Tonight was for celebration.
I just wished that Ravi and Kalani could have seen this time of peace. But they were gone, swallowed by the unraveling when it took the Red Mountain. The area was still healing, and so was my heart.
Araz emerged from the walk-in closet dressed in a gold and cream kurta. He’d pulled back his hair into a knot, his high cheekbones on show, eyes like fire ringed in kohl.
I wanted him inside me right now.
A low vibration shook his chest. “Leela, if you keep looking at me like that, we will most definitely be late for the festivities. Very late.”
I swallowed past the dryness in my mouth. “I guess I’m insatiable.”
He crossed the room toward me. Slow. Deliberate. My pulse kicked up. I reached to graze his jaw with my fingertips, resolve wavering. Fashionably late was still a thing, right? “Araz…”
He nudged my nose with his, breath warm and inviting against my lips. “Leela…”
Yep, I was wavering. But what kind of queen would I be if I put my sexual needs before my monarch duties? A satisfied one? No. Stop it.
I pushed away the greedy thoughts and took a step back, shaking my head and smiling. “You’re bad…”
“I am not,” he said, matching my smile. “I’m good. So very fucking good.”
I lightly slapped his chest. “Gah!Stop it.”
He snagged me around the waist and pulled me close. “Are you sure?”
Heat flashed through me.
“Mama?”
Araz and I both turned to the door, to the small sleepy-eyed boy clutching a blue blanket.
My sweet Arman.
My heart immediately tugged toward my son.
The rebuild and unification of the races, freedom of the drohi, all of it had taken time, and it wasn’t until I’d started to show that the fact that I hadn’t had a period in a while had hit me. Arman had been born not long after that. Too quick for a human child, but then, neither Araz nor I was human, and the timing didn’t matter.
Unease skated up my spine at the thought as it always did because if I tracked it properly, if I ran the numbers, then?—
“I had a bad dream,” Arman said.
Araz released me and crossed the room to scoop him up. “Bad dreams can’t hurt you, Arman. You know that.”
Arman nestled against Araz’s shoulder, his golden eyes, so like his father’s, fixing on me. “There’s something wrong with Pippy. She won’t wake up.”
Araz and I exchanged glances, and my heart sank.
We’d found Pippy, a Loribird, in the palace gardens when Arman was two years old. She’d had a broken wing. Arman hadbeen smitten by her, gently helping to care for her, and when her wing healed, she’d stayed. Always close to Arman, most often perched on his shoulder.
I stroked his hair. “Let’s go check on her together.”
The worry on Araz’s face spoke to the disquiet in my belly. Arman loved Pippy, but Loribirds didn’t have long lifespans.
We stepped out of our chamber and down the corridor to our left, and the double doors to the royal quarters opened, admitting Dhoona. He strode toward us, the tips of his metallic wings catching the lamplight, his expression etched with anxiety.
It had taken time to get used to seeing him with an actual face. The death of Asura Rajni had broken whatever curse had been placed on the brothers. Their stone faces had melted away, and their wings had grown back, slow and painfully. But they were finally whole now.
“Your majesties, Pashim has reported movement in the mountain,” Dhoona said.
