Something felt wrong three days before it happened, and I couldn’t have named what it was if my life had depended on it.
It started small, the way these things always seemed to — a restlessness under my skin that no amount of training could burn off, a wakefulness at odd hours that had nothing to do with the twins, who’d been sleeping soundly through the night for over a year now.
I found myself checking on them more often than usual, standing in their doorway at moments that made no logical sense, watching Ronan sprawled diagonally across his bed and Draven curled neat and careful even in sleep, and feeling, each time, a relief so disproportionate to the actual absence of danger that I started to wonder if something in me had simply broken under the accumulated weight of the last several months.
“You’ve barely slept,” Killian said, finding me in the kitchen well before dawn on the third morning, my hands wrapped around a cup of tea I hadn’t actually drunk from.
“I know.”
“Is it Darius?” He said the name carefully, the way everyone in the family had started saying it since Ashford, like handling something that might still cut if held wrong.
“Has he tried to contact you again?”
“No. Not since the message through Roman.” I turned the cup slowly, watching steam curl off the surface.
“It’s not him. Or it’s not only him. I don’t know how to explain it. Something feels off, and I can’t point to a single thing that’s actually changed.”
Killian studied me for a long moment, the same careful assessment he brought to everything that mattered.
“Damien always said your instincts as a Moon Goddess Chosen would develop past just the physical gifts eventually. Maybe this is that. A sense for wrongness before it’s confirmed.”
“Or maybe I’m just anxious because a man I used to love announced my sons belonged to him in the middle of a market square, and I haven’t fully recovered from that yet.” I said it dryly, though the joke didn’t land the way I wanted it to, some genuine unease still sitting underneath the attempt at humor.
“Could be both.”
“Could be.” I finally drank from the cup, the tea gone lukewarm.
“We’re still going to Ashford on Thursday? The trade meeting Bastian scheduled?”
“Unless you want to cancel it.”
I considered that, turning the restless feeling over one more time, searching for something concrete enough to justify disrupting a routine the twins genuinely loved — the market stalls, the sweets Bastian always let them have despite my repeated objections, the ordinary, uncomplicated pleasure of an outing that had nothing to do with training or politics or any of the weight the rest of their lives sometimes carried.
“No,” I said finally.
“I don’t have anything real to point to. Just a feeling. I’m not going to take something from them because of a feeling I can’t even explain.”
Killian nodded, though something in his expression told me he was filing the conversation away regardless, the same careful vigilance he brought to everything that touched the twins’ safety.
“I’ll double the guard detail anyway. Quietly. No need to worry them.”
“Thank you.”
Darius, three days later, sat in his study with a decision he’d been circling for over a week, the same file spread open in front of him that had occupied his nights for months now.
He’d exhausted every formal channel.
Roman’s cold dismissal, Killian’s flat refusal, Maeve’s silence in response to the one honest line he’d allowed himself in an otherwise professional message.
He understood, turning the healer’s log over in his hands for what felt like the thousandth time, that he’d reached the end of every avenue that didn’t require doing something drastic, something that would likely cost him whatever fragile ground remained between himself and a family that had made abundantly clear he wasn’t welcome to ask the question directly.
He’d learned, through careful, quiet inquiry that stopped just short of the kind of overreach that had cost him so badly in Ashford, that Dreadmoon’s trade delegation visited Ashford roughly every few weeks, and that the timing of the next visit fell within days.
He told himself, drafting a message he had no intention of sending through the formal channel, that he only wanted to see them again.
Not to confront anyone.
Not to repeat the mistake that had already cost him so much ground.
Just to see, from a distance, whether the certainty that had lived in his chest since that market square held up under a second look, or whether grief and guilt had built something in his mind that a second, calmer glance might dismantle entirely.
He didn’t fully believe that reasoning himself.
He wrote it down anyway, and he made the decision, sometime past midnight, to ride for Ashford regardless of what Killian or Roman or Maeve herself might think of him doing so.
Astra received confirmation of the date through her informant two days before the visit, delivered with the same clinical precision as every other report, and she read it three times before she allowed herself to fully absorb what she’d set in motion.
*Confirmed.
Thursday.
The delegation departs at dawn, returns by evening.
Standard market visit, standard security based on prior patterns.*
She sat with the letter for a long time after reading it, turning over every version of the plan one final time, searching for some flaw that might still give her a reason to call it off before the men she’d hired carried it past the point of undoing. Visit novelping.com for the full chapter.
She found no flaw significant enough to stop her.
Only the same, exhausted calculation she’d been running for weeks now, the same conclusion arriving each time no matter how she reframed the question: Elara’s safety, and her own survival, against the safety of a child she’d never met, belonging to a woman she’d spent five years hoping had died quietly in some forgotten stretch of rogue territory.
She sent her final confirmation before she could talk herself out of it again.
*Proceed as planned.*
I woke Thursday morning with the same restless unease that had followed me for days, sharper now, close enough to the surface that I found myself checking on both boys twice before we’d even finished breakfast, drawing a curious look from Ronan that I brushed off with an explanation about wanting extra hugs that satisfied him easily enough.
Draven watched me with more scrutiny, the same careful attention he brought to everything that didn’t quite add up.
“You’re worried about something,” he said quietly, once Ronan had run ahead toward the wagon that would carry us to Ashford.
“A little,” I admitted, because lying to him rarely worked and always cost more trust than it was worth.
“I don’t know why. Probably nothing.”
“Is it the man from before? The one who said we were his?”
“Maybe. A little bit of that too.” I took his hand, steadying us both.
“Stay close to your uncles today. Can you do that for me?”
“I always stay close.” Something in his expression carried more weight than a five-year-old’s reassurance should have been able to hold.
“I’ll watch Ronan too. I always do.”
I climbed into the wagon beside him, watching Ronan chatter excitedly to Bastian about the sweets he intended to demand at the market, watching Killian’s doubled guard fall into formation around us with the quiet efficiency I’d come to trust completely over five years.
The restless feeling didn’t fade as we set out toward Ashford.
If anything, it sharpened with every mile, some old, wordless instinct screaming at a pitch just below what I could consciously translate into anything actionable.
I told myself it was nothing.
I told myself that all the way to the edge of town, watching the market stalls come into view, watching Ronan’s face light up at the first glimpse of the sweets vendor he’d been talking about for the entire ride.
I didn’t know yet, climbing down from the wagon into a crowd that looked exactly as ordinary as it always did, that I was about to lose sight of everything that mattered in the space of a single, distracted moment.