Chapter 148: The Unfolding Truth XXVIII

Third Person POV

The carriage began to move.

Helen stood on the steps and waved. She watched the carriage roll down the long drive, wheels turning slowly at first and then picking up their pace. She watched it grow smaller. She watched it reach the curve in the road where the trees closed in on both sides, and then it was gone, and the drive was empty, and the morning was very quiet.

Her arm dropped.

Her eyes were wet and she did not do anything about it. She stood in the morning light with her free hand on her belly and the goodbye sitting in her chest, heavy and real, and she did not move.

Something cold touched the back of her neck.

The kind of cold that did not come from the wind. She reached up before she had thought about it, and her fingers found a chain. Thin and delicate, and at the end of it, resting against her collarbone, a small pendant. Silver and smooth, shaped like a teardrop, warm already from the brief contact with her skin.

It had not been there a moment ago.

She turned around.

Kai was standing behind her.

Dark clothes, hair slightly disheveled the way it was in the mornings before he had given it any attention, green eyes soft and watching her face. He had been there for a while. Waiting for her to notice.

"It looks beautiful on you," he said. His voice was quiet. He reached out and touched the pendant lightly, turning it gently between his fingers. "Suits you. Looks even better on your neck than it did in the shop."

Helen touched it with her own fingers. It was smooth and warm and small. She felt it sitting against her chest and something in her chest felt different for it.

"Kai," she said. "It is beautiful." She looked at him. "I love it."

He smiled.

Her smile faded.

Not because of him. Something else moved across her face... quieter, heavier, the thing she had been carrying for a while without saying it.

"I never told you what I am," she said.

He shook his head slightly. "You do not have to. I told you, whenever you feel ready, I am here. I am not going anywhere."

"The twins already know."

He blinked.

A beat of silence.

"The twins," he said slowly.

"They are always with me. They asked." She looked at him carefully. "It just came out."

He looked at her for a moment. Then he exhaled... long and slow, the breath of a man who had just learned that his wife’s deepest secret had reached his sisters before him. "Of course they know," he said. "Of course, my two impossible sisters know before I do."

"Are you angry?"

"No." He said it without hesitating. "Just tell me. Before they come back from training and find ways to make it worse."

Helen looked at his face. At the green eyes that had not changed since the garden, since the ceremony, since every moment that had happened between then and now. She took a breath.

And she told him.

Not the whole of it, there was not time for the whole of it, and some of it was still hers to keep. But enough. The essential shape of it.

What she was, what it meant, what had always been hidden under the ordinary surface of her life. She said it plainly and she did not dress it up and she watched his face the whole time.

He listened.

He did not interrupt. He did not flinch or pull back or let his eyes change in the way eyes changed when something crossed a line a person had not known they had.

When she finished, the morning settled around them. The fountain kept running. The flowers were still open.

He stepped forward and took her face in both hands.

"I do not care what you are," he said.

He pressed his forehead against hers. His thumbs rested lightly on her cheekbones.

"You are my wife. You are carrying my child. And I love you." His voice dropped. "Every strange and impossible and beautiful part of you. All of it. I love all of it."

Helen’s eyes filled before she could stop them.

"So stop worrying," he said. He pulled back just enough to look at her properly. A small smile appeared at the corner of his mouth. "You are completely stuck with me."

She laughed.

A real one, coming from somewhere deep, making her whole belly shake with it. The laugh that only came when something inside her unclenched all at once without warning.

Then her face changed.

The laugh stopped. Midway through, just... stopped. The smile froze where it was. Her eyes went wide and dropped to her own body and then came back up to his face with an expression that was not any of the things they had just been talking about.

"Kai," she said.

He frowned. "What?"

She felt it. A long, low rush of warmth moving through her. A release of pressure from somewhere deep and central that had been building for days without her fully recognizing it for what it was.

"Kai."

"Yes, love." His voice shifted. The smile was gone. "What is wrong? Talk to me."

She looked down.

Then back up at him.

"The baby," she said. "The baby is coming."

Kai went pale.

Not gradually. All at once, the colour drained from his face like someone had pulled the stopper on it. He stared at her. "What?"

"I said," she said, her voice rising, "the baby is coming."

"Right now?"

"Yes, right now, Kai, what do you think I..."

The first real contraction hit.

It moved through her like a wave with weight behind it, starting low and radiating outward, and she grabbed his arm with both hands and pressed her teeth together and breathed through her nose until it passed.

He looked at her with the expression of a man who had faced enemy wolves and pack councils and his own father’s silence, and had never once in any of those situations looked this completely undone.

"What do I do?" he said. "What do I touch? What do I..."

"Kai." She said it through her teeth. "You are the Alpha of this entire pack. Act like it."

He snapped out of it.

He turned toward the guards at the entrance, both of whom had been trying very hard to look like they had heard nothing.

"Get my mother!" The Alpha voice, the full weight of it, filling the courtyard. "Get the healers! Get everyone in this building who knows what they are doing! The baby is coming!"

The guards were gone before he finished the sentence.

He turned back to Helen.

She was bent forward now, one hand on her belly, one still on his arm. The second contraction was already building, faster than she expected.

"What else?" he said. He was trying very hard to sound like a man in control of something. He was not succeeding.

"Pick me up," she said. "And stop standing there looking at me like I am something that is happening to you."

He scooped her up.

His hands were shaking. His arms were shaking. He had not noticed until he was already holding her that his entire body had made a decision to shake and had not consulted him about it first. He held her against his chest and turned toward the doors and his voice came out at a volume he had not planned.

"Move! Everyone move! Baby is coming! Get out of the way!"

The pack house erupted.

Servants appeared from doorways. Someone dropped something metal in a corridor and the sound of it echoed through the whole building. Doors flew open. Footsteps came from every direction. Somewhere above them, a window opened and someone called down to ask what was happening.

"The baby is coming!" Kai yelled up at them.

Helen pressed her face against his chest. "Kai," she said, muffled.

"The baby is coming!" He was carrying her through the corridor now, still yelling, his voice bouncing off the stone walls in every direction.

"Kai." Louder.

"The baby is coming! Move! Everyone move!"

"Kai!" She lifted her head. "Shut up!"

He looked down at her. Still moving. Still walking fast. His green eyes were wild.

"My baby is coming," he said. He said it as if she did not know. Like she was not the one it was coming from.

"I know," she said.

"My baby," he said again.

She stared at him.

Then despite everything... the pain, the shaking, the sound of the entire pack house losing its mind around them, she started laughing again. Short and breathless and completely involuntary.

He smiled. Wide and terrified and completely real.

He carried her through the doors and down the corridor and the sound of his voice kept echoing ahead of them, clearing the path, announcing to everyone within hearing distance the one true thing.

The baby was coming.

Nothing after this morning would ever be quite the same again.