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I believe it.

I didn’t know, standing in a warehouse two years ago with a life I was building toward destruction, that I would be standing here. I had no idea that the girl I had vowed to break and kill would be the one to pull me from the shadows and give me a reason to live again.

I didn’t know this life was available. I had removed it from the category of possible things and I had lived in that removal as though it were a fact rather than a choice.

It was a choice.

I’m making a different one now.

I press my hand flat against the nursery door for a moment, not pushing it open, just feeling the solidity of it.

Then I turn off the hallway light.

And go in search of my fairy.

TOREN

Emmerson Kenna Nile Devlin does not understand the concept of an indoor voice.

I want to be clear that this is not a complaint. I am simply stating a fact. She has been in possession of a voice since approximately two seventeen in the morning on the day she arrived, and she has been using it at full capacity ever since. Now at three years old, she is deploying it with the kind of focused, deliberate intention that suggests she knows exactly what she's doing.

“Daddy!” she screams, for what I estimate is the fourteenth time in the last ten minutes.

The woman in the row in front of us turns around.

I give her the smile I have perfected over three years of being the mother of Xaden Devlin's child in Xaden Devlin's arena. The one that says, I understand. I also live with him. We are in this together.

She turns back around.

“He can't hear you, baby,” I tell Em.

“Yes he can,” she says, with the unshakeable conviction of a person who has never once been wrong about anything, which is an energy I both admire and find genuinely exhausting. She has her father's certainty and my stubbornness and the combination is something I was not adequately prepared for regardless of how many times both Cas and Carnage warned me.

She is wearing a miniature version of Xaden's jersey, number and name on the back, with her dark hair in two plaits that she made me redo three times this morning because they weren't straight enough. She has his eyes. She knows she has his eyes. She has already, at three years old, figured out that this is useful information.

She is going to be a problem.

I love her so much it is a physical sensation.

“He'll look up in a minute,” I tell her.

“He needs to look up now,” she says. “He needs to know we're here.”

“He knows we're here.”

“He might have forgotten.”

“He hasn't forgotten.”

“He forgets things,” she says darkly.

He does forget things. He forgot her snack bag last Tuesday and she held it against him for two full days. The man can run a criminal organization across four territories without dropping a single thread but he forgot the snack bag, and she made sure he understood the gravity of that failure. I had to leave the room because I was laughing too hard to be useful.

I settle her against my side and look back at the ice.

Xaden is at center, waiting for the face-off. Even from here, third row, just right of the blue line, the seats he has reserved for us at every home game since Em was old enough to sit up without being held. I can read his posture. Shoulders back, weight distributed, that specific stillness he gets before something happens that he has already calculated will go the way he wants it to.

He looks, as he always looks on the ice, like a man who was built specifically for this surface and finds everything else slightly inconvenient by comparison.