My hands spread across her belly.
"Mine." The word tears from my throat, rough and raw, more growl than speech. "Both of you. Forever mine."
She threads her fingers through my hair and pulls me closer. I press my forehead to her stomach and breathe her in—that new richness flooding my lungs—and for the first time since the bond formed, my chest stops humming.
"We're having a baby." Sarah's voice breaks on the words, cracking open with wonder. "Knox, we're actually having a baby."
I lift my head and look at her face—tear-streaked, glowing—and the protective instinct that's driven me since the moment I first scented her intensifies a hundredfold. Every cell in my body aligns toward a single purpose.
Nothing will touch them. Nothing will harm them. I'll kill anyone who tries.
"Yes. We are." I rise and pull her into my arms, cradling her against my chest like she weighs nothing at all.
Later, when her tears have dried and her breathing has steadied and she's tucked against my side in our bed with her head on my shoulder and her hand resting over my heart, she notices the letter on my desk.
I feel the shift in her attention through the bond—contentment sharpening into curiosity as she registers what she's looking at. The heavy cream-colored envelope. The dark red wax seal pressed into the flap. Not my father's personal crest.
"Knox." She pulls away from me and crosses to the desk. My shirt hangs loose on her frame, the hem falling to mid-thigh, and even now the sight of her in my clothes makes something possessive stir in my chest. "What's this?"
"Nothing you need to worry about."
"That's not an answer." She picks up the envelope and turns it in her hands, examining the seal. Dark red wax, three mountain peaks pressed into it—the mark of the allied orc clans. "This looks serious. Official."
"Sarah—"
"No." She faces me with that fire in her eyes, the same fire I first noticed in the diner when she stood up to those racist assholes without flinching. "We just agreed to face everything together.You said those words to me not two hours ago while I sobbed on a bathroom floor holding pregnancy tests. Whatever this is, it's part of everything. It doesn't get to be an exception."
Pride surges through me hot and fierce. My mate doesn't cower. My mate doesn't accept half-truths. My mate demands the full weight of whatever I'm carrying.
"An emissary." I push myself up from the bed and cross to her, taking the letter from her hands and tossing it back onto the desk where it lands with a soft thump. "The clans have sent a representative to Nightfall Cove. According to that letter, he arrives within the week."
"They're coming here? To Oregon?"
"They want to remind me of my obligations. The duties my father cast me out for refusing." I wrap my arms around her waist and pull her against me, her back to my chest, my chin resting on top of her head. "They want to show me what I abandoned, make me see what's happening in the territories now that my father grows weak and the succession remains unsettled. They think if they can just get me in a room, if they can appeal to my sense of honor or guilt or whatever else they imagine still holds sway over me, I'll come running back to claim a throne I never wanted."
"And what will you tell them?"
I turn her in my arms until she faces me, then take both her hands and press them flat against her belly. Our child grows there—barely bigger than a seed, invisible to the eye, impossible to feel through the barrier of skin and muscle—but I sense the tiny flicker of new life through the bond like a heartbeat answering my own.
"That I found everything I ever wanted." I hold her gaze, letting her see the truth written across my face and feel the certainty pouring through the bond. "That the life I built here with my brothers, with this club, means more to me than a hundred kingdoms. That you mean more to me than anything they could offer, and that I'm never letting go."
She rises on her toes and kisses me—soft and certain, her lips warm against mine, her hands still pressed between us.
"Good answer."
I carry her back to bed and hold her close while the afternoon light fades. The emissary can wait. The clans can wait. The politics of a world I left behind two decades ago can wait.
Right now, the only thing that matters fits in my arms and carries my child and smells like home.
