Page 54 of The Feral King's Mate
Sarah stands in the doorway. She leans on the frame, wearing my flannel shirt and nothing else, her auburn hair loose around her shoulders. She watches us with an expression that cracks me open every time I catch it—this look that saysyou are the center of my world and you don't even know it.
"He has your eyes," she says.
"And he has your stubbornness."
"I don't know what you're talking about."
I raise an eyebrow. She grins. Crosses the room and perches on the arm of the rocking chair, her hip warm at my shoulder. Her fingers find Reeve's back, drawing slow circles.
Her contentment rolls into me. Bone-deep, settled, certain. The fear that used to shadow her—that flinch in her pulse, that constant scanning for danger—dissolved so gradually I can't pinpoint when it vanished. The claiming bite healed more than her body. It anchored her. Gave her a tether to safety that Peter's memory can't sever.
The great room fills as the afternoon stretches. Brothers drift in and out—this is how it goes now. The clubhouse orbits Reeve like he's the sun and the rest of us are helpless debris caught in his gravity.
Garrett sits in the armchair across from me, my son cradled in the crook of one massive arm. Seven feet two inches of minotaur, hands that have broken bones and bent steel, holding a four-week-old infant like the boy might shatter at a careless breath. A low rumble rolls through Garrett—purring, unconscious, the minotaur's response to what he treasures. He doesn't realize he's doing it. Reeve sleeps deeper in that vibration than he's slept anywhere. Garrett's filed-blunt horns dip forward as he watches the baby's face like nothing else in the room exists.
Finn lifts Reeve from Garrett's arm—the minotaur lets out a low grunt of protest—and drops onto the couch beside Jessica, settling the baby into her lap before she can object. She freezes. Holds him at arm's length for two seconds, then pulls him to her collarbone with a sound I've never heard her make—a small, involuntary noise.
"Don't get any ideas," she tells Finn without looking up.
Finn watches her face. The cocky grin fades into an expression raw and unguarded, and for a half-second I see my brother the way Jessica will learn to see him—not the charming rogue, not the VP playing at recklessness, but the man underneath. The onewho's been in love with her since the day she walked into this clubhouse with a six-pack and a surgeon's hands.
"Wouldn't dream of it," he says. His voice catches on the last word.
Diesel crouches beside the couch, nose inches from Reeve's face. "When can I teach him to ride?"
"He's four weeks old," Sarah says.
"So... next month?"
Rex cuffs the back of Diesel's head. Diesel grins.
Sarah tucks herself under my arm. I pull her close, burying my nose in her hair, breathing in the smell that rewired my brain the night I first caught it—summer grass and honey, now threaded with milk and warmth and the new sweetness that clings to a woman nursing your child.
"Our family." I scan the room. Garrett purring with an empty lap now, already missing the baby's weight. Finn sitting closer to Jessica than she's noticed. Diesel arguing with Rex about the appropriate age for motorcycle lessons. Colt reading in the corner, half-smiling at all of it.
"Our kingdom," I say.
Midnight. Rain taps on the windows of our quarters, soft and steady, the rhythm Nightfall Cove keeps instead of silence.
Reeve sleeps between us. Flat on his back, arms flung wide, claiming the center of the bed. His tiny tusks catch the moonlight.
Sarah lies on her side, one hand resting on Reeve's belly. I mirror her on the opposite side, and our fingers touch over our son.
"Sha'keth va'run," she whispers. The Orcish rolls off her tongue with an accent I'll never correct because it's hers—this human woman who learned my dead language so she could speak love to me in the words my mother used.
"Sha'keth va'run," I agree.
My heart, my home. All of it, right here. Everything I walked away from a throne to find, sleeping in a bed that smells like cedar, baby powder and the sea.
On the nightstand, an envelope. Heavy parchment, crimson wax, the seal of the Bloodstone Clan stamped into it with a sigil I spent twenty years trying to forget. It arrived this morning. I haven't opened it.
Tomorrow, I'll read it. Tomorrow, I'll weigh whatever the clans want and make the calculations that come with being a man whose past refuses to stay buried.
Tonight, I tuck the blanket higher around my son's shoulders. I watch Sarah's breathing slow into sleep, her fingers still laced with mine over Reeve's rising chest. The bond between us pulses, constant and warm, a second heartbeat I'll carry for the rest of my life.
Twenty years ago, I walked away from being a prince.
Now, I am a king. Not the kind my father made—not built on blood and obligation and fear. The kind I chose. The kind thatstarts with a woman who saw the man behind the monster, and a son who sleeps between us like the world owes him nothing he doesn't already have. The Feral King and his queen, building our kingdom one sleepless night at a time.
I close my eyes.
The letter can wait.
