"Lira." Vesper's voice fills the doorframe behind him—not a command exactly, but close enough that the difference is academic. "I need to speak with Agatha. Alone."
Lira doesn't move. Her shoulders square and her chin lifts a fraction, and for one glorious second I think she might actually tell the Alpha of Moonveil to wait his turn. Then her eyes find mine over his shoulder—a question, not a concession— and I give her the smallest nod I can manage.
"I'll be in the corridor," she says to him but means for me, and the way she holds his gaze on her way past carries its own eloquence. The door clicks shut and the room contracts to just the two of us for the first time in nine monthsm while Vesper still stands in the threshold.
His eyes move across the room—the window seat worn smooth, the tally marks I scratched into the sill in April before I stopped counting days, the candle that leans perpetually toward my stomach—and his throat works once around something that doesn't come out.
"Can I sit?" Two words, delivered with a hesitation I have never heard from this man. Not in three years of marriage, not in war councils, not once.
I watch him cross the room and lower himself into the chair the way you'd lower yourself into water you're not sure of the temperature of. His hands land on his knees unposed, and that small absence of performance makes my chest do something I refuse to examine.
"The pack is failing." He says it looking at his own hands. "Supply chain's collapsed. Distribution's down seven weeks. Six families walked into the woods last month."
I let the silence stretch one beat past comfortable before answering. "I know. Lira brought the numbers." The tally sheet sits folded on the windowsill between us.
"Is that why you're here? Because you ran out of furniture to file things in?" His jaw tightens, absorbs the hit, and doesn't fire back. The Vesper I married would have matched me line for line—this one just sits with it.
"I made a mistake." The word comes out like something being pulled from deep tissue—slow, resisted, costing him effort I can see in the tendons of his neck. "Removing you from your duties. Locking you in here."
His hands close on his knees and open again. "It was a mistake." I let the silence hold because I want to watch him sit inside it. Three years I performed for this man—stitched gowns, memorized schedules, smiled in corridors—and mistake is the first honest thing he has offered me that wasn't wrapped in strategy.
It's not enough. It's not nothing, and I hate that it's not nothing.
"I'm reinstating your Luna title. Full authority—logistics, supply, intake. Publicly." He meets my eyes with visible effort. "Not because I need you to save the pack. Because removing you was wrong, and this is the first thing I can fix."
My nails press half-moons into my palms beneath the fold of my cloak. The word wrong from Vesper Varulf—directed at his own choices—sits in the air between us like something volatile. I catalog it beside mistake and file both under things I didn't think I'd live to hear.
"The pregnancy." His voice drops, changes register—quieter, stripped of policy. "How is—are you well?" Not what is the child's status. Not has Neve reported on the energy signature. How is—with the cadence of someone who started to ask one question and detoured into a harder one.
My hand moves to my stomach where Nico's heel has been lodging formal complaints for the last hour. "He kicks like he's trying to escape. The candle bends toward him when he moves." The corner of my mouth tugs despite my best efforts at emotional fortification. "I think he's going to be impossible."
"He?" Something shifts across his face—fast, unguarded, gone before it fully forms. His hands go still on his knees.
"I named him Nico." I watch the word land. His lips part and close and part again, and then he repeats it—Nico—so quietly the sound barely survives the distance between us. The way his mouth shapes it carries a gentleness so foreign to every version of him I've known that it takes me three full seconds to recognize it as real.
The candle flame stretches toward my belly and the room holds something fragile—not warmth, not forgiveness, but the specific temperature of two people occupying the same silence without weaponizing it. I let it last exactly long enough to mean something before I break it.
"Remove Hilda." Two words, clean as a blade. His whole body changes—the crack in the wall sealing shut, shoulders resettling into architecture I recognize. "If you want me running this pack, I need her gone. Not sidelined. Gone."
He doesn't pause. "I can't." Fast, flat, the door slamming before I get a foot in it.
"You're the Alpha, Vesper. You can do anything you want—you've demonstrated that extensively." I lean forward, which takes considerable negotiation with my current center of gravity. "What does she have on you? Because you sure as hell don’t love her the way you wanted everyone to think you do."
His jaw locks so hard the scar along its edge goes white. His fingers press into his knees and his gaze drops to the floor—not evasion, something closer to the expression of a man standing at the edge of a hole he dug himself and measuring how far down it goes.
"Something that predates you. Predates us." Each word comes out placed like stones in a wall between the question and its answer. "The damage would be beyond containment."
I hold his gaze. "That's not an answer. That's a press statement."
He stands, and the motion carries the exhaustion of a man who has been holding a position longer than his body can sustain.
Whatever Hilda carries has been sitting on his shoulders alongside the war and the siege and the pack, and the weight of it has worn grooves I can see in the lines of his face that weren't there nine months ago.
"Full authority. No interference from Hilda. You have my word." He walks to the door and pauses with his hand on the frame, half-turned, torchlight catching the side of his face. "I'm glad he has a name." Quiet. Almost too quiet for the room.
Then he's turning to leave, and I am filing the sentence somewhere I haven't decided on yet—not forgiveness, not trust, somewhere in the uncharted territory between—when the pull hits. Low. Deep. A fist closing around something at the base of my spine and dragging downward.
My hand shoots to the desk and grips hard enough to feel the wood grain bite my palm. "Agatha?" His voice, sharp, from the doorway he hasn't fully cleared. Warmth floods down my thighs and I look down at the stone floor where the puddle is spreading with the unhurried certainty of something that has made its own schedule.
Three weeks early. My son—impossible, prophesied, named twenty minutes ago in a voice that broke on both syllables—is not waiting for anyone's plan. Nico is coming now.