3

Elara pov

I checked the study first, since that's where he went to think when he didn't want to be found. His desk sat exactly as he'd left it that morning — border reports, his reading glasses folded shut. No sign he'd been back.

My stomach dropped a little. If he wasn't here, he was still with her. I hated how fast my mind went there. I hated more that it was probably right.

The family suites had always been in the east wing — his brother's old rooms. Lamp light showed under one door. I was halfway down the hall when it opened on its own and Seraphine stepped out in a robe that hadn't been tied with any urgency, hair mussed in a way that told its own story.

She saw me and didn't flinch. If anything her whole body relaxed, like this was exactly what she'd been hoping for.

"Looking for him?" A slow smile. "Why won't you just give up?"

I kept my voice level, though my heart was doing something frantic. "Because I want to hear it from him. Not you. We made vows never to betray each other."

She laughed — low, contemptuous. "*Fated mates.*" Like the words tasted strange in her mouth. "You actually still believe that."

She let the robe fall open at the shoulder. Sheer lingerie underneath, and along her neck, unmistakable marks. A mating bite, dark and fresh.

"He's already claimed me," she said, watching my face for a reaction. "It won't be long before he lets you go completely, and everyone will act like it was inevitable. Because it was. You should start getting used to that now."

Something low and furious rose in my chest, a growl I felt more than heard. I stared at the mark on her neck like staring hard enough could undo it.

She stepped closer, and I did something I hadn't planned — one arm curled across my stomach on instinct.

Her eyes caught it instantly. "What," she said, all the theater dropping out of her voice. "Are you pregnant too?"

"No." I lowered my arm slowly, like the gesture had meant nothing.

She studied me a second longer, apparently satisfied, and the mask slid back into place.

"Good. You'd better not be. No one's taking my place. Not you, not anyone. I've worked too hard for it."

I was genuinely stunned by how plainly she'd said it — no more grieving-widow act, just ambition standing three feet away in a bathrobe at one in the morning.

I never saw the shove coming.

Her hands hit my shoulders harder than I would've guessed she had in her, and the stairs came up before I'd registered I was falling. Falling is strange — it feels slow even when it isn't. I remember the color of the carpet runner, remember thinking I hadn't finished my sentence yet, and then the pain arrived everywhere at once.

I hit the landing hard enough that the breath went out of me. For a second there was just white noise and the taste of copper where I'd bitten my tongue, and underneath it one thought looping — *the baby, please, not the baby* — my arms curling around my own middle even as the world blurred.

Above me, she dropped to sit on the top step, both hands on her own stomach, screaming.

"I'm in labor! Somebody help, the babies are coming!"

Footsteps pounded from the hallway almost immediately — he'd been closer than I wanted to believe. Ronan rounded the corner at a run and didn't look at me once. He scooped her up, her cries dissolving instantly into soft whimpers against his chest, and was already turning for the front door.

As he passed, close enough that his boot nearly caught my dress, I felt something warm spreading under my hip.

I grabbed for his arm anyway. "Our baby," I said, voice cracking. "I'm really pregnant. My belly hurts. Take me too."

He looked down at me — actually looked, finally — and what was on his face wasn't concern. It was irritation. Like I was throwing a tantrum at the worst possible time.

"You're joking right now? Get up. Help me get her to the hospital."

He pulled free and kept moving, and within a few seconds the front door and the car engine swallowed up whatever I might have said.

I lay there with blood spreading slowly under me, staring at the ceiling of a house I'd lived in five years, and understood, clearly, for the first time without anything softening it, exactly where I ranked.

It's a strange thing, grieving someone while they're still alive and twenty feet away. I kept waiting for the man from the garden to come back — the one who used to say my name like it meant something specific. He didn't come back down those stairs. Lying there, I wasn't sure anymore that he ever really had been that man in the first place.

It was the butler, gray-haired and long past the age he should've been carrying anyone, who found me a few minutes later and couldn't bring himself to just step over me the way everyone else in that house apparently could. He lifted me himself, apologizing the whole way to the car, like the indignity of it were somehow his fault.