The floors had absorbed blood long before they would ever hear the cries of a newborn.
Even the silence felt different here, as though the house itself remembered every person it had failed to save.
I did not want my first memory of becoming a mother to begin beneath an unfamiliar ceiling.
I wanted the room Achille had prepared with me.
I wanted the nursery we had argued over far longer than either of us would ever admit. I wanted to hear his ridiculous attempts to reassure me while he was clearly more frightened than I was.
More than anything...
I wanted my husband.
There was no gentler way to admit it anymore.
The closer birth became, the less brave I felt.
I had seen women labor before.
Not often.
Enough.
Enough to know that stories always began after the pain was over. People loved speaking about babies. About tiny fingers.
First cries.
Proud fathers.
The miracle of new life.
They almost never spoke about what came before. The hours that stretched endlessly between the first contraction and the first cry.
The fear.
The blood.
The helplessness of surrendering your body to pain that no amount of courage could stop. Those memories had begun returning at night.
Always at night.
When the manor settled into silence and there was nothing left to distract my thoughts.
I remembered passing closed doors behind which women cried out in voices so raw they scarcely sounded human.
I remembered servants hurrying through corridors carrying fresh linens and steaming basins of water.
I remembered sheets stained crimson before the babies had ever drawn their first breath.
I remembered one woman gripping the bedframe until her fingernails split, and another sobbing for her mother despite everyone knowing her mother had been buried years before.
The first time I had witnessed childbirth, I had been too young to understand what I was hearing.
I thought she was dying.
Perhaps some part of me had never stopped believing it. Now, every unfamiliar ache awakened that frightened little girl again.
A tightening spread across my lower back.
Slow.
Persistent.
I closed my eyes as it lingered, waiting patiently for it to pass.
When it finally did, I shifted carefully against the cushions, one hand instinctively finding the curve of my stomach.
I looked through the open door toward the brightening horizon. Gold had begun spreading across the edge of the sky, soft at first, then warmer. Birds called from somewhere beyond the trees. The world looked peaceful enough to make fear feel dramatic.
The carriage shifted under added weight.
I turned.
Elias stepped inside.
For a moment, I only stared at him. I watched in confusion as he pulled the door closed behind him, and settled onto the opposite bench as though rules were suggestions he had written for less interesting people.
I watched him.
He looked tired.
Not dramatically. Elias rarely looked anything he did not intend to look.
But I had begun noticing the small things.
The faint shadows beneath his remaining eye.
The way he rolled one shoulder before sitting.
The quiet breath he released once the door shut.
He wore travel clothes rather than formal garments, dark and practical, his hair tied back loosely. A coat rested over one arm.
"You are supposed to be in another carriage," I said.
He looked at me.
"Yes."
I waited.
He did not continue.
"That was a statement requiring explanation."
"I disagreed with the arrangement," he said shrugging
I narrowed my eyes.
He leaned back, perfectly calm.
Something in me wanted to ask why he had changed his mind. Whether there was danger. Whether someone knew. Whether Achille had sent new instructions. Whether Elias had seen the way I moved that morning and decided the rules no longer mattered.
But another tightening passed through my stomach.
My breath caught.
Elias's gaze dropped immediately.
The sensation lasted longer this time.
Still not pain.
Not quite.
Pressure wrapped around my middle, firm enough that the muscles beneath my skin seemed to draw inward. My back ached with it. I shifted, trying to escape my own body, but the feeling followed. Then, gradually, it released.
I let out a slow breath.
Elias remained still.
"What?"
"How long has that been happening?"
I looked at him. "What?"
His expression suggested my attempt at ignorance had failed before it began.
"Tht."
"It is nothing."
"That was not what I asked."
I looked toward the window.
"I'll be fine Elias you worry to much"
"How often?"
"Im fine, I swear." i took a deep breath before continueing "This is normal," I added before sighing and shifting again. My lower back protested immediately.
His eye narrowed.
"This is a long trip."
"I know."
"You should lie down."
"I'm fine."
"Lie down young woman."
"I am not tired."
The lie escaped automatically.Elias raised one brow. I decided arguing required more effort than obedience.
Carefully, I turned and tried to arrange myself along the cushioned bench.
The process was humiliating. My stomach made movement awkward.
My hips objected. My back tightened the moment I lowered myself.
I placed one pillow beneath my head, another behind my back, then moved the second beneath my stomach, then removed it because that felt worse.
Elias watched without offering advice.
Wise man.
I shifted again.
Nothing fit.
Outside, someone called an order. The horses moved. The carriage rocked once, then rolled forward. Gravel shifted beneath the wheels. The manor slowly began falling away behind us.
The motion became smoother, though not smooth enough. Every uneven patch traveled through the wheels, into the frame, then directly into my back. I breathed through it. Not because the pain required breathing, but because concentrating on breath gave me something to control.
Elias said nothing.
That made me aware of him.
He sat across from me, one arm resting along the side of the carriage, gaze occasionally moving toward the window before returning to me. He was pretending not to monitor. He was bad at pretending, despite a lifetime built on deception.
"You are staring."
"I am observing."
I closed my eyes. Another ache gathered low in my back.
It spread slowly.
A deep pulling that made me shift again beneath the blanket folded at my feet. I adjusted my hips. Bent one knee. Straightened it. Rolled slightly onto my side.
The feeling faded.
I exhaled.
My body felt impossibly heavy.
Not sick.
That was the important difference.
The poison had made me weak in a frightening way. Hollow. Unsteady. As though life itself had been draining out through places no one could see. This exhaustion felt different. Dense rather than empty. My muscles felt used. My bones tired. My body seemed occupied with work I could not witness.
The gentle rhythm of the carriage gradually settled into something almost hypnotic.
Outside, morning continued to brighten, pale strands of sunlight slipping through the curtains whenever the road turned just enough to let them in.
The world beyond the window slowly woke, but my own body seemed intent on doing the opposite.
My eyelids grew heavier with every passing moment.
I heard the soft rustle of fabric.
Then the seat beside me dipped beneath a familiar weight.
I didn't open my eyes.
A moment later, warmth settled over me.
A blanket.
It fell gently across my shoulders before another careful tug drew it lower, covering my legs.
Large, weathered hands moved with a tenderness that seemed almost impossible for someone like Elias.
He adjusted one corner beneath my arm, then tucked the edge loosely around my feet as though he had done it a thousand times before.
He never hurried.
Everything about the gesture carried the quiet patience of someone who believed care should never be rushed.
I had always found it strangely comforting.
Being tucked beneath a blanket should have felt childish.
It was such a small thing something mothers did for children too young to pull the covers over themselves.
Yet Elias had done it more than once since I had come to the palace, and somehow it never embarrassed me.
Instead, it awakened something I had not realized I had spent my entire life missing.
There was a peculiar sort of safety in being cared for without asking.
Without earning it.
Without first proving I deserved it.
No expectation.
No debt.
No condition waiting quietly behind the kindness. Just a blanket... Pulled a little higher because someone noticed I might be cold.
My throat tightened unexpectedly.
"Thank you," I whispered, my voice already thick with sleep.
Elias's hands stilled for only a heartbeat before smoothing the blanket one final time across my shoulder.
"There ain't no need to thank me, kid."
His voice was quiet.
Warm in that rough, weathered way that somehow made every word feel steadier.
"I'm just doing what I promised." I felt his hand rest briefly against my shoulder." Now Rest."
sleep soon claimed me as the steady creak of the carriage, the warmth of the blanket tucked carefully