“How prolonged is prolonged?”
“What you’ve been experiencing.” His silver eyes were kind. “The symptoms will worsen each time you return to the compound. The bond provides what the body needs. Remove the bond and the body begins to fail.”
“So I need to be near them.” I gestured at the three men arranged around me. “Physically near them. Or the babies suffer.”
“Yes.”
I wanted to argue. Wanted to point out that I had an operation to run, an organization to dismantle, a father to expose. That I couldn’t exactly set up camp in the forest with three lycans and conduct intelligence gathering through thrown rocks and fabric notes.
But the heartbeats beneath my ribs had steadied the moment I entered this clearing. The gray edges of my vision had cleared. The persistent ache in my bones, the one I’d been ignoring for weeks, had quieted.
I couldn’t be reckless with our children.
Whatever was between us, however fractured and complicated and unresolved, the three lives inside me didn’t get a vote in their parents’ drama.
“Fine,” I said. “I’ll figure out a rotation. Short missions, regular returns. But the compound has to stay accessible. Wyatt’s almost ready and I’m not pulling out before he turns.”
Solomon sat down beside me. Close so that the bond registered his proximity and the babies shifted in response. Lucian pushed himself away from his tree and lowered himself on my other side with a grimace he tried and failed to hide. Percival stayed at his oak for a long moment, then crossed the clearing and folded himself onto the ground behind me, his back against mine.
None of us spoke.
Men who’d wrecked me arranged themselves around me with carefulness directed to do with the lives I was carrying.
Solomon’s hand found my stomach first. Lucian’s followed, settling beside it, his fingers trembling from the effort of lifting his arm. And Percival reached around from behind me, his hand joining theirs, completing the circuit.
The bond flared. A surge that I felt in every cell. The wall between us thinned by another fraction and through the cracks I felt them.
“We end this,” Lucian said. Sounding more of a father. “Whatever it takes. We end it so they never know the world we grew up in.”
“Their future will be safe,” Solomon said.
Percival didn’t speak. But his hand shifted lower on my belly, and then he leaned down and pressed his lips against the curve of my stomach.
A kick answered. Small, fluttering, the first I’d felt from the outside.
Then a second. A third.
Three kicks. One for each hand resting on my skin.
Lucian’s breath caught. Solomon’s fingers twitched. And Percival pulled back with the ghost of his old expression crossing his face, there and gone.
I didn’t know where I stood with these three men.
Didn’t know if what was broken between us could be rebuilt, or if the fractures had changed the shape of us permanently. I didn’t know if I’d forgiven them. Not sure if I could.
The rejection had carved trenches in me that proximity and apologies couldn’t fill, and the babies didn’t erase the time I’d spent alone in a compound or the fact that it was so easy for them to leave me behind.
We couldn’t go back to what we were. Maybe we shouldn’t.
But sitting in that clearing with three hands on my stomach and three kicks answering three fathers, I knew one thing.
Whatever we were becoming, it started here.
51
— • —
Solomon
