Chapter Five: Something's Different
1101 Words
Four months of marriage had settled into something Elara had never expected to have.
Ordinary.
Not boring — nothing about a life shared with Jace Ryder had ever managed to be boring — but ordinary in the specific way she'd once thought was reserved for other people. Mornings in the kitchen. Grocery runs. Sunday afternoons with nowhere urgent to be.
Jace's wealth had grown in ways that still occasionally surprised her — a thousand years of accumulated resources, carefully invested, had tripled somehow in the months since the wedding, mostly through decisions Aaron had quietly guided him toward and Jace had trusted without asking too many questions.
"You could buy a small country," she'd told him once.
"I don't want a country," he'd said. "I want this house and you in it."
She'd let that be enough.
They'd spent that Sunday morning at an orphanage two towns over — Victoria's suggestion, something she'd been quietly involved with for decades, and Jace had wanted to bring Elara along the first time he visited since coming back into his mother's good graces properly.
The children had swarmed them both within minutes.
Jace had ended up on the floor of the playroom with three of them climbing over him like he was furniture, laughing in a way Elara had rarely heard from him — full and unguarded, a thousand year old wolf reduced to giggling delight by a six-year-old insisting he play dragon.
She'd watched him from the doorway and felt something in her chest ache in a way she hadn't examined too closely.
"You're good with them," she'd said in the car afterward.
"I like kids," he'd said simply. "Always have. Cole says I'm better with them than with adults."
"Cole's not wrong," she'd said.
He'd looked at her sideways.
"Do you—" He'd stopped. Started again, carefully. "Do you want kids? Someday?"
She'd looked out the window.
"I don't know if I can," she'd said quietly. "Vampire biology and wolf biology together — nobody's ever documented it working. We might not get the choice either way."
He'd taken her hand.
"Then we'll figure it out," he'd said. "Together. Whatever that ends up looking like."
She hadn't said anything else.
But the ache had stayed with her the rest of the drive home.
Mason and Cole arrived that afternoon with food nobody had asked for and the specific loud warmth that always followed Mason into a room.
"I brought the good bread," Mason announced, holding up a bag like a trophy. "The bakery on Fifth. You're welcome."
"You didn't need to bring anything," Elara said.
"I always need to bring something," Mason said. "It's a compulsion."
Cole followed him in with considerably less noise, carrying a bottle of wine and the specific quiet contentment he'd carried more consistently since he and Orion had struck up whatever project they were still refusing to fully explain.
"How was the orphanage," Cole asked, settling onto the sofa.
"Jace got tackled by three children pretending to be knights," Elara said.
"I was the dragon," Jace said. "There's a difference."
"You lost the fight," she said.
"Dragons are supposed to lose eventually," he said. "It's narrative structure."
Mason laughed loudly at that, already heading for the kitchen to find plates for the bread nobody had needed.
Elara stood up to help him.
The dizziness hit without warning.
One moment she was crossing the kitchen, reaching for the plates on the shelf Jace had built slightly too high for her without adjusting for the fact that she wasn't as tall as he was — and the next the room tilted, gently but unmistakably, the specific vertigo of something shifting wrong somewhere in her own body.
She caught the counter.
"Elara?" Mason's voice, sharp with concern.
"I'm fine," she said. "Just—"
The room tilted again.
"JACE—"
She heard him before she fully registered moving toward the floor — his voice cutting across the room, the sound of him crossing it faster than should have been possible, and then his hands were on her, steadying her before her knees fully gave.
"I've got you," he said. "I've got you, look at me."
She looked at him.
The room had stopped tilting the moment he touched her, or maybe she'd simply stopped noticing it because his face had filled her entire field of vision, silver eyes doing the thorough terrified assessment he always did when something was wrong.
"I don't know what happened," she said. "I just — everything went sideways for a second."
"You're pale," Cole said, appearing beside them. "Paler than usual, and that's saying something for a vampire."
"I feel strange," she admitted. "Not sick exactly. Just—" She pressed a hand to her stomach without fully deciding to. "Different. Something feels different."
Jace's eyes followed the movement of her hand.
Something shifted in his expression — a thought arriving too fast to fully process, too significant to say out loud yet.
"Sit down," he said instead. Gentle. Careful. "Just sit down for a minute."
He guided her to a kitchen chair.
Mason hovered, uncharacteristically quiet, the bread completely forgotten on the counter.
"Should we call someone," Cole said. "A doctor. Someone who—"
"I don't know what kind of doctor would even know what to look for," Jace said. "Vampire physiology, wolf physiology—"
"Malachar," Elara said suddenly.
Both wolves looked at her.
"His healers," she said. "The ones who fixed you after the dagger. If anyone would understand what's happening to me it would be them."
Jace looked at her for a long moment.
At the hand still resting against her stomach.
At the specific quality of her face — pale, but not afraid exactly. Something more like wonder, arriving slowly and carefully, like she was afraid to fully let herself think it.
"Do you think—" he started.
"I don't know," she said. "I don't want to say it out loud yet. In case I'm wrong."
"Say what," Mason said. "What are you two not saying—"
"Mason," Cole said quietly.
Mason looked between them.
Understanding arrived slowly on his face.
"Oh," he said. Very quietly, for once. "OH."
Jace knelt in front of her chair.
Took both her hands.
"Whatever it is," he said. "Whatever this turns out to be. We'll figure it out. Together."
She looked at him.
At the silver eyes, careful and hopeful in equal measure.
"Together," she said.
Outside the kitchen window the Sunday afternoon continued, ordinary and golden, entirely unaware that inside the house something extraordinary might have just begun.
- Writer
