Crying beside him over words he meant as love would feel too humiliating to bear. So I lie still and let the ache spread quietly instead.
After a long while, Kaiven finally shifts into full sleep. I know the difference now. The exact drop in tension. The change in his breathing. The way his body settles more heavily when he is truly gone under. Only then do I carefully slide one hand up and touch the place over my own lower belly through the blanket.
Not because I am pregnant. Not because I think anything has already changed. Because that is where his words keep landing.
My baby is inside you. Our daughters. Strong sons.
My hand trembles once and stills.
It should have felt like being cherished. Instead, it feels like standing again in that white match office on Mars while strangers looked at numbers and decided what kind of value my body held.
The room is different. The male beside me is different. The meaning should be different. But wounds are stupid that way. They drag old shapes over new moments and call them the same until proved otherwise.
And Kaiven has not proved otherwise yet.
He may. A piece of me believes he may.
That is why this hurts as badly as it does.
Because I am no longer only afraid of him. No longer only grateful to him. No longer only trying to survive what this marriage is. I am attached enough that this can wound me. Attached enough that the thought of being wrong about him cuts deeper than the fear of being right.
By the time dawn begins thinning the dark at the edges of the tent, I have not truly slept at all. I have only lain in the warmth of his furs and his arm and his scent, feeling farther away from him than I did before he touched me last night.
And that distance, built in the middle of such closeness, feels like the beginning of something dangerous. Not loud. Not dramatic. Worse for being quiet.
A crack.
One he does not know he made.
Chapter 25
Kaiven
Iknow something is wrong before Keandra says a single word.
I know it in the way she wakes. Not with fear. That would be easier to understand. Fear has scent. Shape. Cause. I know what to do with fear. I have already learned some of the ways her body carries it. The tightness in the shoulders. The way she grows quieter instead of louder.
This is different.
She wakes already distant.
She is still in my bed. Under my furs. She answers when I speak. But some thin invisible space has opened where none was before, and my body notices it at once. The way she rises from the blankets faster than usual. The way she keeps her eyes on the wash basin instead of on me. The way her scent is muted, not gone, but held back, as if she is pressing too many things down at once and does not want any of them reaching the air.
I stay quiet for one breath longer than usual, watching her in the half-light.
The instinctive answer hits me immediately. Go to her. Touch her. Pull her back into me until whatever loosened between us knots tight again.
I do not move.
That is the first hard choice of the morning.
Because instinct is not always wisdom with her. I know that now. What feels obvious in my own body often lands wrong in hers. Too much closeness when she is hurting can look like pressure. Too much certainty can sound like I have already decided what she feels before she has been allowed to speak it.
So I stay where I am and say only, “You woke early.”
She keeps her back to me while she ties her hair. “I wasn’t sleeping.”
I push myself upright and study the line of her shoulders, the tightness in her hands as she works the tie through her hair. I search back through the night for some clear point of injury. Did I hurt her body more than I meant to. Did the words go too far. Did I miss fear hidden under heat. Did my hunger override her in some way I failed to see because my own blood was too full of future and need.
