WRONG LOVE 3: HEIR

Chapter Thirteen: The Nursery

The room had been empty for months.

Now it held seven wolves, several arguments about paint color, and considerably more chaos than a nursery should reasonably contain.

"That's not the right shade," Nathan said, standing back to survey the pale lavender Max had just applied to the far wall.

"It's the shade you chose," Max said.

"I chose sage," Nathan said. "That is not sage. That is lavender. You've painted my granddaughter's nursery the wrong color entirely."

"They looked identical on the little paper card," Max said.

"They did not," Cole said, examining the abandoned paint chips on the floor. "These are clearly different colors, Max."

"I have excellent color vision," Max said. "I simply exercised creative license."

"Nobody asked for creative license on the nursery," Jace said, from where he was assembling the crib with Aaron, both of them following instructions that made considerably less sense than a thousand years of combined life experience should have allowed for.

"This piece doesn't go here," Aaron said, frowning at a wooden panel.

"It has to go somewhere," Jace said.

"Not here. It doesn't fit here."

"Then where does it go?"

They both stared at the instructions.

"I don't understand this diagram," Aaron admitted.

"I've read four-thousand-year-old vampire court protocols easier to follow than this," Jace said.

"Give it here," Shawn said, crossing over from where he'd been assembling a bookshelf with the specific quiet efficiency he brought to most physical tasks. He examined the diagram for a moment, turned the panel around, and slotted it into place with an ease that made both Jace and Aaron look faintly betrayed.

"How did you—"

"I've built things before," Shawn said simply.

"Show-off," Aaron muttered, but there was no real edge in it. The two of them had settled into something approaching cautious friendship over the weeks since Shawn's reconciliation with Jace — not close, not yet, but civil in a way that had genuinely surprised everyone including themselves.

Orion, meanwhile, sat in the corner reading the assembly instructions for something else entirely with the focused intensity of a man determined not to repeat Max's mistake.

"This is," he announced, "the worst-written document I have encountered in four centuries. And I've read wolf pack treaties."

"Just wing it like Max did," Cole said.

"Absolutely not," Orion said. "I refuse to repeat that particular disaster."

Max, still standing beside his lavender wall, looked genuinely wounded.

"It's not that bad," he said. "It's a soothing color."

"It's fine, Max," Nathan said eventually, with the specific reluctant softening he'd developed for his youngest son over the past few months. "We'll just call it a design choice."

"THANK you," Max said. "Finally. Someone with taste."

Downstairs, the sitting room had become its own version of organized chaos.

Victoria sat with a basket of tiny clothes she was folding with the specific practiced care of someone who had folded baby clothes before, decades ago, and had never quite forgotten how.

Seraphina had brought a stack of books — for reading to her, once she's old enough, she'd explained, though the pile leaned heavily toward books Seraphina herself had loved as a young vampire, four centuries of nostalgia disguised as gifts for a niece who hadn't been born yet.

Nova, predictably, had opinions about all of it.

"That book is too advanced," she said, pulling one from Seraphina's pile. "She's a baby. She needs board books. Things with textures."

"She'll grow into it," Seraphina said.

"Not for YEARS," Nova said. "You're planning for a toddler who reads philosophy."

"I was reading philosophy by age seven," Seraphina said.

"You're a vampire who ages differently," Nova said. "This is a hybrid baby. We genuinely don't even know how she'll develop. Malachar said himself there's no precedent."

"All the more reason to have philosophy ready," Seraphina said, unbothered.

Victoria laughed softly, folding a tiny sock with more attention than the task strictly required.

"When Jace was born," she said, "his father insisted on filling the nursery with weapons. Small ones. Practice ones, but weapons nonetheless. I had to remind him that infants generally don't require armaments."

"That sounds exactly like something Nathan would do," Nova said.

"He's mellowed considerably," Victoria said. "Watch him upstairs. He's currently arguing about paint colors instead of preparing for war. Progress."

Elara, seated in the armchair with her feet up on Nova's insistence, laughed at that, one hand resting on her stomach where the baby shifted occasionally in response to the noise filtering down from above.

"I can hear them," she said. "Even from here."

"They're doing their best," Victoria said fondly. "It's chaotic, but it's love. All of it."

Elara looked around the room — Victoria's careful folding, Seraphina's stubborn philosophy books, Nova's fierce opinions about texture-appropriate literature — and felt something warm settle over the residual fear that had lived in her chest since the beach.

This was what safety felt like.

Not the absence of danger.

The presence of this many people who loved her enough to argue about paint and books on her behalf.

None of them knew, in that moment, what was gathering far beyond the walls of their nursery-in-progress.

Three hundred miles north, in territory that belonged to neither pack nor court, a gathering of ancient wolves — older than Nathan, older than most of what remained of the original founding bloodlines — had begun exchanging information that had reached them through channels neither the Ryder family nor Malachar's court had accounted for.

A hybrid child.

Wolf and vampire, bound by blood oath, growing where nothing like it had ever been permitted to grow before.

The eldest among them, a wolf named Corvin who predated even Malachar's earliest memories of the war, listened to the reports with the specific stillness of something very old calculating something very significant.

"If this child exists," he said finally, "and if she survives to maturity — she represents the end of everything the old laws were built to prevent."

"What do you propose," one of the others asked.

Corvin was quiet for a long moment.

"We watch," he said. "For now. We watch, and we learn what she is capable of becoming. And then we decide."

The gathering dispersed into the dark, unnoticed by anyone in a warm sitting room three hundred miles south, where a family painted the wrong shade of lavender and argued about board books for a child who hadn't yet drawn her first breath.