Chapter 30 #2
I watch her notice it the moment we step through the door—the slight flare of her nostrils, the way her body stiffens, the quick glance she throws in my direction before schooling her expression into neutrality.
Three weeks of sleeping in her bed, wrapped in sheets that held her scent, and now my own scent has soaked into the room so thoroughly that even I can smell the mingling.
She doesn't comment on it. Just closes the door behind us and turns to face me with her arms crossed over the swell of her belly.
"I need to tell you something."
The words land heavy in the space between us, and I brace for another blow. Whatever she's about to say, I probably deserve it.
"It's twins." She watches my face with those sharp dark eyes, measuring my reaction. "I'm carrying twins."
Twins.
The word bounces around inside my skull without finding purchase. I've been thinking of the pregnancy as one child, one life, one small fierce thing growing inside her. The mathematics of it made sense—one omega, one alpha, one baby.
"Twins," I repeat, and my voice sounds distant to my own ears.
"A boy and a girl." Still watching me. Still measuring. "I found out from the village healer after I left."
A boy and a girl. A son and a daughter. Two children where I expected one, two lives tangled together in the warm dark of her womb.
Something cracks open in my chest—wonder and terror and desperate joy all flooding through at once, overwhelming in their intensity.
I've never let myself imagine being a father.
Three hundred years of watching omegas die, of knowing my curse killed everything it touched, of accepting that my bloodline would end with me because anything else would be too cruel to contemplate. And now—
Twins. A family. Something I never thought I'd have.
"That's—" I stop, swallow hard, try again. "Twins."
"There's more." Her voice goes hard, and the wonder curdling in my chest turns to dread. "The curse, Rhystan. It passes to male heirs. And when there are twins—when there's a sister sharing the womb—"
"Tell me."
"The curse activates around month six. Your son will try to kill your daughter before they're born. Male heirs eliminate competition—it's what cursed bloodlines do."
The room goes very cold.
My son. My curse. Three hundred years of divine rage passed down through my blood, turning my own child into a weapon pointed at his sister before either of them draws their first breath.
"No." The word scrapes out rough and broken. "There has to be a way to stop it."
"There is." She lifts her chin, fierce and determined despite the exhaustion carved into every line of her face. "Warrior omegas can absorb curses—take them into themselves. There's a ritual, but the texts I found were incomplete. The page that explained how to do it was torn out."
Warrior omegas absorbing curses.
The texts I hid.
She doesn't know yet—doesn't know I pulled those references from the archives months ago, terrified she'd find them and volunteer to die the way forty-seven omegas died before her. I had Corvith restore everything the night she left, but she hasn't had time to discover that yet.
I could let her find out on her own. Could avoid the conversation entirely, let her stumble across the restored texts and draw her own conclusions.
No. I'm done with lies. Done with omissions. Done with making choices about what she gets to know.
"I know those texts." The words come out steadier than I feel. "I had them removed from the archives. Months ago. Because I knew what you'd do if you found them."
Fury sparks through the bond before it shows on her face.
"You—"
"I had Corvith put them back the night you left." I hold her gaze, don't let myself look away from her anger. "Everything I hid is in the restricted section now, waiting for you. No more secrets."
She stares at me, processing. I can practically see the calculations happening behind her eyes—weighing my admission against my actions, trying to decide if this changes anything.
"You hid texts that could save our daughter," she says finally. "Because you were afraid I'd sacrifice myself."
"Yes."
"And now you've restored them."
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Because I was wrong." Simple as that. Complicated as that.
"About the tea, about hiding your pregnancy, about the texts—I thought I was protecting you and I was just controlling you.
Making decisions that weren't mine to make.
" I take a breath. "You left because I didn't trust you with the truth about your own body. I'm not making that mistake again."
Something shifts in her expression. Not forgiveness—we're a long way from that, if we ever get there at all. But something that might be acknowledgment. Recognition that I'm at least trying to be different.
"The ritual," she says. "If we find the complete version, I'll be the one to do it."
"We explore every other option first."
"Rhystan—"
"I'm not forbidding you." I take a step toward her, close enough to see the way her pupils dilate despite her anger.
"I'm asking for time to search for alternatives.
Partial transfers, staged rituals, ways to weaken the curse before moving it.
The priests destroyed most of the texts but not all of them—there might be another way that doesn't end with you dead. "
The bond thrums between us, heavy with anger and fear and underneath it all, buried deep but impossible to ignore, the pull that's never stopped. She feels it too. I see it in the way she sways almost imperceptibly toward me before catching herself.
"How long do we have?"
"I don't know exactly. Twelve weeks, maybe less." I hold her gaze. "We work together—separate spaces if that's what you need, but two people searching covers more ground than one. I've already identified promising texts. Give me a chance to find another way before you volunteer to die."
She's quiet for a long moment, and I let the silence stretch without trying to fill it. This has to be her choice. All of it has to be her choice from now on.
"Fine," she says finally. "We search together. But you stay out of my way, and you don't make any more decisions about what I can handle."
"Agreed."
"And Rhystan—" She steps closer, and the proximity floods the bond with heat neither of us is acknowledging.
Her belly brushes against me as she gets in my face, close enough that I could count her eyelashes, close enough that her scent fills my lungs and makes my head spin.
"If I decide the ritual is the only option, you don't get to stop me.
No more hiding texts, no more drugging my tea, no more making choices about my body.
I decide what happens to me. Understood? "
"Understood."
She holds my gaze for another long moment, searching for something—sincerity, maybe, or the limits of my commitment. Whatever she finds must satisfy her, because she steps back with a sharp nod that puts distance between us again.
"I'm going to see the mystic. Then I'm going to sleep. We start in the library tomorrow."
"I'll have everything ready."
She moves toward the door, and I think that's it—conversation over, boundaries established, nothing left to say. Then she stops with her hand on the frame and looks back over her shoulder.
"The bed smells like you."
It's not a question. Not an accusation either, exactly. Just a statement of fact delivered in a tone I can't quite read.
"I know."
Her expression flickers—something complicated moving behind her eyes that I can't interpret. Then she's gone, the door closing behind her with a soft click, and I'm standing alone in chambers that smell like both of us.
I don't go back to her bed that night.
She's there now, wrapped in sheets that carry traces of my desperate weeks without her, and whatever comfort I found in sleeping surrounded by her scent feels like an intrusion now that she's actually here.
Instead I return to the library, to the restricted archives, to the piles of fragmented texts that might hold the key to saving our children.
The work helps. Focusing on translations and cross-references and the careful reconstruction of knowledge someone tried very hard to destroy—it's better than lying awake replaying every word she said, every flash of heat through the bond she was trying to suppress, every moment where I wanted to reach for her and knew I couldn't.
She came back. Against all odds, despite everything I did, she walked through a mountain pass while pregnant because our children needed more than she could provide on her own.
Not for me. I'm under no illusions about that.
But she's here. And tomorrow we start searching for a way to save our daughter from a curse my bloodline gave her.
That's enough. It has to be enough.
The rest—if there's going to be any rest—I'll have to earn.