Lena's POV
I said yes to him in the quiet dining room, and I thought, foolishly, that the saying of it would settle something in me permanently.
It did settle something. The particular fear that had lived in me since the night I first told him about the pregnancy, the fear that asking for what I wanted would somehow cost me more than staying silent ever had, had finally gone quiet. But the world outside that small warm room did not pause to accommodate the settling, and within days the war room reports returned to their usual grim rhythm, the eastern perimeter still restless, the unity ceremony still weeks away, the shadow of whatever had escaped Aldric's arrest still moving somewhere just beyond the edge of what Bastian's intelligence could clearly see.
I slept less well in those final
