Page 87 of Feral King

I place my hand on my belly again, watching Julian pace.I’ve never seen him like this before. He’s always so together, so calm. He moves with deliberate purpose.

But right now, he’s walking the length of the room, like a caged animal, past the floor-to-ceiling windows, the fury coming off of him so intense that I can practically feel it, as if I were standing next to a heat lamp.

“You said you needed to talk. So talk.”

“Can you stop moving first?”

He stops and faces me. His hands are at his sides, fingers flexing. The vein at his temple is pulsing.

“I’m listening,” he says.

“You’re not listening. You’re standing there waiting to react. There’s a difference.”

My words hit the mark, and I can see him relax a bit. He takes a slow, deep breath—controlled and steady. It’s the kind of breath a man takes when he was two seconds away from putting his fist through a wall but thought better of it.

He goes over to the couch and sits on the armrest. Then he folds his hands and waits.

I look at him. This impossible, terrifying, beautiful man.

I could lie. I could go to bed, then try to leave when he’s sleeping.

Because I know when I tell him the truth, it’ll put a process into motion that I won’t be able to stop. The protectiveness he feels towards me would be a speck compared to what he would feel for a child—hischild.

But as I look into those gunmetal-gray eyes, I know that there’s no keeping it from him. I can’t hide it for another second.

“I’m pregnant.”

Silence.

Julian doesn’t move, doesn’t blink. Shock appears on his face for just an instant before the stoicism returns. Calculations flash behind his eyes, the same sort of strategizing I’ve seen him do dozens of times.

“How long.” His voice is quiet, stripped of emotion. He’s in fact-finding mode.

“Six weeks.”

He glances away, doing the math. I watch him arrive at the same night I did, with the fairy lights in the apartment in Astoria, his body on mine. He closes his eyes for a long moment. When he opens them again, his gaze travels to where my hand rests on my stomach, the intensity nearly scaring me.

“That’s why you were running.”

“I wasn’t running.”

“You were barefoot in a ball gown, rushing into an elevator without telling me where you were going. That’s running, Lyra.”

Part of me wants to keep arguing, but I don’t.

“Fine. I was running.” My voice cracks as I speak, and I hate it. I need to be strong for this conversation, but I already feel weak and scared.

“Why.”

“Are you kidding? I was running because someone tried tokill ustonight. Again. I learned I was pregnant during the exam. I needed some time to think it over, to process and figure things out…” My voice trails off.

“To figure out whether or not you wanted to tell me.”

“No,” I say too quickly. “Not that.”

“Then what.”

The tears come. Goddammit.