I cross my arms and huff at the trees.
When I look up, my father’s already rolling the wagon toward me. I groan. “I’ve gotta go. My own warden’s here to collect me.”
I have to go too. More king work.
That word still gets me—king.This man who clawed his way up out of nothing, wearing it now like he was born to it. I smile in spite of myself.
I’ll come back to you tonight,he says.Read you and our cub a story, same as every night.
I close my eyes and let his voice hold me. I miss the weight of him at my back when I sleep, his warmth, his scent—that coffee and sandalwood my lion’s gone half-feral without.
I miss you too,he says. Of course he hears all of it.
I pout, even though he can see me.
I try to give you room. I do.His voice roughens.But I miss you so damn bad it’s a sickness in me, Mara. You’ve become my obsession. I want all of it—how you breathe, how you sleep, every thought that crosses behind those amber eyes.
I’m swooning right there in the middle of the path, my knees going soft, my lion purring like a fool. Then the world tips and I’m upside down, squealing, hauled up over my father’s shoulder.
“One more weird outburst,” he growls, already carrying me toward the wagon, “and I’m setting up a meeting with that spider therapist. Nicole.”
I love you,Aaron says, still laughing.Talk later.
Then he’s gone. I feel the moment the bond goes quiet and the warmth winks out, that small tearing loss hitting me every time he leaves. I breathe through it.
My father sets me down in the wagon bed and wedges a box in tight beside me so I won’t slide, gentle for all his roaring. Tunde tucks a blanket over my legs and kisses the top of my head before he heads up front to help pull. I settle back against my boxes and rest a hand on my belly.
Up on the porch, Ezra lifts a hand and waves. I wave back, and I hope he fills that small place with a better life than the one I’m leaving in it. Him and his Aya. The same thing Aaron did for me once, before he’d let himself bring me home.
I spend the rest of the day flat on my back in my childhood bed, staring up at the ceiling beams and counting down the minutes to the hour Aaron always comes.
Then something thumps inside me.
I freeze. It comes again, light and strange under my hand. I push up onto my elbows and spread my fingers wide over my belly, and there it is,thump, thump, thump—my cub, knocking from the inside.
A laugh breaks out of me and the tears come up right behind it. “Hi, baby. Hi. I’m here.”
The door bangs open and my father fills it, his chest heaving, braced for a threat that isn’t there. “I can feel my son,” I tell him, half-laughing, half-crying. “He’s kicking, Dad.”
The fear goes out of him all at once. He crosses the room and drops to his knees as I swing my legs over the side of the bed. He lays his big scarred hand over the swell of me, gentle. When the baby kicks against him, he pulls back like the touch burned, andturns his face clean away from me. The grief that crosses it is a thing I’m not supposed to see.
“I know he comes to you,” he says. “That’s who you’re always talking to.”
I don’t answer him.
“He’s going to come for you. Isn’t he?”
I nod, even though he isn’t looking at me.
He pushes to his feet. “And you’re going to leave with him.”
I nod again.
“Then I might never see you again.” He turns to face me, his amber eyes wet and furious. “What about us, Mara? What about the people of Wintermoon? You’d just go?”
“Would you do it?” I meet him head-on. “If it were you. Could you let my mother walk away and build a whole life somewhere else, and just wait on her, the way Aaron’s waiting on me?”
The growl that comes up out of him has no answer in it. We both already know what it would be.
