Chapter 4 A MONTH

CHAPTER FOUR

DARIUS

A month passes and I mark it not by counting days but by the way she has changed.

Her hands are different. Competent now, capable of things they could not do six weeks ago.

She moves through our usual routine without being asked. She anticipates what needs doing before I have thought of it.

She is already reaching for the firewood when I am still pulling on my boots, already checking the roof joints when I am halfway through breakfast.

I watch her do these things and do not say anything about it because making it a moment would ruin it.

I have changed too, though I examine this less directly.

The pack instincts that ran everything at Mooncrest: the status, hierarchy, the constant low-level awareness of where I stood relative to everyone else have gone somewhere quieter out here.

Honestly, I do not miss them. That is the part I do not want to examine too closely.

I think about everything that happened. I would be lying to myself if I said I didn't.

I think about it when she is not watching... when I am out in the trees alone with the gun, the silence and nothing requiring my attention except the next step.

I think about Mooncrest, Marcus, my mother, the border stones and all of it.

But I do not let it swallow me whole because I know what that would cost.

I have watched what it does to a person. I spent ten days watching it do it to her. I am not going to let it do it to me.

I need to be here. I need to be fully here.

The only thing that matters out in this forest is whether we eat, whether we stay warm, whether she is safe.

It is the most uncomplicated version of myself I have ever lived inside and most days that is enough to keep me moving.

The routine still holds.

We go hunting in the mornings. Building and maintenance in the afternoons. Fire at night.

At night she talks. I have noticed this... that she does it more easily after dark, when the fire is the only light and the forest has gone quiet around us.

She talks about the roads.

"Tell me about Jax," I say one evening, because she has mentioned the name twice and stopped short both times.

She is quiet for a second. Then: "Jax was my road captain. He's the one who kept the Reapers from falling apart whenever someone decided to be an idiot."

She pulls her knees up. "He was the first real friend I had. Not school friends or neighbour kids but someone who actually chose me."

"How did you meet?"

"In a bar fight." She says it flatly. "Not mine. Someone was going after a girl outside and I got involved. Jax pulled me out before it got worse and told me I had terrible technique and offered to show me better."

The corner of her mouth moves. "I told him I didn't need his help. He said obviously not, but did I want it anyway."

I watch her face in the firelight. "And?"

"And I said yes." She shrugs. "He was right about the technique."

I listen and she keeps talking about the Reapers, about the first long ride she took alone, seventeen years old with her mother's jacket, a full tank and nowhere to be.

She talks about the way the road opened up at night with just the air rushing past, the moon above smiling down at her, the long empty lane stretching out in front of her and nothing required of her at the other end of it.

"That feeling," she says, and then stops.

"What about it?"

She looks at the fire. "It was the only time everything went quiet in my head. All of it just stopped." She pauses. "I haven't felt that since then."

I understand, sitting there, what she gave up when she crossed that border.

And the understanding sits uncomfortably because she would not have been anywhere near exiled if she had not gone to Midnight Academy on a revenge mission that turned into something she never planned for, and now she is here with mud still under her fingernails, cracked hands, a roof made of leaves, and she has not once — not once in a month — said she wished she had done it differently.

I do not know what to do with that.

So I just listen, and let her talk, and keep the fire going.

One ordinary morning she sits up from the branch bed and kisses, "Good morning."

I kissed her on her lips before she could turn away like she always does, *Did you sleep well?"

She nods, stretches, stands up and heads for the door.

Then she stops abruptly. Her hand goes to her stomach. She turns fast and gets through the door. I hear her retching outside.

I am on my feet before the sound finishes.

I stand in the middle of the hut and go very still. My eyes are wide. My mind is moving very fast through something I do not fully want to arrive at yet.

Beside me, Atlas is not still at all... Atlas is pacing, purring in short bursts, doing absolutely nothing to help me think.

She comes back through the door wiping her mouth, her face pale, her eyes watering slightly from the effort of it.

I cross to her and take her arm, help her back to the bed and sit her down.

I sat beside her.

My wolf instinct and smell was so high that I could feel it. I could feel it inside her.

Atlas was purring crazily and pacing about.

I take her hand not wanting to believe it even though it's staring right into my face.

She looks at me. "What is wrong with you? Why are you making that face?"

I blink. "What face?"

"That face." She waves her free hand at me vaguely. "And you're doing the pheromone thing. I can smell it."

I almost laughed. I press my mouth together and ask her, as levelly as I can manage, "When did you've your last cycle?"

She looks at me and thinks about it. "Before we crossed the border." She pauses. "I think the living conditions of this place are delaying it."

I shake my head slowly.

She stares at me.

I take her hand and move it, very gently, and cup it against her stomach with my hand over hers. I look at her face and say, "You're carrying little Ravenna. Or little Darius. Whichever one the foetus decides to be."

She stares at our hands. Then she looks up at me. "You're joking right? Darius, you're not saying what I'm thinking."

I shake my head.

"Darius." Her voice comes out smaller than usual. "You're joking. Just say you're joking."

"Why do you think Atlas is going insane?"

As if on cue, Atlas does another full circuit of my mind, purring so loudly I can feel it behind my sternum.

She looks at me and her expression is doing several things at once... disbelief, fear and something underneath both of those that is not quite ready to surface yet.

"I'm really pregnant?" She asks in a whisper, her eyes widened

"Yes, you're."

"Darius?"

I burst out laughing. I did not plan to — it comes up from somewhere I was not monitoring and comes out real and completely overwhelmed and fills the small hut.

She starts crying at the sound of it, immediately, like the laugh unlocked something in her chest, and I pull her into me, hold her and she cries into my shoulder.

I am still laughing, the fire crackles behind us, the trees stand outside and none of it is how either of us would have chosen it and all of it is real.

I held her and let her cry.

After a while she pulls back and wipes her face with the back of her hand and looks at me.

Her eyes are red and wet and she looks more awake than she has looked in weeks. "How are we going to survive out here with a baby coming?" Her voice is raw. "Darius, this is going to be so hard. I wish it hadn't happened. Not now. Not here."

I look at her steadily and wait until I am sure she has finished before I speak.

"Don't think that way," I cut her off. My voice is quiet but there is no flexibility in it. "This baby is not bad timing. This baby is the only good thing that has happened to us since we crossed that border." I hold her eyes.

"It's the light in the darkness threatening to take over our life. I need you to hear me. I am going to do everything to protect you and our child. We are going to survive this forest. All three of us."

I squeeze her hand. "So don't wish it away. Don't do that."

She looks at me for a long moment and then she leans forward and kisses me.

When she pulls back she mutters, quietly, "I love you, Darius."

My smile widens. "I love you more.”