Chapter 13: Four Heartbeats

“Your Majesty…” the royal healer whispered, her hand frozen above my stomach. “When was the last time you shared a Moon Bond with your mate?”

I felt every drop of blood leave my face.

“…Before he rejected me.”

The healer closed her eyes.

“Oh… Moon Goddess.”

⸻

I’d slipped out of my chambers before sunrise, careful to avoid Cassian’s watchful eyes and Orion’s early rounds, my bare feet silent against cold stone, my heart hammering the entire way down those corridors like I was doing something wrong instead of something necessary. I told myself the pulses in the garden had been exhaustion, nothing more.

I told the healer the same lie the moment I sat down across from her.

She didn’t believe it for a second, her eyes narrowing slightly even as her hands stayed gentle.

The moment she laid her silver crystals across my stomach, they lit up brighter than I’d ever seen them glow, throwing sudden light across the whole chamber, and her calm, professional expression cracked straight down the middle.

⸻

She checked again. Then again, hands shaking harder each time.

Moon magic circles began bleeding into existence on the floor around us, no one casting them, silver lines unspooling out of nothing. The air in the chamber turned uncomfortably warm. Every crystal in the room started humming in unison, a sound I felt in my teeth more than heard.

The healer took a slow step back from me, staring like she’d seen something out of legend rather than out of medicine.

She had … once, she told me later, in a manuscript locked away for centuries.

⸻

She knelt then. Not because I was Queen.

“You are with child,” she said quietly.

Silence swallowed the room.

I’d braced for illness. For stress, for some lingering wound from the rejected bond finally surfacing. Never this.

“My Queen… there is something I’ve never seen before.”

She checked the crystals a third time. They kept multiplying beneath her hands, refusing to settle into a number that made sense.

⸻

Her voice trembled on the next words, her hands still hovering above me like she was afraid to touch the crystals again.

“It isn’t one heartbeat…”

I gripped the arm of the chair hard enough to hurt, my knuckles white against the wood.

“It isn’t twins…”

The room tilted around me, the humming of the crystals climbing louder, my own pulse roaring in my ears.

“There are four.”

Everything in me went silent except for one name, ringing louder than anything else I could have thought in that moment, drowning out even my own fear.

Lucien.

The father of four children he didn’t even know existed, who’d rejected the mother of them in front of three hundred witnesses.

⸻

The healer pulled an ancient scroll from a locked case at the back of the chamber, her hands still unsteady as she unrolled it across the table between us, the parchment so old it crackled at the edges.

When the Chosen Queen carries the Four Children of the Eclipse, the Moon Throne shall awaken, and kingdoms shall either unite… or burn.

No queen in recorded history had carried four heirs. These weren’t simply royal children, not heirs in any ordinary sense of the word.

They were prophecy given breath.

She warned me, gently but plainly, that once their power grew strong enough to sense, every enemy who’d ever wanted me dead would feel it too, drawn like moths toward whatever light they carried.

They were already in danger, and they hadn’t drawn a single breath yet. I sat with that thought long after she’d rolled the scroll back up, my hand never once leaving my stomach.

⸻

I couldn’t breathe inside that chamber a moment longer. I fled into the Moon Gardens instead, walking without direction among silver blossoms while my wolf paced close at my side, more protective than I’d ever felt her, growling low at shadows that weren’t there.

I stopped beneath the largest tree and pressed both hands over my stomach, the bark cool against my back, dawn light barely starting to touch the highest branches.

“I’m all you have now,” I whispered.

Four small pulses answered beneath my palms, unmistakable, real, each one distinct from the others like four separate hearts learning to beat at once.

I sank onto the grass and finally broke … not from grief, though grief was tangled somewhere in it, twisted up with fear and fury and something achingly tender all at once. I cried because I had just discovered I already loved them completely, four heartbeats I’d known about for less than an hour, already more mine than anything else in this entire kingdom.

⸻

Something moved in the reflecting pool as I gathered myself, the water rippling without wind, without cause. Not my reflection.

Four children, running through moonlight, each wrapped in a different colored flame … gold, silver, violet, deep blue, their laughter carrying across water that shouldn’t have carried any sound at all. One turned and looked directly at me, small face achingly familiar, some echo of my own eyes staring back from a future I hadn’t lived yet.

“Mother… don’t trust the man with the silver crown.”

The vision vanished before I could ask him anything, water rippling smooth and empty again, leaving only my own startled reflection and a warning I had no way to place.

⸻

Orion found me still kneeling there, my hands pressed to my stomach, tears drying salt-streaked on my face, the sun just beginning to touch the tops of the garden walls.

He didn’t come as a king. He crossed the grass slowly, the way a father does, and crouched down in front of me, close enough that I could see the worry carved fresh into the lines around his eyes.

“Who hurt you this time?”

I almost told him everything. The healer, the scroll, the four small pulses that had already claimed every piece of my heart in the space of one morning.

Instead I only cried harder, my hands still guarding my stomach without my meaning them to, some instinct already fiercer than my own fear.

His eyes dropped to my hands and understanding moved across his face like a shadow crossing water.

⸻

“Felicia…” His voice had gone barely above a whisper.

His gaze moved from my face to my stomach and back again, searching for a denial I didn’t have.

“Please tell me I’m wrong.”

Before I could answer him either way, a guard came sprinting down the garden path, pale, breathless, terror written plain across his face.

“Your Majesty! We’ve captured the palace spy…”

He swallowed hard, chest heaving.

“…and he keeps demanding to see you because he says he knows who your children’s father is.”