Confession, Half of One

POV: Matteo

"I'm pregnant," I said.

The words fell into the room like something breaking, small and enormous all at once. The assistant's scanner lowered slightly in her hand, her professional composure faltering for just a second before she caught herself. Rhys went completely still.

"What," he said, quiet, like the single word had taken everything he had.

"I'm pregnant," I said again, my voice steadier the second time, though my hands were still shaking in his. "That's what I wasn't telling you. That's why I was nervous about the scan."

For a long moment, he didn't move at all. He just stared at me, something working behind his eyes too fast to read, and I braced myself for anything, disbelief, fear, the sharp control I'd glimpsed moments ago hardening back into something unreadable.

Instead his whole face broke open.

"You're certain," he said, his voice rough, thick with something I'd never once heard from him in two years of marriage.

"I took a test," I said. "A few days ago. I've been trying to find the right way to tell you."

"A child," he said, like he was tasting the word for the first time, testing whether it was real. "We're having a child."

"Yes," I said, and watched something in him come completely undone.

He pulled me into his arms before I'd finished the word, careful of the scanning equipment still set up around us, but not careful of anything else, holding me like he was afraid I might vanish if he loosened his grip even slightly.

"My lord," the assistant said gently, "perhaps I should give you both a moment. I can return once the initial scan can proceed, if you'd still like to confirm the pregnancy's progression through the equipment."

"Yes," Rhys said, not looking away from me. "Thank you. A moment."

She gathered her things quickly and slipped out, leaving us alone in the small examination room, his arms still wrapped tight around me, his face pressed into my hair.

"I don't know what to say," he murmured. "I don't know what I'm supposed to feel right now. It's too much. It's not enough words for what it actually is."

"You don't have to say anything," I said, my own voice unsteady now, the weight of the secret finally leaving my chest even as a dozen others stayed lodged there, unspoken.

He pulled back just enough to look at me, his hands framing my face with a reverence that made my chest ache. "I'm going to protect you," he said. "Both of you. I don't care what it takes."

"Rhys—"

"I mean it," he said, and something fierce entered his voice now, something that went beyond simple joy into territory that felt sharper, more urgent, almost frightened underneath the fierceness. "Nothing is going to happen to either of you. Not while I'm breathing."

"I know," I said, though the intensity of it unsettled me even as it warmed something starved and aching in my chest.

"You don't understand," he said, his grip on me tightening slightly. "I don't remember much of anything before the injury. But I remember enough, somewhere underneath all the fog, to know what it looks like when a family becomes something cold. Something transactional. I won't let that happen to us. I won't let our child grow up in a house where love gets rationed out like it's a resource in short supply."

"Rhys, you're scaring me a little," I admitted, quiet.

"I'm sorry," he said, gentling instantly, though the fierceness didn't fully leave his eyes. "I just need you to understand how serious I am about this. Whatever I was before, whoever that man was who apparently made you look at me the way you did those first few days after I woke, I refuse to become him again. I refuse to let our child ever wonder if they're loved."

I stood there in his arms, the confession sitting heavy and unfinished in my chest, everything I hadn't told him pressing against the back of my teeth. Dave's admission. The greenhouse. The flicker of real memory I'd caught behind his eyes days ago. All of it sat there, silent, while he held me like I was the only solid thing left in a world that kept threatening to take everyone he loved from him.

"I want to be different," he said, quieter now, some of the fierceness settling into something more raw and honest. "I want to be the kind of husband, the kind of father, who doesn't make the people who love him feel like they have to earn every scrap of attention. I don't fully understand why that feels so urgent to me. I just know it does. Somewhere underneath everything I've lost, that feels like the one thing I remember clearly."

"You will be," I said, my voice breaking slightly. "You already are."

He kissed my forehead, slow, deliberate, his hand resting protectively over my stomach now, something almost worshipful in the gesture.

"I won't let anything take you from me again," he said.

The word landed wrong before I'd even fully processed it, a small, sharp splinter working its way under everything else in the room. Again.

Not I won't let anything happen to you. Not I won't let anything take you from me. Again.

The word of a man who remembered almost losing something once already. Not the word of someone with no memory of ever fearing that loss at all.

I stood frozen in his arms, the warmth of the moment curdling slightly around the edges, that single word sitting impossible and unmistakable in the space between us, and I couldn't decide if he'd heard himself say it at all.

Rhys sat with the shape of what he'd just promised, the words still echoing in his own chest, warm and certain and entirely his to give. He hadn't planned to say it that way. It had simply arrived, whole and unbidden, the way certain feelings sometimes did lately, arriving fully formed from somewhere he couldn't name and couldn't quite trust either.

He held Matteo tighter, breathing in the moment, the joy of it too large to examine too closely. If some small, careful part of him noted the word he'd chosen, the specific shape of the fear underneath it, he didn't let himself look at it directly. Not yet. Not while there was still this, still Matteo warm and real in his arms, still a child neither of them had asked for but both of them, impossibly, already wanted.