Page 143 of Dragon 7

Those were Nyomi's eyes. That same dark depth. That same calm that should not exist in a world like ours. I had seen those eyes across a kitchen and in a war room. And I was seeing them again.

Yes. That’s our Tiger’s eyes.

However. . .the rest of the baby girl’s face was Kenji’s.

How did I not see that before?

The brow. The set of the jaw, even soft and unfinished. The shape that ran in my own blood. I knew that face. I had grown up beside that face all my fucking life.

I was looking at my brother and the woman he loved, folded together into a child the size of a loaf of bread, and my chest cracked at the impossible logic of her. My throat closed so hard I could not have spoken her name if I'd known it.

Our Tiger was pregnant. . .

My stomach twisted.

Did she know days ago?

I doubted it.

She would have told me. Kenji too. But still. . .all of the memories of these past days came to me different. All that time, Nyomi had walked into every room with a second life within, made of the two people I loved most on this earth. This little life curled within her womb.

Pregnant? Dear God. . .

A cold, terrifying shiver ran through me as my heart shattered into tiny pieces.

And. . .Nyomi sacrificed her for the war?

I didn’t know how she did it, but in my mind. . .I saw our sweet Tiger holding this precious life in her hands and tears falling from her eyes as slowly. . .she opened them and let the little life go.

For Kenji. For us. For the war. No, Tora. No. . .

This unbearable pain crashed into me.

Nyomi. . .you love us too much.

For some reason, my mouth filled with the copper taste of blood, even though none was within it. I swallowed it down.

Did Kenji know? There’s no way. . .

With this new knowledge, I looked at the baby ghost again.

She’s my niece. . .

She giggled at me again, and then those eyes—Nyomi’s eyes—began to. . .shift.

I trembled from the impossibility before me.

No ghost had ever done this.

Her black pupils widened for a heartbeat until they swallowed almost all of her irises. A second later the pupils narrowed, stretching vertically into long, feline slits.

What?

As the pupils reshaped, the roundness of her eyes subtly changed. The upper lids lowered at the outer corners while the lower lids tightened, giving her eyes a longer, more almond-shaped appearance.

Even on a baby's face, the difference was unmistakable.

She’s not just. . .a normal baby.