Lucian sat in stillness, hands clasped, book tucked against his side, eyes on Seri. No crown. No guards. No politics. Just a man watching over a girl his sons loved.
I didn’t like him, and I couldn’t love him, butbleeding nightI almost pitied him.
#
Lucian
I nearly had a seizure from the shock of Casimir’s call in the middle of the day, requesting I stay with Serafina again while they dealt with an emergency. Whatever had happened, it left the dear girl Darksick, and I leapt at the chance to not only aid her, but mend just a fraction of the rift with my sons.
I sat watching her for a long while, fingers twitching over the book’s spine. Not one of Casimir textbooks or Koa’s grimoires or Zane’s mangas or even Sebastian’s classics. No, this was mine. A children’s storybook with Mahina’s tiny drawings in the margins.
I hadn’t meant to bring it.
Or perhaps I had.
The day my workers had cleared out the boys’ storage unit, they’d found a box of Mahina’s things and brought to me rather than here to Evermere. I hadn’t been able to open it at first, but when I did, this book was right on top. I remembered it well. Countless evenings, I’d sat in Mahina’s living room, listening to her read it to the boys as she tucked them in. Koa crying when the knight lost his horse. Zane demanding a sword of his own. Casimir insisting the plot would have been better if the dragon lived. Sebastian debating which had been kinder, the prince or the princess.
Serafina had never heard these stories, so I would read them to her now.
Opening the book, I blinked when something fell into my lap. A simple plastic sleeve that held a piece of thick white paper. Picking it up, I saw a wisp of dark brown hair tied with a slender blue thread. Just below it on the paper,Mahina’s bonus boywas written in spidery lettering I’d recognize anywhere.
My vision misted.
She’d kept a lock of Sebastian’s hair.
I shouldn’t have been surprised. She’d taken my firstborn son into her heart and held him safe just as she did with my other boys.
Certain there was more, I flipped the bookmark over and found a thin plait of fine baby hair. One strand blond. One strand red. One strand black. At the top of the paper, she’d written,Mahina’s braid.
Time stuttered back a step, and I was suddenly in a warm kitchen. Sebastian stirring batter in a bowl. Casimir adding chocolate chips. Koa sneaking a cookie from the cooling rack. Zane, attached to Mahina’s leg as always, talking a mile a minute. And Mahina herself laughing, the scent of vanilla and evening primrose filling every cranny of the room…
I was a vampire forged in war, policy, and power. King Isaac’s right-hand, his Reaper, the one he sent in when all else failed, and not much had changed in the intervening years. But Mahina was different.She’d touched the man I’d once been, long before I was Turned. She’d made the darkness not brighter, but softer.
“Your braid still holds, little moon,” I whispered to the plastic-protected keepsake. “You wove it so tightly, nothing could ever break it. Not even me.”
I slipped the bookmark into my breast pocket. Tomorrow, I’d have it professionally mounted and framed.
I’ll put it on my desk, I decided,next to the photo of Kaori and Sebastian.
Sheets rustled as Seri shifted in her sleep, a faint furrow between her brows. I reached out, smoothing it away with my thumb.
“She should see someone she knows,” I’d told the boys.
What Ihadn’tsaid was that I needed to see her, too. Not only as my precious daughter-in-law, but as the echo of a woman I’d failed. In watching over Serafina, perhaps I could still protect something of Mahina.
Even if it was only the heart of the sons she’d left behind.
#
Seri
I woke up starving, sweaty, and tangled in a mountain of blankets, my mouth tasting like an old boot. When I sat up, the room spun. When it stopped, I realized a few things at once.
Someone had dressed me in a huge gray t-shirt. Koa, since it was rich with his evening primrose scent.
Someone had drawn two eyes and a mustache on my hand where my thumb made a mouth against my index finger. Definitely Zane.
Someone had braided my hair. The perfection of the tight rope lying over my shoulder said Casimir’s handiwork.
