Chapter 179 Final Days

Chapter 179 Final Days
Ryn POV

The months go by rather slowly, the way I imagine they do for everyone, except mine come with their own particular uniqueness because there's nothing ordinary about carrying a demon's child in a vampire court while a curse waits at the end of it like a debt collector.

I show earlier than a human would. The healer says half-demon children grow faster in the early months and slower at the end, and by the fourth month I'm rounder than Vael was at six, which I only know because I caught myself comparing and then made myself stop.

I want nothing to do with her as well. Depending on what happens to me after the curse, I won't leave here.

The child moves early too. By the fifth month it's not the flutter the healer describes for human babies, it's something different. And sometimes, when I'm upset, when my temper goes the way my temper goes, I feel a warmth answer it from inside, a small heat that isn't mine, the white fire reaching toward something that reaches back.

The first time it happened I froze, and the healer just nodded like she'd expected it. Demon blood and Ashveil fire in the same body. They know each other. Of course they do.

Zevran is the thing I didn't expect. He learnt everything there is to know about the pregnancy the way he learned to make eggs back on our honeymoon trip. Badly at first and then with a stubborn competence that undoes me.

He knows by the sixth month exactly which smells turn my stomach and has them kept out of his chambers entirely. He knows that I get cold in the evenings now, that my back aches if I sit too long, that I've started crying at things that don't warrant it and that I hate being asked why, so he doesn't ask, he just appears shirtless in front of me.

"You're staring," he says one night. I'm in his lap on the bench by the window, which has become the place we end up, and his hand is on my stomach, waiting for the child to press back against it, which it does for him more than for anyone.

"I'm allowed to stare. I'm carrying a parasite that's making me emotional." I snapped. I don't know why I've been so on edge today but I can feel my irritation build.

"A flattering way to refer to our child."

That shatters whatever I was feeling. He says it like that now, and every time he does I have to look away, because six months ago this man would have had me killed for carrying a demon's offspring, and now he's referring to the child as"'Ours'

"Does it bother you," I ask. "When you feel it move, knowing it's..."

"Don't." He catches my chin, turns my face back. "We're not doing that. I told you that I'm perfectly fine with calling her mine.

" How do you know she's a girl?" I laugh with tears in my eyes.

" Well, I've always wanted a mini you so I'm hoping she looks exactly like you and not like him, " He stops, and something works in his face. "I just want you to be fine. We can always try for ours after." His thumb moves along my jaw. "It's mine because it's yours. That's all it ever needed to be."

The child presses against his palm, right then, like it heard, and I watch a thousand-year-old king's whole face come apart with helpless wonder, and I think, this. Whatever the curse does to me, I got to see this.

I got to see a king learning to love a child that isn't his blood, in real time, with his hand on my body. Most people don't get a single thing that pure in a whole life. I got this.

But the dread is always there underneath. I'd be lying if I said the months were only sweet.
Because every day the child grows is a day closer to the day it comes, and the day it comes is the day I find out whether the curse simply wakes up and finishes me.

The healer's been honest, she's always honest. No Ashveil has ever lived this long carrying a demon's child. I'm the experiment. I'm the page that hasn't been written yet, and at the end of it is either a life I get to keep or a death that was only ever paused.

We don't talk about it much, but it's there, in the way Zevran's hand tightens sometimes when the child moves, like he's already braced to lose the body it's growing in. It's there in the way I catch him watching me sleep, the way he used to before the Renewal, the look of a man memorizing a thing he's afraid he won't keep.

"You're doing it again," I tell him one night, half asleep.

"I like watching you." he brushes a strand of stay hair from my face.

"You're memorizing me." I open my eyes. "I can tell. You've got the face."

He doesn't deny it. He's stopped denying things, which is the gift the Borderlands mess left us, ugly as it was. "Yes," he says. "I won't pretend I'm not afraid. You told me once you'd had enough people lie to you for your own good. So I won't. I'm terrified, Ryn. Every day you get bigger you get closer to the thing that might take you. I shed a thousand years to keep you and I might still lose you to a curse a heartbroken boy wrote four hundred years ago, and there's nothing I can buy or burn or threaten to stop it. I've never in my life been unable to do something about a danger to a thing I love. It's the worst feeling I've ever had and I have it every single day."

I take his hand off my stomach and hold it against my chest instead, over the heartbeat the child gave me, the one that wasn't there before all this.

"Then we don't waste the months being afraid," I say. "We can't stop the curse and we can't know how it ends, so we don't spend the only sure time we've got bracing for the worst. If I'm going to die when this baby comes, I'm not going to have spent the last of my life watching you watch me die. I'd rather spend it like this."

"And if they're not your last?"

"Then we got good at being happy." I press his palm flatter against me. "Either way we win, Zevran. That's the only way I can stand to do this. Either I live and we got happy, or I don't and we got happy anyway. I'm not giving the curse the months too. It can have the ending. It doesn't get the middle."

He pulls me closer, careful of the bulge of my stomach as we sit on the bench by the window with the child turning between us.

The curse can wait at the end of the hall. Tonight it's not invited in.