LOGINChapter 52 — Helena's POV"The cook has quit again, madam.""Third time this month." I didn't look up from the newspaper. "Tell her the raise is still on the table and the soufflé is still her responsibility.""She says it isn't the soufflé. She says it's the crying.""Everyone cries in this house. It's a family tradition." I turned the page. "Send up coffee. The strong kind. My son will need it."My assistant, a long-suffering young woman named Corinne who had survived four years in my employ through a combination of competence and an uncanny ability to appear invisible, retreated with a murmured *yes, madam*. I returned to the front page of the *Regional Courier*, where, as promised, my son's handiwork sat in a tidy column above the fold.*A Luna's Convenient Climb: Did Ofiura Voss Trade Up?*I read it once, slowly, the way one reads a letter from a tax office. The prose was serviceable. The insinuations were thin. The photograph, a grainy shot of Ofiura at a charity luncheon with N
Chapter 51 — Damon's POV"Smile, darling. They're looking."Patricia's lips barely moved when she said it, her hand tucked into the crook of my arm and her face tilted up in an expression of such soft, devoted adoration that anyone watching would have sworn we'd been in love for years. I smiled. I'd been smiling for two hours. My jaw ached."I am smiling.""You're baring your teeth." She squeezed my elbow. "Try again."I tried again. Somewhere across the ballroom, a photographer lifted his camera, and I turned my best angle toward him and slid my arm around my wife's waist. She wasn't my wife, not technically. The paperwork was still waiting on a lawyer's desk and a date I'd kept postponing. But the cameras didn't know that, and neither did the people drinking my champagne.The Harvest Gala was the kind of evening my family had hosted for forty years. Crystal chandeliers, a string quartet, Alphas and their Lunas in carefully chosen silk. My father used to say that a gala wasn't a par
Chapter 50 — Ofiura's POV"You're late.""I'm four minutes early." Nikolai glanced at his watch, then back at me, with the expression of a man who knew exactly what he was doing. "You're the one who's been standing outside this restaurant for ten.""I wasn't standing. I was observing.""Observing what?""Whether you'd be punctual." I tilted my chin, and the corner of his mouth lifted. "You passed. Barely."It was Friday. He'd promised me dinner, properly this time, and for once there was no crisis to cut it short. Maren sat at a corner table pretending to read a menu, three tables away and close enough that I could feel her watching. I'd stopped minding. It was a small price for a night that felt almost ordinary.The restaurant was the same one where I'd first told him I'd choose him. Candlelight, white linen, a waiter who'd learned within a week not to hover. Nikolai pulled out my chair, and I let him, because I'd decided weeks ago that accepting a courtesy wasn't the same as surren
Chapter 49 — Ofiura's POV"You're doing it again.""Doing what?""Reading the same page of that report and not turning it." Nikolai didn't look up from his own laptop, which sat open on my kitchen counter, the screen throwing pale light across his jaw. "You've been on it for twenty minutes.""I'm thinking.""You're staring.""It's the same thing." I closed the folder anyway and pushed it away, resting my forearms on the table. The apartment was quiet around us, the kind of quiet that only came after a long day. Maren had gone to her own place across the hall an hour ago with a polite nod and a plate of the leftovers I'd pressed on her. Outside, the evening had turned blue and soft.It was the first night in nearly a week that Nikolai had stayed for dinner without anyone threatening anyone, and I was surprised how much I wanted to keep it that way."Come here," I said.His head came up. "Is that a request?""It's an invitation. You can decline.""I'm not going to decline." He closed th
Chapter 48 — Ofiura's POV"Everything looks perfect."The doctor said it with such cheerful certainty that I almost didn't believe her. She was a small, round woman in her fifties with silver bangles and no interest at all in who my baby's father was, which was exactly why I'd chosen her. She tilted the monitor toward me, and there it was, a tiny flicker of light in a field of gray, so rapid and so determined that my throat closed."Strong heartbeat," she said. "Right on schedule. Whatever you were worried about, this one's not bothered.""I used a lot of energy two nights ago." I'd practiced the sentence in the car, careful not to say more than I had to. "Something stressful. I wanted to be sure.""Stress is hard on mothers and generally very easy on babies." She patted my knee. "Rest, water, and no more standing between large men and furniture. Is that clear?"I laughed, startled, and she grinned at me like she'd known exactly what she was saying.Nikolai had waited in the corridor
Chapter 47 — Ofiura's POV"Eat the eggs.""I'm not hungry.""You're growing a person. That wasn't a suggestion." My mother set the plate in front of me with a firmness she wouldn't have dared use three months ago, then returned to the stove, her split lip hidden under a thin coat of concealer she'd applied with more care than the occasion deserved. "I made them the way you like. Soft, with the cheese."I looked at the eggs. I looked at the sun slanting through her small kitchen window, at the chipped blue mug she'd carried out of my stepfather's house in her handbag, at the second blanket still folded on the couch where I'd barely slept. Everything looked ordinary. Everything felt like it belonged to somebody else's morning.I picked up the fork."Good girl," she said, and I rolled my eyes, and for a moment we were just a mother and a daughter who happened to be bad at mornings.It didn't last. It never did, these days. I ate three bites, set the fork down, and caught my own reflecti







