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My shadows explode off the walls. Every light in the house comes on at once. The windows rattle in their frames. Somewhere downstairs, something made of glass shatters, and I don’t give a single fuck what it was.
“Nik!” She grabs my wrist. “Calm. Down.”
“I’m calm.”
“Your eyes are doing the thing.”
They’re doing the thing. I can feel my true form pressing at the edges of my skin, my claws aching to come out, my fangs already long in my mouth. Every instinct I have is screaming that my mate’s in pain, and somebody has to fucking pay for it. The only one I can blame is me.
“Get dressed, Red,” I order, my voice two layers deep. “We’re going. Now.”
“I need to shower first…”
“No.”
“I’m not having a baby with my hair like this!”
I don’t argue. I just wrap her in my robe, pick her up, and carry her down the stairs while she cusses me out the whole way to the car.
I bought the whole maternity floor at Saint Ursula Memorial in March. Kisha doesn’t know that. The nurses don’t know that. All they know is that a man the size of a door walks in at two-forty in the morning carrying a cussing pregnant woman in a silk robe, and somehow the best suite on the floor is already ready, with the best doctor in the city already waiting in it. Money’s useful. So is fear.
“Sir, we need you to step back so we can examine her.”
The nurse is short, round, and about sixty years old, with reading glasses on a chain around her neck. She has no idea that the thing standing between her and my mate has been making grown men piss themselves for three centuries.
I don’t move.
“Sir.”
Nik, I swear to God, Kisha thinks at me from the bed, if you don’t let this woman do her job, I’m going to have this baby and then kill you.
I step back one inch.
The nurse looks up at me over her glasses. Then she looks at the ceiling, where the lights have started to flicker, and at the shadows creeping up the walls behind me that she can’t quite explain.
“Hm,” she says. “First baby?”
“Yes.”
“Mm-hm.” She snaps on her gloves. “Go stand by her head, honey. Hold her hand. Try not to break anything.”
I like her. I’m going to buy her a house.
It takes eleven hours.
Eleven hours of my mate screaming, sweating, crying, and calling me every name in every language she knows, plus a few I’m pretty sure she made up. Eleven hours of her squeezing my hand hard enough to break a human’s bones. Eleven hours of me holding my human form together by a thread while every instinct in my body roars that she’s hurting and I can’t fucking stop it.
Don’t you EVER put your knot in me again, she thinks at me during one contraction, you big, gorgeous, three-hundred-year-old piece of SHIT…
“You’ll beg me for it in six weeks,” I tell her.
“I HATE you!”
“No, you don’t.”
The nurse snorts.
When the contractions get bad, I start to rumble. I don’t even decide to do it. It just comes up out of my chest, deep and low, and the second she hears it, her whole body goes a little looser. So I keep it going. I rumble for hours, my mouth against her sweaty temple, her nails in my forearm, while the lights in the hallway flicker every time she screams and the doctor and the nurses pretend not to notice.
