Page 237 of Onyx Cage: Volume II

The door to the enormous room was ajar, so I slipped inside, taking a breath to announce my presence when my wife’s voice carried across the empty space.

“There’s no baby. Just a mountain of stress, as it turns out.”

I froze.

No baby.

She said it like it was a surprise. Like she thought there had been a baby, something Mila had evidently known.

Which made one of us.

The past week raced through my mind, punctuated by the several hours a day we spent in silence, walking from one meeting to another, sparring, sleeping across the storms-damned hall from each other.

How long had she suspected she was carrying our child? Yet she hadn’t found a single spare moment to mention it?

Hadn’t wanted to.

A memory assaulted me of her twirling a midnight vial in her hands on our wedding night, needing to know if I wanted a family with her, wresting the unwilling admission from my soul.

Was it worse that she had been willing to keep that possibility from me, knowing what it meant for me to want it?

Or that in the midst of a war, she would have preferred to bear that burden alone, the fear and the uncertainty, rather than trust me with it?

You said you wanted to share your life with me.

It seems I wasn’t the only one who had fallen short of that promise.

“You thought there was a baby, and you didn’t think to tell me?” My voice was heavy with pain for her, pain from her.

Rowan froze from where she was sitting with her back to me, while Mila jumped up to leave. I couldn’t even bring myself to care that we had an audience, though Mila was quick to excuse herself. I barely registered the moment she left, unable to look away from the unmoving mass of curls that was all I could see of my wife.

Slowly, gracefully, Rowan got to her feet, turning to face me like a man walking to the gallows.

“Let’s not pretend we have the kind of relationship where we tell each other everything, Evander,” she said, defensiveness creeping into her tone.

She couldn’t be serious. I straightened to my full height, regaining control of my features, if not the reaction that still spiraled from my control, morphing into something so much bigger than I expected it to be. Something I had no context at all for.

“So because I kept something from you, you would have, what, taken our child to Lochlann and never told me?” I clarified in a voice far calmer than I felt.

She reared back. “Of course not.”

I took a breath, the razor sharp pain in my chest easing with her rapid denial.

“I would have told you when and if it became relevant,” she went on. “Which is, by the way, more courtesy than you have shown me. But there’s really nothing to concern yourself with, because there is no baby.” She cut off abruptly, like something had caught in her throat.

Then she swallowed back whatever emotion had overtaken her, meeting my gaze. “There never was. So, that’s a relief, right?”

Relief.

Her pale-green eyes met mine, and for a moment, I saw them staring at me from an entirely different face, one with olive skin and perfectly bowed lips and riotous curls in my onyx shade.

But she was relieved not to have that particular complication tying her to me.

“Yes,” I echoed hollowly, watching a pyre burn somewhere in the back of my mind. “A relief.”

She blinked once, then gave a single, minute dip of her chin before striding past me.

Leaving me alone.

---