Chapter 2

He came home while I was still awake, not that he knew that.

I'd been running through the plan since midnight, checking for gaps. When the bedroom door opened I closed my eyes and kept my breathing even.

He didn't turn the lights on. Just sat on the edge of the bed and was quiet for a moment, then reached over and touched my shoulder. "I know you're awake."

I didn't answer.

He reached for his tablet on the nightstand and angled it toward me. Stone walls. Towers. A moat. The kind of place that shows up in oil paintings.

"I just signed the deed," he said. His voice had gone soft in the way it almost never did, the way that usually cost me something to hear. "Crosshaven. Named after your family."

I looked at the screen.

"When we have children, we'll spend every summer there. They'll run the grounds. We'll watch the sun go down from the tower." He set the tablet down. "Just us."

He pulled up a second image—a floor plan, stone corridors, a room with spaces carved into the walls like shelves built for the dead. "The Vael sanctum," he said. "The inner alcoves are for blood and the most beloved. I had one carved for you, next to my parents." He tilted my chin up to make me look at him. "Living or dead, Vera. Only ever you."

Something cracked loose in my chest and the tears came before I could stop them.

He thought I was moved. He pulled me close and let me cry and didn't ask what was wrong, because he'd decided he already knew.

I waited until I could speak normally. "Mira thinks Corbin is cheating on her," I said, against his shoulder. "She found something. She's a mess."

His body changed—just slightly, just for a second. "Corbin isn't that type. It's probably a misunderstanding."

"What if it isn't? If you were her—what would you do to me?"

"I would never." No hesitation. "You're the first person in six hundred years I've actually cared about. Whatever I owe you—it's more than you know."

I pressed my face into his chest and kept it there. So he couldn't see my expression.

The gathering was his idea.

A private room at one of the clan venues, a dozen of us around a long table—all of us turned, all of us somewhere in the long, grinding process of trying to have a child. He'd brought the tonics himself. Stood at the head of the table and set a bottle in front of every seat like party favors at a wedding.

"She developed the formula herself," he said, and everyone looked at me.

"I was completely out of options," the woman on my left said. She'd been trying for seven years before Vera's compound. She touched her stomach—just briefly, automatically—and didn't finish the sentence. She didn't need to.

"You'll be next," someone said across the table. "You've helped every one of us. It's your turn. You and Lucian—" A warm, easy laugh. "I've never seen him look at anyone the way he looks at you. You'll get there."

I smiled. Said thank you. Said I hoped so.

Lucian's hand found the back of my chair, and for a moment his thumb brushed my shoulder, light and automatic, the same gesture he'd used ten thousand times over five years. I didn't lean into it.

The door opened.

Seraphine walked in with an assistant behind her and a stroller in front. She glanced around the room, said "wrong reservation" in a tone that matched someone doing the opposite of leaving, and sat down across from me.

A short silence fell and then the conversation restarted, a little louder to compensate.

Her eyes moved to the bottle in front of her place setting. She picked it up. Turned it. Read the label, or pretended to.

"I drank a lot of this," she said. The conversation at the table slowed, then stopped. "While I was pregnant." Her voice stayed pleasant, almost idle. "The father kept sending it over. For nearly a year, actually." She looked up and found me directly. "I only just realized it was yours."

She set the bottle down.

"Thank you, Vera."

The room went very quiet.