Page 288 of Slashed Bonds

We’re all looking at Cassian. Cassian’s looking at the roses with his jaw doing a thing I’ve only seen it do when a draw’s gone wrong.

Oh. Oh, that’s where he gets it. The reading. The man who knows where everyone’s going to be two seconds early got it from a redhead in silk who clocked a mocktail across a ballroom and understood her son’s life had changed before he’d told her.

“She’s good,” Viper says. From the door. With something that on anyone else would be respect.

“She’s a nightmare,” Cassian says.

“Same thing.”

Killian’s crossed the room. I didn’t see him get up. He’s at the counter beside the roses, and he’s taken one of the dark red stems out from between the white and is turning it in his inked fingers, reading it, and then he’s crossed back and he puts it on the blanket beside the card without a word.

He reads walls. He read a bouquet and found the one thing in it that was for me and not for the room.

“So my bestie is TRULY having a BABY!”

Maddie. Throwing the card in the air. Both arms up, the pink of her coming back through the black like a sunrise through a storm, and the card flutters down onto the blanket over my legs and lands face up with the word Welcome toward me.

I don’t say anything.

I can’t. I’m looking at my stomach. At the blanket over it, flat, a hospital blanket with a clinic’s name stitched in the corner, and under it a body I’d been told for five years was a closed building, and in the body a gray smear on a screen that a woman with no bedside manner called five weeks.

I’m going to be a mother. Again. The word’s “again.” I never got to be the first time and I’m going to be anyway.

I don’t know how to react.

Happy. Sad. Thrilled. Losing-my-shoes happy, which is a thing Maddie says and I’ve never understood until this second, because I can’t feel my feet. Afraid, in the small cold way you’re afraid of a thing you want, because wanting it is how they get you. All of it at once, in a room with seven people in it, with a monitor telling everyone how fast my heart’s going so I can’t even lie about it.

And under all of it, when I let the rest go past, when I find the still the way Nikolai finds it in a crease, there’s one thing sitting in the center of me with its hands folded.

Gratitude.

For the miracle inside me. For the woman in the chair who made a word a liar. For a basement under a laundromat and a man who said right strings. For three men who sat in a chair and had a crown drawn on a finger because a captain said wedding rings while filling out a form.

I lift my hand.

The left one. Out of Nikolai’s, who lets it go, and I hold it up in the fluorescent light and I look at it. At the monarch across the back, healed now, the umber gone deep and the aura settled between the tendons. At the ring finger.

At the two butterflies.

One above the other. Where a band would sit. Small, and settled, and finished healing this week, and I’d asked for them on a Friday in a chair for the one I lost and the one I’d yearn for until my next life.

I didn’t have to wait for the next one.

I look at them for a long time. The room lets me.

I guess the foreshadowing was simply waiting to catch up.

CHAPTER 46

Taking Out The Trash

~MORRIGAN~

“FUCK!”

The scream comes through the doors before the doors come open.

Then the doors come open, both of them, the heavy glass ones at the top of a brass-railed staircase, and the stomping that follows is a sound I’d know with my eyes shut. I’ve known it since I was eighteen. A man’s weight coming through a room like the room should apologize.