I grab Knox's arm. "That's not back pain."
The table goes silent. Every head turns.
"Her water broke." Jessica's chair scrapes back. She's on her feet in a blink, combat medic mode engaged, her hands sure and calm. "Knox, truck. Now. I'll call the clinic."
Knox doesn't speak. Doesn't need to. He scoops me out of the chair like I weigh nothing—one arm under my knees, the other behind my back, my stomach flush to the solid wall of him. The bond crackles with his terror and his focus, burning side by side, two fires feeding each other.
"I've got you." The words vibrate through his ribs into mine. "I've got you both."
The compound blurs. Brothers scatter. Finn sprints for the truck and has the engine running before Knox reaches the passenger door. Jessica climbs in beside me, phone jammed to her ear, rattling off my stats to Dr. Bryce.
Finn drives. I won't call it driving. Driving implies respect for speed limits, stop signs, the general concept of lanes. What Finn does involves the accelerator, the horn, and a vocabulary of Orcish curses I've never heard him use before.
Knox holds me in the back seat, my spine to his ribs, his body caging mine. Every contraction rips through the bond in both directions—my pain, his helpless fury at not being able to take it from me.
"You're so strong, sha'keth va'run." His lips brush my temple. "Strongest person I've ever known."
Dr. Bryce meets us at the clinic door, her capable hands already guiding me onto the bed while Knox fills the cold room with heat like a furnace with a heartbeat. I grip his hand through every contraction, and my nails—harder now, thicker since the claiming bite changed my body—dig crescents into his gray-green skin. He doesn't flinch.
Hours. Or minutes. Time collapses into sensation, into Knox's voice in my ear, into Jessica's fingers checking monitors, into the primal work of bringing a life into the world.
"Push, Sarah." Dr. Bryce’s voice, even and firm. "One more."
I bear down. Knox's forehead drops to mine. The bond narrows to a single point—us, this moment, the edge of everything.
A cry. Small and furious and certain of its right to be heard.
Knox makes a sound I've never heard from him—broken, raw, all air and no words. His tears hit my shoulder, hot and uncontrolled, soaking into my hospital gown while Dr. Bryce lifts our son onto me.
He's small for an orc. Gray-green skin, darker than Knox's, mottled with patches of pink where the human blood shows through. Ten fingers. Ten toes. A shock of black hair. And two tiny tusks, barely visible, nudging his lower lip.
"There you are," I whisper. My voice breaks on every word. "There you are, baby. We've been waiting for you."
Knox folds himself around us both. His shoulders heave with the effort of holding himself together, and the bond tells me he's failing—every wall, every defense, every piece of armor he'sspent forty-two years building, demolished by a seven-pound infant with his mother's stubbornness and his father's tusks.
I came to Nightfall Cove running from a monster. I found a different kind entirely—one who saved me, claimed me, and gave me a love worth fighting for.
Whatever comes next, we face it together.
That's what family does.
Knox
The rocking chair creaks on every backward pass.
Reeve sleeps on me. One fist curled into my collarbone, his face turned into the hollow of my throat, his breathing so light I keep my palm flat on his back just to feel it. Four weeks old. Eight pounds, six ounces at last weigh-in. The smallest thing I've ever held and the heaviest weight I've ever carried.
I named him for a ghost.
Reeve. My eldest brother—three years older, built like our father, born to lead. He died in the border wars when I was sixteen, cut down in a skirmish that accomplished nothing, resolved nothing, changed nothing except the shape of the hole in our family. Our mother never recovered, she died shortly after. Our father turned that grief into fuel for more campaigns,more blood, more territory won at the cost of sons who'd never come home.
I left the clans six years later. Finn followed. And Reeve stayed behind in the mountain burial grounds, his name carved into stone that the snow covers every winter.
My son breathes on my neck, alive and warm and so new it scares me.
I trace the curve of his ear. Run my thumb across the tiny ridge of his tusk. He stirs, wrinkles his face, and then settles.
"You don't know it yet," I tell him, so quiet the words barely reach the air. "But you're named for someone brave. Someone who deserved more than he got. You carry him forward."
