Chapter Four
1148 Words
Seraphine POV
I found out six weeks later.
Wren confirmed it on a grey morning with the particular calm of someone delivering information they have delivered many times before, pressing two fingers to a point just below my navel, a long pause, a measured breath.
"You’re eight weeks gone," she said.
Nyx sat in the corner pretending to fix a tear in her boot but she was actually listening to every word.
"That is not possible," I said.
Wren raised one eyebrow.
"I mean" I stopped. I pressed my fingers to my mouth. "There was only one night. Before the Accord. We weren't…it wasn't"
I couldn't finish the sentence. Not because I didn't remember. But because I remembered everything, which was the problem. The way the bond had been pulling at both of us even then, in the private corridors of the Iron Keep the night before the ceremony. The way every wall I built had simply ceased to exist for a few hours. I told myself in the morning that it meant something, that the thing that had moved between us was real and not a chemical lie.
Twenty-four hours later he stood in front of the world and told me it wasn't.
Wren was still watching me. Nyx had gone very still in the corner.
"Leave me," I said.
Wren set down her instruments and left without argument. I heard Nyx start to rise.
"You too," I said.
A pause. Then I heard Nyx's footsteps moving slowly and reluctantly toward the door.
I sat alone in the quiet room and I counted backward.
Eight weeks. During the night before the Accord, Before the ceremony and the rejection that had rearranged every fact of my life. In the corridor outside the meeting rooms. We didn’t plan to be in the same place at the same time but the bond was pulling us both. Kael Dravon had looked at me in the dark and both of us made a choice that neither of us was supposed to make.
I rubbed my stomach gently
"Oh," I whispered.
Not to anyone. Not to myself exactly. Just out loud.
I could vividly remember the look on his face that night, he felt the bond just the way I do. I knew he did. I saw the way his eyes changed when I walked into that corridor, the way his breath changed and the way every carefully controlled thing about Kael Dravon had come slightly undone at the edges. He felt it and he came toward me anyway.
"No," I said softly.
Not denial. Not grief but something else. The quiet, particular no of a decision being made, the kind that comes from a place in you that doesn't argue or negotiate or revisit.
He would never know.
This child is mine. Mine alone.
I stood up from where I sat, I slowly walked to the door and opened it. Nyx was sitting on the floor outside with her knees drawn up and waiting.
She quickly stood up when she heard the sound of the door.
“Sera.” Nyx's voice was quiet. She was the only one here who used my false name with gentleness in it. She had crossed the room without me noticing and she was crouching in front of me now, her dark eyes searching my face. "Talk to me."
"I'm fine.”
"You've said that four times in the last two months. It stopped being convincing the first time."
"He can never know," I said.
Nyx went very still.
"This child is mine," I said. "This isn't his. Not in any way that matters." My voice stayed even. "She belongs to no pack that doesn't want her. She belongs to no Alpha who… My throat closed. I opened it again. "He made his choice. This is mine."
There was silence in the room.
"Okay," Nyx said quietly.
"Okay?" I asked
"I said okay." She stood up and put her hands on her hips. "I'm not going to argue with you about a decision you've clearly made and will not change. I'm just going to say one thing and then I'll stop."
"Say it."
"A child is hard to hide."
"I know."
"Duskfen is a good place, but it’s not invisible. If anyone comes looking?"
"I know, Nyx."
She looked at me for a long moment. Then she exhaled slowly and the argument went out of her like air from a bellows and she just nodded.
We stayed in Duskfen.
The weeks folded into months. My body changed in ways I tracked quietly, and I learned Duskfen the way you learn a place when you're trying to make it home without admitting that is what you're doing. I worked in the healing quarters because Wren needed help and because what I could do with my hands was growing into something I had no name for.
My father had never explained it either.
Wolves recovered faster when I touched them. By the fourth month it was undeniable.
Zane noticed it too but he was careful about it, I caught him watching during the healing sessions with an expression I couldn't fully read. Not suspicion. Something closer to recognition.
One evening, while we were sitting on the low ridge above the settlement I finally asked him about it.
He was quiet for a long time before he answered. "Because whatever you are," he said, "I don't think you know yet. And I think you deserve to find out for yourself."
I looked at him and smiled.
"I'm carrying a baby girl," I said.
"You know that already?"
"I can feel it." I pressed my hand to the curve of my stomach. "She's going to be so loud," I said and it surprised me, the sudden warmth of it, the fierce certainty that whatever had been taken from me had absolutely not taken this.
Zane laughed softly. The sound of his laughter was warm, and for one quiet moment on that ridge I felt something almost like peace.
Then I heard it.
Hooves on the eastern road. Moving fast. Too many for a scout patrol, too many for anything casual or routine.
Zane was on his feet before I had fully processed the sound, his golden eyes sharp and fixed on the tree line with that predatory stillness that meant his wolf was already ahead of him.
"Get inside," he said.
"What is it?"
"Ironblood," he said quietly.
The peace I felt earlier shattered.
"How many?" My voice came out flat.
He didn't answer. He turned to me and something in his face made my blood drop ten degrees.
"Seraphine." He never used my real name. The sound of it in his mouth was deliberate and serious, telling me everything before his next words did. "They're not heading for the border."
He looked at the settlement below us.
"They're heading here."
- Writer
