The months moved faster than I expected them to, once I stopped waiting for something to go wrong.
Damien trained me in the mornings, patient with my failures in a way none of the Hellfang elders had ever been with my absences.
Killian trained beside me some days, teaching me to fight with a body that finally had a wolf inside it, correcting my stance without once making me feel stupid for not already knowing.
I grieved in pieces, some days undone by a memory I hadn’t expected — the sound of Darius’s voice, the exact pressure of his hand on my shoulder — and other days entirely unbothered, present enough in my new life that Hellfang felt like something that had happened to a different woman.
By the time my belly had grown too heavy for the training Damien insisted I still needed, gentler now, careful of the children inside me, I understood something the healers had missed in the earliest tests.
“Twins,” Vera told me, laughing at my expression when the second heartbeat first showed clearly enough to be undeniable.
“You’re having twins, Maeve.”
I didn’t know how to feel about that beyond overwhelmed, and overwhelmed in a way that had nothing to do with fear this time.
I pressed both hands over the curve of my stomach and let myself imagine, just for a moment, two children instead of one, growing up surrounded by uncles who already loved them before they’d taken a single breath.
The labor came hard and fast on a night I hadn’t expected it, months after that appointment, and Vera stayed beside me through nearly six hours of it while Roman paced somewhere outside the door and my brothers took turns hovering close enough to be scolded back by the healers twice.
The first son came first, small and furious, his cry filling the room before Vera had even finished cleaning him.
“A boy,” she said, placing him against my chest, and I stared down at a face that was unmistakably, undeniably his father’s, even now, even this small — the same shape to his brow, the same set of his mouth, already stubborn before he’d opened his eyes.
The second followed only minutes later, quieter than his brother, watching the room with an alertness that seemed too old for someone who’d only just arrived in it.
“Two boys,” Vera said, awe plain in her voice even after months of preparing me for this.
I lay there holding both of them, exhausted in a way that went past my body and into something deeper, and I understood, distantly, that I was crying again, though this time it didn’t feel like grief at all.
The door opened once Vera allowed it, and Roman came first, stopping just inside the threshold like he needed a moment to absorb what he was looking at.
“Two grandsons,” he said quietly, like the words themselves were fragile.
“I thought I’d lost the chance at this entirely. I thought I’d lost you before I ever had the chance to know either of you.”
He didn’t ask to hold them right away.
He simply stood there, watching, something in his face open in a way I hadn’t seen from him even during our reunion.
Killian came next, and where Roman had gone soft, Killian went fierce, leaning down to look at both boys with an intensity that made me almost laugh despite the exhaustion.
“They’re going to need to learn to fight early,” he said.
“Both of them. I’ll start training them myself the moment they can stand.”
“They’re an hour old, Killian.”
“I said start. Not finish.” But something in his voice cracked slightly on the words, and I understood the fierceness was covering something more vulnerable underneath it.
Bastian, when he saw them, simply laughed, delighted in a way that startled a real smile out of me despite how tired I was.
“Two of them. Of course it’s two. Nothing about this family does anything by half measures.” He touched one small hand gently with one finger, careful, like he was afraid of his own strength around something so small. Visit g.com for the full chapter.
“Welcome to the absolute chaos you’ve been born into. I promise it gets better.”
Lucian said the least, as he often did, but he stood close for a long time, watching both boys with the same quiet, careful assessment he’d given me the day we met.
“They’re going to be strong,” he said finally.
“I can already tell.”
“You can’t already tell anything. They’re an hour old.”
“I can tell,” he said again, and didn’t explain further, though something in his certainty settled a worry in me I hadn’t even fully realized I was carrying.
I named them that same night, once the room had quieted and it was only the three of us left — Draven, for the older by minutes, and Ronan, for the younger, both names chosen without Darius anywhere in the room to weigh in on them, both boys entirely mine to name because I had built the family that surrounded them entirely without him.
I held them both, one in the crook of each arm, and I made myself a promise in the quiet of that room that I intended to keep for the rest of my life.
They would never know what it felt like to be looked at and called a curse.
They would never stand in a hall full of people who used to love them and hear the word *reject* aimed at their own name.
Whatever else the world eventually did to them, whatever Hellfang eventually learned about their existence, I would spend every day I had making sure they grew up inside the kind of love I hadn’t known was possible until four days after the worst night of my life.
“I promise you both,” I whispered, quiet enough that it was only for them, only for me.
“You will never be unwanted. Not for one single day.”
Five years passed.