Her breath stutters, “Nobody knows, yet.”
“I don’t give a fuck, I will not let them think they can touch you whenever they want. You’remyPair, everyone knows this, you are not to be touched. Pregnant or not.”
She looks up at me, fear and love and a little bit of lunacy twisting together in her expression. “What are you going to do?”
I smile, but there’s no kindness in it.
Only certainty.
Only conviction.
“I’m going to show them you’re untouchable.”
Her fingers tighten on my coat. “What does that mean?”
“It means,” I murmur, brushing a thumb over her cheek, “that tonight, every one of them will understand exactly what you are to me. And what this child is.” I tilt her chin up, my voice dropping to a darker register, her scent filling my nose, roses and earth. “No one will ever lay a hand on you again without remembering what I did to the last man who tried.”
She shivers, and I hold her tighter, burying my face in her neck, breathing her in like I’ve been starved for months, and I have.
“I’ll protect you. Both of you. Even if I have to tear the whole estate to the ground.”
She exhales, a trembling, fragile sound, “I was so scared you wouldn’t come back.”
“I’ll always come back to you,” I vow against her skin. “I don’t care if the world tries to steal you a thousand times. I’ll take you back every single time.”
When she leans into me, exhausted, shaking, but safe, I gather her into my arms and rise to my feet, lifting her with a gentleness I didn’t know I had. She curls against my chest, trusting me, for what feels like the first real time.
“Don’t leave again,” she says, soft but pulled tight with fear. “I don’t wan-”
“I won't. I'm not.”
The moonlight follows us as I carry her from the graveyard, away from the blood, away from the fear, toward whatever comes next.
I look down at her, my Pair, my salvation, the mother of my child, and I know one thing with perfect, bone-deep certainty.
Anyone who touches her again, will pray for death long before it comes.
The graveyard is silvered with moonlight, marble stones gleaming like bones half-buried in wet soil. Hail clatters against angel statues and cracked mausoleum doors, the stormreigniting, spitting its fury. But everything feels quiet now, quiet that comes right before a life changes in ways it cannot return from.
My hand shackles around Balor’s ankle, and I haul the man through the fields, over the threshold of the manor, down corridors that echo with old whispers and fresh dread.
Nellie follows behind me, steps light but unwavering, clutching her arms across her belly to shield the life growing beneath them.
At the end of the hall, two guards stare me down as I approach, but then they see Balor, dragging behind me, the fury in my eyes burning like lava, they open the heavy doors to the meeting chamber without resistance.
The Council sits in their high-backed chairs, robed, silent, ancient as stone.
And I throw the dead man up onto their seated platform like rotting meat.
The thud echoes like a gunshot.
Every head lifts. Every gaze drops to her at my back, my Nellie, her bruises, her torn clothes, the dried blood down her chin. Never before has a woman been in this chamber.
Ignoring Gore as he stands, my eyes only on our father, I raise a single brow.
A murmur ripples through the chamber, low and poisonous.
I step between her and their eyes, blocking their view.
