Page 13 of Demon Daddy's Hidden Son
"Oh, child." Her voice carries a weight of understanding that makes my chest tighten with something between hope and terror. "You don't know, do you?"
"Don't know what?" But I do know, somewhere beneath the damaged surface of my mind. The knowledge sits in my body like a secret I've been keeping from myself.
"You're with child. Have been for months, by the look of things."
The words hit me like a physical blow, sending me stumbling backward until my legs encounter a chair and I collapse into it. Pregnant. The concept seems impossible and inevitable all at once, explaining so many things I hadn't understood about my body's recent changes.
But if I'm pregnant, that means?—
"Where's the father?" The question tears out of me with desperate urgency. "There has to be someone. I wouldn't have—I couldn't have?—"
Memories slam into me without warning. Not clear images, but emotional echoes. The sensation of being held. Of feeling safe. Of loving someone so completely that their absence leaves a hollow ache in my chest.
Someone who mattered. Someone I've lost.
My hands shake as I press them to my stomach, feeling for the first time the subtle roundness that my torn clothes had been hiding. Beneath my palms, something flutters—so faint I might be imagining it.
"How long?" My voice sounds strange, disconnected from my body. "How far along?"
Derri's expression is carefully neutral, the look of someone delivering news that could go either way. "Hard to say without proper examination, but... four months. Maybe five."
Four months. Does that means I knew? Before whatever happened on the mountain, before the blood and the emptiness and the fear, did I know about this baby? Plan for it, prepare for it? Maybe even wanted it?
I'm not sure.
But now the knowledge brings only terror—sharp and crystalline and utterly consuming.
I don't remember the father. Don't remember deciding to have a child or feeling joy at the prospect. Don't remember anything that would help me understand what this means or what I'm supposed to do now.
A sob builds in my chest, part grief and part panic. Someone loved me enough to give me this child. Someone who might be searching for me right now, wondering what happened to his woman and his baby. But I can't remember his face, can't even remember his name.
"Shh." Marnai appears at my side as if summoned by my distress, her weathered hands gentle on my shoulders. "Easy, child. Everything's going to be all right."
"How can it be all right?" The words come out broken, desperate. "I don't remember anything. I don't know who I am or where I came from or who—" My voice cracks on the impossibility of it all. "What kind of mother forgets the father of her child?"
"The kind who's been through trauma." Marnai's tone brooks no argument. "Head injuries are tricky things. But you're safe here, and that baby's safe here. That's what matters right now."
Safe. The word should be comforting, but instead it feels like a cage. Safe means staying in this village that feels like borrowed clothes—pleasant enough, but never quite fitting right. Safe means accepting that the life I had before, the person I was before, might be gone forever.
But as another flutter moves beneath my hands—stronger this time, unmistakably real—I realize that whatever I've lost, I'm not entirely alone. This child is a piece of my previous life, a connection to whoever I used to be.
Even if I can't remember him, somewhere out there is a man who helped create this life. A man who might be looking for us both.
The thought brings a mixture of hope and terror so intense it makes me dizzy. What if he doesn't find us? What if he does, but I don't recognize him? What if I've forgotten him completely, but he still loves the woman I used to be?
"One day at a time," Derri says softly, as if she can read the chaos in my expression. "Memory or no memory, your body knows what to do. Trust that."
I want to trust something, but faith feels like a luxury I can't afford when everything I am exists in the space between one heartbeat and the next. Still, as the fire crackles in Marnai's hearth and the baby moves again under my trembling hands, I try to find some small piece of solid ground to stand on.
My name is Kaleen. I'm pregnant. I'm alive.
For now, that has to be enough.
7
DOMIEL
The first day crawls by like a wounded animal. I force myself through the motions—sketching ward patterns for the Vaelthorne commission, checking measurements against the architectural plans spread across my drafting table. But every line I draw wavers slightly, my usually steady hand betraying the restless energy that's been building since Kaleen's zarryn disappeared around the bend in the road.
