Three men carrying three babies, settling onto the oversized bed beside the woman who’d made them. Mira took Solian from me and held him against her chest. Reached for Mireille with her free hand, touching her daughter’s cheek. Looked at Percius sleeping on Percy’s chest and smiled with a weariness so complete it bordered on transcendence.
“We did it,” she said.
My tears had stopped. The evidence remained on my face and I didn’t care. Percy’s head rested against the headboard, Percius rising and falling on his chest. Lucian’s arm wrapped around Mira’s shoulders, Mireille tucked in the crook of his elbow.
Solian opened his silver eyes and stared at me from Mira’s chest. I stared back.
“He has your eyes,” Mira said softly.
“I noticed.”
“And Lucian’s frown.”
“He’s minutes old. That’s not a frown. That’s a facial muscle reflex,” Lucian protested.
“It’s a frown. A tiny, grumpy, Lucian frown. He came out judging the world.”
Percy laughed. Quiet, wrecked, still wet with tears. “Born disapproving. That’s the most Lucian thing I’ve ever heard.”
Mira’s hand found mine. Laced our fingers together over Solian’s sleeping body.
Through the bond, I felt all of it: her exhaustion, her triumph, her bottomless love for the three men and three children in this bed. And beneath it, aimed specifically at me with a precision that rivaled my own, gratitude so pure it almost started the tears again.
“Thank you,” I said. “For choosing us.”
“I’ll always choose you.”
“And we will choose you,” Lucian answered.
The room went quiet.
Six heartbeats against mine. Three new, three familiar.
78
— • —
Lucian
Solian had my wife’s temper and Solomon’s refusal to sleep on schedule.
It had been three weeks since the birth, and the royal chambers had transformed into a warzone of burp cloths, mismatched swaddles, and the perpetual low-grade chaos of three newborns who’d apparently agreed to operate in shifts so that at least one of them was crying at any given moment.
Mireille was the easiest.
She slept when held and screamed when put down, which meant someone was holding her at all times, which meant we’d developed a rotation. Percy had the morning shift. Solomon took afternoons. I covered the nights. Mireille seemed to find my heartbeat personally soothing, which I refused to be emotional about and was absolutely emotional about.
Percius was the wildcard. He slept through anything: howling wolves, slamming doors, his brother’s screaming. Nothing woke him.
“He sleeps with commitment,” Percy had said. “I respect it.”
Solian was the problem.
Solian didn’t sleep, he observed. His silver eyes tracked movement across the room with a focus that had no business existing in a three-week-old, and when the movement stopped, he cried.
Solomon was the only one who could settle him. He’d lift Solian from the crib, hold him against his chest, and walk the length of the chamber in measured steps, and the boy would go quiet.
Silver eyes tracking his father’s jaw, his collar, the scar on his face, analyzing the world with a methodical intensity that made Mira say, “He’s going to be exactly you and I’m going to need therapy.”
