He stilled, breath caught tight in his throat.
“I don’t know how he’s real,” she whispered. “Sometimes, I wonder if I dreamt him. That I fell asleep in the woods one day and imagined all of this. My people call him a monster. But he’s no such thing. Not really. Not to me.” She paused, her voice growing softer. “He loves fiercely. I don’t know if he truly knows what love means in my tongue, but he still shows it. I see it in everything he does. Every time he feeds me. Every time he shields me from the world. Every time he curls around us like he’s daring anything to try and take us from him.”
Midas’ chest ached. He hadn’t realized how tightly he’d curled his claws into the stone until a tremble passed through them. Her words pressed into him like a new fire in his chest. She had never spoken these things to his face. Never told him he was kind. Or brave. Or precious. He didn’t know how to hold those truths.
“I hope you have his eyes,” Elowen said quietly, voice full of warmth. “They’re gold like sunlight. Like he swallowed the dawn. I want you to look at the world with those eyes one day and know that you’re loved. That even if the world doesn’t understand you, he will. I will.”
Midas moved without thinking. A quiet shuffle of his weight. Elowen turned toward the sound—and there he was, caught in the dim glow of firelight, golden eyes wide, his expression unreadable in the flicker of shadows.
Midas stepped forward, slow and careful. He didn’t speak. The words would never be enough, even if he found them. Instead, he lowered his head beside her and pressedhis snout ever so gently against her swollen belly, breathing in the scent of her skin and the new life beneath it. A promise passed between them in that breathless moment—silent, but steady.
He would protect them. He would never stop. Elowen touched his jaw, soft and reverent.
“You heard me?” she asked.
He nodded once, and though she did not know it, he had already committed every word to memory—another precious treasure carved into his heart.
Thirty
Midas stirred before the dawn.
The cave was quiet. Eerily so. The usual rhythm of Elowen’s breathing was there, but beneath it pulsed a shift in the air, something only he could sense. It prickled along his scales like static, ancient instincts stirring in the marrow of his bones.
He lifted his head slowly from where he had coiled himself around the edges of the nest, careful not to rouse her. Elowen slept fitfully now. The weight of their unborn child rested heavy in her belly, and her discomfort had worsened by the day. Midas had noticed the way she winced when she turned, the way her breath would catch mid-sentence, and how she barely touched her food except when he fussed and fed her himself.
Midas reached out with his nose, pressing it gently to her bare shoulder. Her skin was hot. Elowen’s labor was close. Though she had only been growing the child for lessthan half of the time of a human pregnancy, her body was already preparing for birth.
He rose in silence, transforming quickly and with strain into his two-legged form—still scaled, still winged, still not quite human, but small enough to move through the narrow alcoves of the cavern without his tail knocking over the drying herbs and bones lining the walls. His body ached from the change, but he bore it. For her.
There was water to heat. The smoothest of the river stones he had gathered earlier were placed into the fire to warm the basin. Blankets were unfurled and spread around the nest, shaken and fluffed and scented with her flowers. A half-cooked stew was stirred back to life with a bit of dried meat and wild greens he had foraged, just in case she could stomach it after.
And still…it did not feel like he had done enough. Not when she carried something so precious in her womb, and when the unknown was quickly creeping up on them.
Thoughts of the labor worried him often—he worried if Elowen would even survive birthing a half-dragon child in whatever form they might take.
His taloned hands shook as he placed jars of salves within arm’s reach of the bedding. He knew these herbs well now—Elowen had taught him. He knew what eased pain, what slowed bleeding, what cooled fever. He would give her everything she needed. He wouldnotlose her.
Midas paused at the edge of the firelight, his golden eyes flicking to Elowen’s sleeping form. His tail lashed slowly, restlessly behind him.
Then—her breath caught. A whimper broke from her throat, sharp and raw. Midas was at her side in an instant.
“Elowen,” he whispered, his voice rough.
She gasped. The pain came like fire in her spine. Her hand flew to her belly, and her eyes shot open wide and wet.
“Midas,” she choked, voice strangled. “Something is happening?—”
A wave of pain hit her unlike anything she had ever felt before. Her body curled forward, wracked with the first full contraction. Midas caught her before she could fall forward, holding her gently in arms that felt suddenly too large, too clumsy, too unworthy.
“Elowen. Safe. Breathe,” he repeated, again and again, low and soft into her hair. She clung to him, teeth gritted, tears falling fast down her cheeks.
“I’m scared,” she whispered.
He kissed her brow. “No fear. I am here.”
She nodded, her whole body trembling with emotion and pain and uncertainty.
And then the night swallowed them whole, labor beginning in earnest, pain cresting and falling like waves in a storm—and Midas, beast of fire and claw, became a cradle of gentleness. He knelt beside her through every cry, every breath, every trembling squeeze of her fingers around his.
