Chapter 175: A Demon Child 3
Ryn POV
Zevran finally sleeps properly on the third night, in the bed beside me instead of the chair after trying to avoid me and failing.
Once his breathing goes slow and even I lie there awake and let myself think about it for the first time without anyone watching my face.
A baby. Sorin's baby.
I put my hand flat on my stomach in the dark. Although there's nothing to feel yet, since it's too early, but I press my palm there anyway like I'm checking whether it's real, like it might have been something I dreamed in the wreckage of the embrace.
It's real. All of it is so fucking real. The tiredness that wasn't my usual tiredness. The way food felt in my mouth and weeks. All of it, weeks of my body telling me something I kept shoving into the same box I marked as curse because the curse was an answer I could live with and the truth was one I couldn't.
The there's that pull from the last time I was there.
That's the one I make myself look at, lying there in the dark. The clinic. The second Sorin walked through that door, before I even turned around, my body leaning toward him like a plant toward a window.
The thing under my ribs that got so bad I had to press my hand to the bed. I told Jasmin it was leftovers of the bond. I told myself it was nothing. I hated it, whatever it was, hated that I could despise a man with my whole heart and still feel my body reach for him without my permission.
Apparently it wasn't the bond or any of its leftovers. It was this. This child. His child, in me, recognizing its father across a room, turning me toward him the way a compass turns, and I felt it and called it a hundred other things because the real name was unbearable.
My body knew before I did. It's been carrying his secret for me for weeks, leaving its little signs, and I read every one of them incorrectly on purpose.
At this point, I don't cry because I spent the last three days bawling my eyes out so now, there's nothing left. I just lie there and let the contradiction sit on my chest, because there's no resolving it and pretending otherwise would be one more lie for my own good.
I hate him. That's true and it stays true. The bet was real. The four hundred years of watching my bloodline, the curse he wrote when he was young and heartbroken, the lie he carried straight to the altar, the marriage he built to win me before I could find out why.
None of that softens because I'm carrying his child. If anything it's worse, because now I can't even hate him cleanly, from a distance, the way you're supposed to be able to hate someone you've left.
He's right inside me. In the curse killing me and in this child saving me which is very ironic because the bond I can't sever is what's making my body betrays me by reaching for him. There's no corner of myself he isn't somehow standing in.
And I just made a person with him. That's the part I keep circling. Whatever he is, whatever he did, there's a child now, half mine, and it didn't ask to be made by a liar and a blood slave in the middle of the worst year either of us ever had. It just got made and it's just here to stay.
That's where it turns, lying in the dark.
Because I know exactly what it is to be a child who got made and arrived somewhere they weren't planned and weren't wanted by half the people responsible for them.
I spent twenty-one years being one. A baby left on a doorstep in the cold, taken in and raised small, blamed in a hundred quiet ways for the simple crime of existing, of taking up space, of being a thing that happened to a family instead of a thing they chose. My whole life I was punished for how I arrived.
I won't do that. Whatever else I get wrong, and I'll get plenty wrong, I won't do to this child what was done to me. I won't look at it and see Sorin. I won't make it carry the pressure of how it was made.
It didn't choose its father any more than I chose to be left in the snow. It's not a product of the bet or the lie neither did it come from the curse. It's a person who's going to arrive in a world that didn't plan for it, the same way I did, and the difference, the only difference I have it in my power to make, is that this one is going to arrive to someone who already decided it gets to belong.
I move my hand on my stomach, slow.
"You're not him," I say to it quietly in the dark. "Whatever your father is, whatever he did to me, you're not him. You hear me? You're not the thing he did. You're just you. And you're already more wanted than I ever was, and that's a promise. I don't make those lightly, I learned that the hard way."
Beside me Zevran stirs but doesn't wake, and I think about him too, the man who stood at the window and nearly came apart chose to stay anyway. The king of Valdris was crying about it, but decided to stay. It was so hard watching the hurt in his eyes.
He tried to hide it, but his body kept betraying him. In all this, I don't blame him. He has every right to be upset. I was mad when I saw Seraphina on his lap.
I think about what it means that this child is going to be raised by a vampire king who has every reason to resent it and decided to love its mother enough to try not to. Two people who've already decided this baby belongs, before it's even big enough to feel.
That's more than I had. That's so much more than I had.
It doesn't fix anything. The curse is still waiting at the end of the nine months. I might not live to raise this child I'm making promises to in the dark. Sorin is still somewhere I hope I never have to think about, not knowing, and I haven't decided whether I'll ever let him know.
I don't have to hate myself for it anymore. That's something right? In a year that's taken almost everything, being able to stop hating my own body for reaching is a small sense of stability and self worth. I've also learned to take the small ones where they come.
I fall asleep eventually with my hand still on my stomach, and for the first time since the embrace attempt, I sleep the whole night through.
I'll take it. God help me, I'll take all of it, even the parts that are him.
Especially those, if it means I get to keep this child.