5.

ELLARIA.

He was staring up at me with Arren's exact greyish blue eyes in his tiny face and my brain kept trying to make it add up and failing every single time. 

He was just a child. 

A child who happened to have greyish blue eyes that looked eerily identical to my husbands. 

I needed to stop, I needed to breathe, I needed to get a hold of myself before I completely fell apart over something that wasn't even real.

I crouched down to his level and kept my voice as steady as I could manage. "How old are you?"

He held up four fingers, very proud about it. "I’m four this year."

My chest pulled in a way I wasn't ready for. "And where are your... mummy and daddy, little guy?"

"The clinic." He was already eyeing the path behind me for something more interesting.

The relief hit me instantly. 

The pack clinic. 

His parents were clinic staff. Healers, probably, or maybe some of the nurses. He wasn’t Arren and Katerina’s. I'd let my emotions lead me to think insane things.

But sue me, I was thrown and pregnant and off my game. 

I was still looking at him though, studying his small open face. And before I knew what was happening my hand drifted down to my stomach.

They’d one day be four years old too. 

He grabbed two of my fingers without warning, "Play hide and seek with me." He was already scoping the grass like he'd done this a hundred times.

Something other than the surprise in my chest gave in all at once. "O-Okay."

He absolutely beamed. "You hide and I count to a hundred, and you have to hide really well because I always find people. I have never not found someone."

"I believe you," I said, with complete seriousness. 

He slapped both hands over his eyes and started counting with the kind of intense focus that only a four year old can bring to something like hide and seek. I slipped around the corner near the east stairwell, pressed my back flat against the wall, and for the first time since this morning I just breathed.

The corridor was quiet around me. 

His small voice carried through the stillness as he counted, and for a few seconds I let everything else fall away. 

This was the calmest I’d been all day.

Then heavier footsteps came from the far end of the hall.

Adult ones.

My whole body locked up as I tilted my head to see who was approaching. 

And then my heart stopped beating in an instant. 

Arren came around the corner first and Katerina was right beside him, close enough that their arms kept brushing as they walked. 

It was close and intimate. 

And I hated to be a fly on the wall with a front row seat. It was like the goddess was out to punish me. 

I pressed further into the shadow and held every single breath inside my chest.

"Did she drink it?" Katerina sounded almost bored, like she was asking about something she'd already moved past. "The medicine you gave her?"

Something cold dropped straight through my stomach.

Were they talking about me?

“Of course she did,” Arren said, just as lightly. "And she was very obedient about it." 

Katerina laughed softly. “This may be off topic, but I’m curious. Does Ellaria want to have kids of her own? Perhaps maybe even... with you?”

Arren’s first response was a darkly amused scoff that pierced my heart better than a bullet, “She can want all she wants. I’ll never have children with her.” 

He said it the way you state the time of day. 

Simple and completely certain, like it was a fact so settled it didn't even need feeling attached to it.

And I was carrying his children.

My hands pressed to my stomach and I felt my heart rip into itself.

Did this mean that the pills I’d swallowed without a single question every day for months because they came from my husband were actually from Katerina?

He’d been feeding me his mistresses pills?

Because she asked him to?

My hand was over my mouth before I knew it had moved there. Tears were running down my face before I even felt them start to fall.

"Why are you crying?"

The little boy was standing right in front of me. He was looking up at me with wide open concern, completely unbothered by the fact that he'd discovered a crying woman hiding in an alcove like it was the most normal thing in the world.

I couldn't speak, instead I reached out and took his outstretched hand. 

“Dalor!” Katerina called shrilly, “I told you not to stray to far!”

The boy let go of my hand and ran toward Katerina, “Coming, Mommy!”

Mommy?

I heard the soft thud of him colliding with someone and Katerina's delighted laugh. 

Then his voice came back to me, slightly muffled like his face was pressed into something. I looked over the bend and found his little arms wrapped around Arren’s legs. "Daddy. What were you talking about? You said I'm your only child."

What...?

"Yes." Arren's voice came out soft and unguarded, carrying something warm and certain that I had spent four years trying to be on the receiving end of. "Having you is enough."

So that meant...?

My legs stopped holding me up.

I went down right there on the floor of that alcove and I pulled my knees to my chest and I sobbed as quietly as I have ever done anything, one hand pressed flat against my stomach, against those two tiny lives growing inside me, against the children whose father had just said having someone else's child was enough.

He already had a child. 

He had a little boy with his eyes and his whole unguarded heart.

It wasn’t that he never wanted children. 

It was that he never wanted mine. 

He had looked at my face every single day for four years carrying this knowledge and handed me those pills every morning and looked me in the eye while he did it.

"I was playing in the bushes with a girl," The little boy's voice drifted back to me, sharing his discovery. "A sad one."

Silence thickened the night air as he said that.

Katerina asked Arrren, "Do random strangers lurk around the pack house?"

Arren's voice sharpened immediately. "Who's there?"

He stepped in front of Katerina and Dalor and put himself between them and the dark, and I watched it through vision so blurred I could barely see. 

And something about that... about him shielding them the way he had never once thought to shield me, finished what was left of my tears completely.

He had never once stood in front of me like that. 

He’d never once protected me like that. 

He’d never devoted himself to me ever. 

He’d used me. Did his mistresses’ bidding. Embarrassed me in front of our entire pack. Had an affair behind my back.

And now... 

He wanted to discard me?

I looked down at the pregnancy report crumpled and damp in my fist.

His footsteps were getting closer, and everything in me that had spent four years learning to survive quietly wanted to run, to slip out into the evening air and go home. 

To honor the remaining months of our deal and leave quietly once we were done. 

But I was so tired of being the only honest person in this.

He had started this transaction.

He could watch me end it.

I stood up, smoothed out the pregnancy report with shaking fingers, and stepped out of the clearing.

The light landed on all three of their faces at once. 

Katerina's expression was so triumphant it left a bitter taste in my mouth. 

And Arren went very still, watching me with an emotion behind his eyes that I was done trying to read. "What are you doing here?" His voice came out measured.

I looked at him. At the little boy with his eyes holding Katerina's hand. At Katerina standing there behind his shoulder, glowing as he treated me like I was less than nothing. 

At the crumpled report in my own trembling hand that I’d been trying to give him for the last two days! 

“I heard everything you said and I don’t want to believe it.” I cried out into the night air, “ I know it can’t possibly be true. What are you talking about, Arren?” I gestured between him and the perfect image of a family that stared right back at me, “Who is that boy to you?”