LOGINDo you guys also think Jayden should reject Victor and have it over with..?
🖱️ Jayden 🖱️"Will you two stop hiding over there and come join us," I called across the garden, waving Sammy and Victor over from where they'd been standing close together near the colonnade for the better part of twenty minutes.They separated, both looking faintly caught out, and made their way over Sammy dropping down onto the grass beside me with a groan for his still-healing leg, Victor settling more carefully across from us, close enough to Jane that she immediately swatted his shoulder for stealing one of her notes just to read it upside down."We weren't hiding," Sammy said, entirely unconvincingly."You were absolutely hiding," Jane said. "Whispering sweet nothings while the rest of us do actual work.""It wasn't sweet nothings," Victor said, mock-offended. "It was very important, emotionally significant conversation.""Sure it was."We fell into easy bickering for a while, Jane's notes finally abandoned in favor of simply existing together in the warm afternoon sun, and e
🖱️ Sammy 🖱️Victor and I stood together near the colonnade, watching Jayden and Jane from a comfortable distance, the two of them still bent over Jane's scattered notes, laughing quietly about something I couldn't quite hear."How can someone want to hurt something so perfect," Victor said quietly, watching Jayden with an expression that had settled somewhere between wonder and old, familiar grief."Because they hate perfection," I said. "Anything that whole, that good, existing so effortlessly it makes cruelty feel justified to people who've never once managed to build anything half as beautiful themselves."Victor glanced at me, something surprised flickering behind his eyes. "That was almost poetic. Should I be concerned?""I contain multitudes," I said, and was rewarded with a small, tired laugh.We stood in comfortable silence for a while, watching Jayden gesture animatedly at something in Jane's notes, watching the easy, familiar warmth between the two of them that ten years o
🖱️ Jayden 🖱️"Do you think you can still carry out the ritual tomorrow?" I asked, watching Jane carefully over the rim of my tea. "Now that you're pregnant, I mean. Given everything Wren's old notes suggested about how much it might actually demand from everyone participating."Jane looked at me, one eyebrow arched so high it nearly vanished into her hairline."Please," she said, "do not tell me you're about to start looking at me like I'm suddenly made of glass.""I'm not—""You are absolutely gearing up for it. I can see it happening in real time, Jayden. The careful voice. The concerned eyebrows. I recognize the exact symptoms because I performed them myself, at you, roughly four days ago."I laughed despite myself, some of the tension easing out of my shoulders. "Fine. I'm concerned. Is that allowed?""Concerned is allowed. Fragile-glass-treatment is not." She set down her own cup with brisk, decisive precision. "I am pregnant, not incapacitated. I've read every single one of Wr
🖱️ Jayden 🖱️Jane found me in the garden after breakfast, the same quiet courtyard where everything with Victor had first started unraveling days earlier, though this morning it simply felt peaceful, sunlight warm across the stone benches, the scorch marks near the far wall the only remaining evidence of how violently that peace had already been tested once."There you are," she said, dropping onto the bench beside me with a groan that sounded more exhausted than dramatic. "I was starting to think Sammy's mother had adopted you permanently and I'd need to schedule visitation.""She might, honestly." I smiled, some of the morning's warmth still lingering pleasantly in my chest. "She's already threatened to teach me three new recipes before she leaves.""Terrifying.""Deeply."We sat together in comfortable silence for a while, the kind that had grown easy between us over ten years of exactly this quiet mornings, shared exhaustion, the particular unspoken understanding that came from
🖱️ Sammy 🖱️I watched my father laugh at something Victor said, easy and unguarded, and felt the same strange, disorienting ache I always felt watching him like this grateful, and still, somewhere underneath the gratitude, a little bit furious that it had taken losing everything he knew for him to finally become the man sitting at this table.He hadn't always been like this.I remembered, with a clarity that never quite faded no matter how many years passed, the exact night he found out Jayden was my mate and the public nuisance he made out of it. And how I rejected my Jayden breaking us both. Then months of a careful, cold distance that had nothing to do with silence and everything to do with disappointment worn like armor, a werewolf king who'd apparently decided his own son's happiness mattered considerably less than whatever legacy he'd imagined for me before I'd ruined it by simply being myself.He made me feel so useless and u wanted, he didn't fully know how to forgive, and s
🖱 Victor 🖱I stopped in the kitchen doorway the moment I saw her, some old, defensive instinct rising up before I'd even registered why.Sammy's mother stood at the counter, flour dusted across her forearms, humming quietly to herself while she worked, and the sheer, easy domesticity of the scene felt almost jarring against everything I'd survived over the last several days. She looked up the moment we entered, and her eyes found me immediately,m assessing in a way that reminded me, uncomfortably, of every royal audience I'd ever endured in my old life.I braced myself for judgment."There he is," she said instead, setting down her wooden spoon and crossing the kitchen with startling speed for a woman who looked entirely too delicate to move that fast. "The infamous Victor."Before I could formulate a proper response, she'd pulled me into a hug.I stood there, stunned, arms hovering awkwardly at my sides for a full second before some instinct finally kicked in and I hugged her back,







