The night lay soft over Solmire, dressed in the hush that follows chaos.
Within Caelen's chambers, the silence was deceptively tender, the kind that pretends to heal what has merely been silenced.
Ophelia rested against him, her cheek over his heart, her hand curved over the flat plane of her stomach. She smiled as though nothing in the world could fracture that fragile peace. Her ginger hair spilled like silk across his bare chest, and the warmth of her skin seeped into him, gentle, anchoring, cruel in its innocence.
She thought she had everything now.
A husband who stayed.
A future unthreatened.
A child, the promise of one, blooming quietly beneath her hand.
"Your heart is racing. You must be excited like too. I can feel our baby already." she whispered, voice dreamy, tender. "Do you hear it?"
She said it with the certainty of the blessed, the kind who believe that joy, once found, will not turn on them.
