“You won’t have to sell him. He’ll say yes before you finish the sentence.” I stand. “But I’ll be in the room when you ask.”
Carson asks him in the conference room, and it goes exactly like I knew it would. Maximus listens to Carson lay it out, every word level, and I watch the moment his body goes still.
And then he rolls up his sleeve.
The sleeve goes up, precise, final, and he extends his arm and doesn’t look at the needle. The vein will close before Carson finishes packing his kit.
“Take what you need,” he says. “Take it on a schedule that doesn’t compromise my readiness, and tell no one whose blood it is. The coalition doesn’t learn that the cure runs through me. The moment they know, I become a thing to be controlled, and I’ve been that, and I’ll burn the lab down myself before I’m that again.” A beat. “Those are my terms. They’re not negotiable.”
“Agreed,” Carson says, fast, already reaching for his kit.
My husband puts his arm out and looks at the wall while a human slides a needle into him, and he doesn’t flinch, and the bond is showing me what it’s costing him, an old horror held down hard. So I cross the room and sit on the arm of his chair and put my hand in his hair, not making a production of it, just there, and he leans his head back against me a fraction, and neither of us says anything.
When it’s done there’s a cotton ball and a strip of tape over a vein that’s already closed, and he looks at the little bag of his own blood for a long moment, and then he looks at me, and through the bond the horror settles.
He was used before. By the man who turned him. By everything that treated his body as a weapon to be deployed rather than a person to be kept. He won’t name it and doesn’t need to, because I can feel it.
“You didn’t have to stay for that,” he says.
“I know.” I take my hand out of his hair. “You threatened to burn down his lab while he had a needle in your arm. Somebody had to witness the terms.”
I findMaximus on the training floor. He’s running forms with a blade he doesn’t need, the one he keeps for practice, balanced and old and nicked along the edge from long use. He moves through the patterns with an economy that has no spare motion in it, each position flowing into the next, and from the doorway I watch him without announcing myself, the watching I only do when he doesn’t know I’m looking.
He stops when I come in. He always stops when I come in. I’ve decided not to find that as devastating as I do.
“Carson has his furnace,” I tell him. “He’ll scale it. You bought the continent a cure by sitting quiet for a needle.”
“Carson bought it. I bled into a bag.” He sets the blade down. “Don’t make me the hero of a job I did with my eyes closed.”
“Too late. I’ve already started the legend.”
I hop up onto the equipment crate that’s become my spot, sitting on actual furniture is for people whose backs don’t ache yet, and he crosses to me, and whatever’s been waiting behind his eyes all morning finally comes forward. I’ve learned his tells. One of the better perks of the arrangement.
“Seraphina will read them again today,” he says. “The twins.”
“Probably. She reads me every twelve hours like I’m a kettle about to go.” I tilt my head. “That’s not what’s in your jaw. Say the real one.”
He’s quiet a moment. Then he says it.
“I don’t know how to be a father.”
He says it looking at his hands. His hands rest on the equipment crate beside my leg. These hands have closed around blades and treaties and the arms of dying soldiers. They’ve built armies and broken doors and held me with a precision that makes me forget they were designed for war.
There it is. That’s the real one.
Catherine came back from the dead last night, and this is the thing that’s been sitting in him since dusk.
“You’ve seen all of it,” he says, low. “The family I had before. What Luciano made of me after. He took the ring, the name, the chance to pass any of it to a son, and I buried that want so deep I stopped noticing it was buried. Now the want is back, and it has two heartbeats, and everything I’m good at ends a life. I don’t have an hour of practice keeping a small one alive and certain it’s loved. I’m very good at the wrong thing, Celeste. I’m afraid the wrong thing is all I am.”
I let it sit for a second. Then I take his face, turnabout’s fair, he’s done it to me enough.
“Okay. Listen, this is happening once and then we’re never speaking of your feelings again, it’s bad for my reputation.” His mouth almost smiles. “You think you don’t know how to do this. You’ve been doing it the whole time I’ve known you. Mira calls you Uncle and signs her letters to you like you’re the safest address she has. Julian would walk into fire on your say-so and you’d walk in first to make sure the floor would take his weight. You keep every single one of these people standing. You catch them before theyknow they’re falling. You did it for me before I’d have let you say the word love out loud.” I meet his eyes. “You’ve been practicing on all of them. All that’s changing is that two of them are going to be small enough to carry on one arm, and they’re going to think you hung the actual moon, and you’re going to let them. You have never once in your life known how to refuse the people who are yours.”
He doesn’t say anything right away. The blade lies where he set it. The training room is quiet except for the ventilation hum that never stops. His face opens, just for a breath, the unguarded look I’m learning to live for, there and gone.
He turns his head and presses his mouth to my palm.
“Every time I run out of faith in what I am,” he says against my palm, “you hand me yours.”
