Twelve
Mercury waved Rowan right out the door, and he sat there, he and Talon staring at one another.
They were pregnant.
They were pregnant.
They were really pregnant.
He was going to have a baby and possibly throw up. He stared at Talon in kind of a panic. “I don’t know what to do.”
“Well, we don’t have to do anything. We can just sit here and stare at each other.” Talon winked at him. “And then, when we’re ready, we can tell people.”
Mercury rolled his eyes. “I know you already told Kami. You told Kami the second that Rowan told us. In fact, you told Kami and you told Triton, which means Triton, Cerran, and Elowyn know, which means Lake and Eyv know which means that Boone and Durango know, and Reno already knew because Kami knew. That means Cain probably knows, which means Jack and Dex know. So, really, who are we going to tell?”
Talon blinked innocently. “Oh, there’s an entire load of warriors I could tell. There’s all the people that work down in the kitchens.”
“Don’t make me hurt you.” Mercury chuckled softly. “Okay, so now that we’ve accepted that no, we don’t have to tell anyone that we’re pregnant, I think maybe we should just sit and stare at each other after all.”
He made his eyes very big.
Talon hooted, the sound like a big owl had invaded their quarters. Then Talon leaned in until their noses touched, staring into his eyes and making them cross.
The laughter bubbled up in him, and he put his hands on Talon’s shoulders. “Don’t make me queasy.”
“No, gods forbid.” Talon stroked Mercury’s cheek. “You have been blessedly calm in the tummy.”
“I mean, this is pretty early days. This is my first morning sickness. You’re just lucky it wasn’t the flu. You would have been very disappointed.”
Talon snorted, his head tossing as they leaned back into the couch cushion. “I saw you eat that French toast. You just gobbled it down like you’d never eaten before. If it was a stomach flu, you wouldn’t have done that.”
“Yeah, I guess you’re right. There’s like seventy thousand and one things that we probably should worry about right now.”
“Only seventy thousand and one? You’re not working hard enough,” Talon teased, chuckling. “Do you want to go explore? Do you want to just go back to bed and cuddle up in the covers and watch television? Do you want company? Do you just want me to shut up?”
“I don’t know,” he chuckled, the barrage of questions dissipating his tension quite a bit. “I’ve never been pregnant before. I never thought I could be, and I never thought that life could be like this. Now, suddenly, it is.”
“I understand that.” He blinked at Talon who nodded. “When I came here, it was very difficult. I almost left when Kami found his mate.”
Mercury didn’t know that. He frowned at Talon a little bit. “You did? Why? I thought you liked it here.”
“I did. I do, but I felt like an outsider, and it was so close and such a family. I was a little worried. This is not your everyday keep, and I went from rescuing dragons and being on the run and hurting in my soul because I’d lost my brother, and I couldn’t remember how to live without my soul hurting. So I was trying to find a way to go about what was comfortable, even if it sucked.”
He rolled the idea over in his mind, exploring it. “I can understand that. Everything about where I was, was awful, but I was used to it. I’d been there for a long time. Part of me is terrified I’m going to wake up, and I’ll be back there. This will all have been a dream.”
“Kami told me that too. In fact, I think once you allow yourself to make some friends with the other omegas, you’ll hear that story many times. Eyv, Durango’s hailee? He bit his betrothed’s hand off, and they were going to kill him. In fact, Durango caught him when he threw himself from the tower because he would rather do that than be murdered by his family.”
“That’s wild. How can we be so evil to one another?” It broke his heart.
“Power is like a thing all by itself, I think. Once you have it, you don’t want to release it, and you’ll do whatever you can to get more. At some point, it becomes a force of its own and begins to grow.”
That made sense. He nodded because he hadn’t had any power at all. Then he thought he’d found some, and they’d punished him for having it. “Do you think that’s why Biram had to die?”
“Yes. I think someone needed no witnesses to that keep being dismantled. You, they couldn’t just kill outright. You werefrom their keep, and you had this special talent. But he was an outsider, and they could say he simply left.”
He felt sickened at that thought. Biram hadn’t deserved that. Not at all.
“I’m sorry you lost him.”
