Page 149 of Scaled Daddy's Secret Heir
Then I leave.
And I don’t look back.
CHAPTER 40
LEAH
Time doesn’t march here. It meanders.
That’s the thing no one tells you about peace—it’s not loud. It doesn’t announce itself with banners and horns. It shows up in the small, quiet hours. In the soft clink of dishes being stacked in the drying rack. In the way the light moves through the window at the same time every morning.
On Glimner, time passes gently. Like it trusts us not to waste it.
Our cottage sits perched on a bluff above the western surf. One of those squat, sunwashed little places built back when island zoning laws didn’t assume secrecy meant danger. The windows are round, like portholes. Salt crusts the sills no matter how often I wipe them.
The floor hums with old solar lines.
The sea always whispers just outside.
Inside, everything breathes slow.
Kalev fixes the hinges on the back gate in the morning while Clancy pretends to fly over the garden beds. Our son’s laugh echoes through the soil like sunlight, bright and stubborn. Kalev grunts at the bolt rust but his hands are gentle. He’s always gentle, these days.
He cooks more than I do.
He tells Clancy stories before bed—long, winding tales about vakutan scouts and sky islands and ships that can talk. His voice lowers into that deep, melodic rhythm that used to command entire battlefields. Now it tucks our son into sleep.
And me?
I wake up without flinching.
I move through rooms without listening for surveillance clicks or drone wings or footsteps that don’t belong.
It still startles me, sometimes. The ease of it.
Like I’m waiting for the other boot to drop, only to remember we burned the boots. Both of them. Together.
Clancy grows fast. Stronger every week. His shoulders are already broadening in that way that mimics his father. His skin changes with the light—peach to bronze to dusky rose, depending on the hour. His eyes, though, are all Kalev. Sharp and dark and full of questions.
He asked me last week what a “secret operation” was.
I looked up from the dishes and nearly dropped a plate.
Turns out he overheard one of the neighbor kids talking about League spies.
Kalev just arched a brow and said, “A very bad idea.”
Clancy giggled like it was the best joke he’d ever heard.
That’s what amazes me the most. Not the safety. Not the structure.
Thejoy.
Kalev hums when he works now.
Sometimes it’s Vakutan. Sometimes not. But there’s melody in him where before there was only mission.
We plant herbs together. Repair the fence. Catch fish off the rocks with long reels and zero finesse. He grumbles about the bait. I grumble about the heat. Clancy falls in the tide at least once a week and insists it wason purpose.
