Romane von Ziri Ink

RowanShe was nineteen weeks when I felt it.I'd been warned. Lake had read four books on the subject and delivered a summary nobody asked for, the medical woman had described it as a flutter, a bubble, a tiny fish turning over. None of it prepared me for lying in the dark with my hand on Athena's stomach and something knocking back.I stopped breathing."Did you," I said."Yes." Her voice was soft and kind of wondering. "That's the third one tonight. She's showing off.""She?""I don't know. Amara says she." Athena shifted onto her side so my palm stayed where it was. "Amara also said the baby told her.""The baby told her.""Through the wall of my stomach. Apparently she's very chatty."I laughed, and the knock came again, right under my fingers, as if it had heard. Something in my chest went loose and strange. Six years ago I wasn't there for any of it. I didn't feel Amara turn over for the first time, I didn't know there was a Amara. I'd lain awake in a palace three days' drive aw

AthenaThe sickness hit at eleven weeks and it hit like a door.I'd forgotten. That's the stupid part. Five years of telling myself I remembered every detail of Amara, and I'd somehow filed away the nausea as a minor inconvenience instead of what it actually was, which was a personal vendetta carried out by my own body.I threw up in the shop sink on a Wednesday morning with a client waiting. Marco from the old human quarter, of all people, who had come to Valeria for a visit and decided I owed him a touch up. He stood there holding a paper towel, looking like he wanted to be anywhere else."You okay?" he said."Great," I said into the basin. "Wonderful. Give me a minute.""Should I get someone?""Please don't."He got someone. Of course he did. Within four minutes Rowan was in the shop doorway, slightly out of breath, pretending he'd just happened to be passing by on the other side of the palace."I'm fine," I said."You're green.""It's my natural glow."He crossed the room, took th

RowanThe first assessment day was a Tuesday, and Bren was early.I found him at the training yard gate at seven with a boy beside him, eleven, thin, all elbows and knees, wearing clothes that were clearly his best. The kid held himself like someone who'd been told to behave and was trying so hard it made his shoulders shake."Alpha," Bren said, stiff."Bren." I looked at the boy. "Who's this?""Tobi." The boy said it before Bren could. His voice cracked on it. "I'm Tobi.""Good name." I held out my hand and he shook it like a very small, very serious diplomat. "Luna's inside. She's been here since five.""Since five?" Bren said."She doesn't sleep much lately."That was true, though I left out why. We hadn't made the pregnancy public beyond the council and the palace, and I wasn't about to give Bren more to chew on than his nephew.Inside, Athena had turned the east training hall into something that didn't look like a pack hall at all. No ranks painted on the floor, no shift-line mar

AthenaI told my father on a Sunday, over the phone, with Amara sitting on my feet.I'd rehearsed it. Three different openings, one funny, one careful, one that was basically just the word pregnant said very fast. In the end I said "Father, I need you to sit down" and heard him go still on the other end."Is it Amara?""No. No, she's fine, she's right here eating my sock.""I'm not eating it," Amara said. "I'm chewing it a little.""Athena.""I'm pregnant." It came out smaller than I meant it to.Nothing. Not a breath. For maybe five seconds I thought the line had dropped, and then I heard a sound I'd never heard from my father in twenty eight years. It was wet and cracked in the middle, like something he'd kept shut for a very long time had finally been pried open."Father?""I'm here." His voice was thick. "I'm here, angel. Give me a moment."I gave him several. Amara looked up at me with her whole face scrunched, mouthing is grandfather sad, and I shook my head and mouthed no, and

RowanI stood behind her chair and kept my hands to myself.That was the whole job. She had asked for it exactly that way, behind, not beside, and I understood why. If I stood next to her, the council would see a Luna with an Alpha holding her up. If I stood behind, they would see a Luna with a kingdom at her back. Small difference. Wolves read small differences for a living.The chamber was full. Cain at the head of the long table, Marsh with his hands folded, Bren three seats down looking like he'd already decided to dislike whatever came out of her mouth. Lake by the door pretending to be furniture.Athena had the good notebook open in front of her. She hadn't looked at it once."I'm going to tell you something first," she said. "Then I'll tell you what I want."Nobody moved."I grew up in Silverthorne being called a curse. Not by everyone. By enough." Her voice was flat, steady. "I had no wolf. I couldn't shift. I couldn't run with the pack, and I was told so, often, by people who

AthenaI found the notebook under the bed.Not the drawing one, the other one, the good one, which I'd been keeping in the studio drawer since the ceremony. Somebody had moved it. I knew exactly who, because the corner of a page was folded down, and I only know one person who folds corners to mark where she stopped reading.I sat on the floor with it in my lap and wasn't even angry.It was open to the page where I'd written the ceremony words, the crossed out parts and the rewritten parts, all of it messy, nothing neat. Underneath, in huge uneven pencil that went off the edge of the line, Amara had written: I LIKE THIS ONE BEST.I read it three times.She was in the garden with Peri and I could hear her through the window, bossing something around, probably a wolf. I should have gone down and told her not to touch my things. I didn't. I sat there with the notebook and my back against the bed frame and thought about how many nights she'd watched me write in it and said nothing, and wha

LEON'S POVThree weeks.That was how long it took for the immediate noise to settle into something manageable.Not gone. These things didn't go. They just found their level, stopped being the loudest thing in every room, started existing alongside ordinary life rather than instead of it.Stefena's case was moving through the proper channels. Her lawyers were doing what lawyers did, which was slow everything down and construct the most defensible version of events from whatever material remained. Carter's statement was on record and couldn't be undone, which meant the defence had a specific shape to work around rather than an open field.It would take time. Everything took time.Justin had found an apartment in the city.Not the Romano estate, not anything connected to the family name. A quiet place on the east side that he'd found himself and paid for himself, which told me everything I needed to know about where his head was. He'd accepted the introduction to the family lawyer, the l

KATE'S POVWe went back to the villa that evening.Not dramatically. No conversation leading up to it, no decision announced. Leon just took the turning that led toward the private road and the gates opened the way they always did and we pulled into the driveway and got out.I stood for a moment looking at the building.It looked the same as it had the first night I'd arrived here in a wedding dress I hadn't chosen, in a marriage I hadn't agreed to, with a man I'd spent most of my life deciding I hated.Same villa. Everything else different.The kitchen window had been replaced while we were gone. Someone had arranged it quietly and efficiently, the way things in Leon's world got arranged, and you'd never know from looking at it that two nights ago someone had thrown a brick through it while we stood on the other side.I noticed it and said nothing.Leon noticed me noticing.Also said nothing.We went inside.The house had the specific quality of somewhere that had been empty for a da

LEON'S POVI read Justin's message twice.Then I put my phone in my pocket and stood on the bottom step of the Romano estate looking at the car waiting for us at the gate and thought about Carter Romano sitting somewhere in this city having made a statement last night that couldn't be taken back.Wanting to meet me.Kate was beside me. Not pushing. Not filling the silence with suggestions. Just present in the way she'd learned to be present, which was one of the things about her I'd stopped being able to imagine being without."You don't have to," she said."I know.""Not today. Not this week. Not on anyone else's timeline.""I know that too," I said.She waited.I looked at the gate. At the city beyond it. At the ordinary Saturday afternoon existing completely outside whatever was happening inside me."I want to," I said. "That's the strange part. After everything. After the letter and the bail and the medical records used as leverage." I paused. "I still want to sit across from him

KATE'S POVThe room stayed quiet for longer than was comfortable.Leon wasn't moving. Wasn't speaking. Just sitting with what Stefena had said and the particular stillness that came over him when something had landed deeper than his composure could immediately address.I kept my hand on his arm. Didn't say anything. Just kept it there.Stefena was looking at him with an expression I'd been slowly learning to read over the past two days. It wasn't the cold authoritative face she'd worn at that dinner table weeks ago. It wasn't the stripped down version from the anonymous house either. Something else. Something that had decided to be honest regardless of what that cost her in the room.Oliver had gone very still across from us."How," Leon said finally. His voice came out even. The kind of even that had considerable effort behind it."Fiona told me when she came to work here," Stefena said. "Not immediately. I found documents she'd kept. A copy of the DNA result." She paused. "I confron

LEON'S POVOliver Gentry and my mother.I turned that over in the car and couldn't find an angle that made obvious sense. They had no prior connection, no shared history, no logical reason to be sitting in the same house together the morning after everything that had happened.Unless."He went to her," Kate said beside me. Reading the same silence I was sitting in. "After the press conference. After his statement at the police station." She paused. "He went to Stefena.""Why.""Because she's the only person in this situation who knows what it feels like to have done something you can't undo and have to keep living inside it." Kate looked at the window. "Oliver made choices this week he's going to carry for a long time. Natalie, the press conference, using what he knew the way he used it." A pause. "Maybe he needed someone who understood that specific weight."I thought about that.It wasn't wrong.Stefena Romano had spent decades living inside a decision she couldn't undo. She underst

KATE'S POVHe handed me the phone without saying anything.I read it.Read it again.Then I looked at Leon and he looked back at me and we sat on that bench in that ordinary park on that ordinary Tuesday afternoon with something extraordinary sitting between us on a screen.There's a DNA result you haven't seen. Not Jared's. A different match entirely. One that changes everything you think you know about where you came from."Call her," I said.He was already dialing.It rang four times. Five. I counted without meaning to, the way you counted things when you needed something to do with the part of your mind that wasn't waiting.She answered on the sixth."Fiona." Leon's voice was level. Controlled. The version of him that appeared when something significant was happening and falling apart wasn't an option. "Explain this."I leaned slightly closer. Not enough to crowd him. Just enough to hear.Fiona's voice came through quietly. She sounded like someone who had been sitting with a deci