Epilogue
Sarah
Knox's mouth finds the bite mark before I open my eyes.
His lips follow the scar at the junction of my neck and shoulder—that silver crescent where his teeth pierced skin and changed everything. The bond hums between us, warm and low, his contentment bleeding into mine.
"Morning, little human." His voice scrapes against my shoulder, rough with sleep.
"Mmm." I stretch—or try to. Nine months pregnant and enormous, I manage a slow roll at best. My belly presses into his forearm where it drapes across my body, and beneath my skin, the baby kicks hard enough to make Knox's hand jump.
He splays his fingers wide across the curve. Holds still and waits for another kick.
"He's awake," I murmur.
"He's been awake since four." Knox sets his mouth to the spot behind my ear. "Keeps punching your left side. I've been feeling it through the bond."
Of course he has. Ten months of orc gestation—longer than a human—and Knox has catalogued every flutter, every hiccup, every midnight acrobatic routine through the connection between us. He tracks the baby's movements the way he inventories engine parts: methodical, obsessed.
He shifts behind me, propping himself on one elbow, and his free hand maps the new shape of my body. The fullness of my breasts. The tight drum of my stomach. The widening of my hips. His touch carries reverence, not hesitation, and the bond tells me what he won't say out loud—that he finds me staggering like this. That the sight of me swollen with his child short-circuits his brain.
"You're beautiful like this."
"I'm enormous."
"You're carrying my son." His palm settles over the highest point of my stomach, where the baby's foot pushes outward. "You've never been more perfect."
I laugh—the sound is rusty and breathless because he's dragging his tusks along the underside of my jaw, that deliberate graze of smooth bone that turns my spine to liquid.
"Come here." I hook my fingers into the collar of his shirt and pull him down.
He comes. Careful, always careful now, his weight braced so none of it lands on me. His mouth covers mine and the kiss tastes like sleep and cedar and home—this man, this bed, this life I built from the wreckage of the one that came before.
The bond floods with his love, hitting me like a wall of heat. I send mine back, and his breath catches on my lips.
"Sha'keth va'run," he whispers into the space between us.
My heart, my home.
I pull him closer. The baby kicks between us, impatient, and Knox grins into the kiss.
"Our son agrees," he says. "You're perfect."
The clubhouse smells like garlic bread and motor oil.
Family dinner runs loud tonight—Finn telling a story that requires both hands and half the table's attention, Rex heckling him from the far end, Garrett eating in silence with an expression that suggests he tolerates all of them because Knox told him to. Diesel refills water glasses with the eager precision of a prospect hungry for his patch, and Colt reads a paperback with one hand while eating pasta with the other.
Jessica sits across from me, her blonde pixie cut trimmed sharp, her sleeves pushed to her elbows. She catches my eye and mouthsyou okay?because she's been doing that every thirty minutes for the past two weeks.
I nod. Shift in my chair. Dig my palm into the low ache in my back that's been building since this afternoon.
Knox's hand lands on my thigh under the table. The bond registers my discomfort before I can hide it, and his fingers tighten.
"We should go home," he says, low enough that only I hear it.
"I'm fine. It's just—"
The sensation hits like a fist from the inside. Pressure, deep and sudden, followed by a rush of warmth between my legs that soaks through my dress and pools on the wooden chair beneath me.
