Chapter
One
The heat wakes me.
His hands are on me, one spread across my hip and the other curled around my ribs, fingers cool against skin that has no business being this hot at three in the morning. The compound below us runs pre-assault inventory, carts rolling, Marcellus’s voice carrying through stone. The heat cuts through all of it. Mine. Pouring off me in waves that started weeks ago and haven’t stopped climbing.
Twelve weeks of this. Getting worse, not better. Noted.
Maximus is awake beside me. I can tell because rest-still and thinking-still are two different things, and I’ve slept next to this man long enough to know which one keeps his thumb tracing circles on my hip bone. On the nightstand, the photograph sits face-up where he put it. A pale hand on dark wood, the angle composed, the light chosen so you see exactly one thing. Heavy gold on the third finger. Maximus’s father’s ring on Konstantin’s hand. A reminder or a promise, depending on the night. The shutters are open. He stopped closing them after the springs, when thesun stopped being a thing that could kill him. It never could kill me. Konstantin built me for it. Moonlight cuts across the bed and catches my ring, the M and C worked into a single crest.
“Stop planning,” I say.
“I’m not planning.”
“You’re planning so hard the mattress is vibrating.”
His mouth finds my shoulder, and the temperature difference alone is enough to make me press closer. “I’m lying next to my wife on the last quiet night before everything starts. The planning is incidental.”
Wife.The word still hits me somewhere below the ribs every time he says it.
“You’re going to wear that out.”
“Good.” He pulls me tighter. “I intend to.”
I turn into him and his arm comes around me and I press close because he runs cold and I run hot and I have since the pregnancy started changing my body one degree at a time. The crescent over my heart pulses warm against his chest and his answers mine, both marks deepening to crimson. His heartbeat slows under my palm. Mine matches from inside my own chest, the same rhythm, the one they’ve kept since the marks first wrote themselves into us.
Below, the compound keeps working. Tomorrow night we hit the first of Konstantin’s three remaining facilities. Seraphina and Mira can shatter the wards in a single night now. What we don’t have is his estate, the place he runs everything from. Vivienne sent the coordinates after Konstantin turned her reserves, the closest thing to choosing a side she has ever done, and they put the estate in a fold of mountains that sits on no map we own. What the coordinates can’t give us is a way in. Every probe we’ve sent at its wards has come back with nothing. So we start with what we can reach.
He kisses me. Unhurried. Tomorrow belongs to the war. These minutes don’t. His hand slides under his shirt, the one I slept in,up my spine, and his fingers spread across my back, and it’s possessive in a way that stopped being new and became the thing I reach for in my sleep. I push closer. He makes a low sound against my throat.
Then something pulls tight below my navel.
Deeper than him. Deeper than anything he’s doing. A hard inward drag from where the twins are, a clench in a place I don’t have muscles to clench.
I know where my telekinesis starts. I trained it. Up from the sternum, steered from behind the eyes. This comes from lower and it’s climbing and I didn’t tell it to move.
“Maximus.”
The lamp lifts off the nightstand. Smooth, no wobble, cord drawing taut. Glass follows. On the low shelf the books slide forward as one.
Heat flares through me. Past anything the kiss explains. Past anything the pregnancy explains. Past my experience. Past my training.
More of it than I have ever felt at once, flooding up from below, and when I grab for the place I learned to steer this, there’s nothing to grab.
It isn’t going out from me. It’s coming up through me. I’m not the one moving it. I’m the thing it moves through, and the thing it moves through doesn’t get to pick where it goes. And right now it’s climbing, and it’s aimed at the thing nearest me. The thing nearest me is my husband.
Maximus.
Into him. Past skin, into the cold dense interior of him, into the places where a body comes apart. Mapping the seams. Finding the angle. The same automatic reach that went for a bird on a branch once and mapped its hollow bones before I could stop it, except now there’s three times the force behind it and it’s reading myhusband, every fault line, and the thing roaring through me has already found the answer and is asking whether to pull.
No.
I rip it back. Both hands, everything, and it fights me, massive and unwilling to let go of what it just learned. I drag it out of him and throw the whole mass of it sideways into the wall.
Something in the wall gives with a deep structural crack.
Then it lets go all at once.
