Page 151 of Even Robots Die
Brice crosses his arms, one shoulder against the frame and one leg crossed over the other.
“Should I tell them to leave?” he says with amusement in his voice. “Sophie is going to be very disappointed. You know she’s always talking about the fact that she wants to be you when she grows up …”
Sophie is Léandre and Cassiopé’s first kid, and she’s well on her way to be the eldest daughter of a lot of siblings—like me—with Cassiopébeing pregnant with her fourth. Cassiopé is due in three weeks, and I have a feeling those two aren’t done populating earth. Sophie will never be like me, though, which is for the best. She has two loving parents who are here for her, even if Marcus and Camille—the twins—are a handful most of the time. She will never grow up too fast like I did.
I leave the populating of earth to Cassiopé and Léandre, though. After more or less raising the girls, I didn’t really want to have kids, and Brice has been more than accommodating. He has a daughter already, after all, so he doesn’t feel the need to pressure me and I love him for it.
I wish I could say Dad changed and that he finally stopped gambling and started being responsible, but sadly, I don’t think he can change at his age. He took oddly well the fact that I left the house to go live with Brice—in Notre Dame at first, and then in the house we bought near Orléans—but that’s because he thought it would be easier to get money out of us. He did try. Multiple times. It took me some time to realize I was just too kind to him and that he knew exactly what he was doing. I stopped letting him take advantage of me and that might have strained our relationship, because the girls are here—minus Elodie who has yet to stop hating the world—but he is not. I’d like to say that it doesn’t hurt, but that would be lying and that’s something I don’t do anymore—or not as much—after all the love of my life knowing exactly when I lie from the beat of my heart kills all the entertainment I could gain from it.
“Okay, okay,” I say as I get up and wipe my hands on my overalls. “Give me five minutes so I can shower?”
“I’m perfectly capable of entertaining them for five minutes,” he tells me as I get closer to him and wrap my arms around his waist.
He tips up my chin with his thumb before kissing me softly.
“But if you cling to me like this for another minute, I might let them entertain themselves and decide to take you on that new table we installed in front of the floor-to-ceiling window,” he adds after nipping at my lower lip.
I flush at the image of it in my mind.
“Oh, that beautiful red,” Brice says in a murmur against my ear. “Forget the family. They can wait. I’m getting you out of this.”
He tugs at the straps of my overall, but I bat at his hands.
“And make me miss Elhyor’s chocolate cake? You’d do that to me?” I say in fake outrage.
“You can eat the chocolate cake after I eat you,” he says in a playful manner, and I know he totally means it.
I push him with both of my hands on his chest, and he takes a step back.
“You didn’t let my chicken burn?” I ask, as he holds his hand for me to take.
“Of course not,” he says, outraged—and he’s not faking. He knows how much I love food and find it abhorrent that he could ruin food for me.
“Then we better go, because I won’t eat chicken for a full week just because you decided to shoo everyone out. Or do you think we can eat what we cooked for twelve with just the two of us? I know that you like my curves, but that might be a bit much.”
We head back to the main house—my workshop is at the end of the property because the new printer I got can be noisy and I like having a space that’s solely dedicated to the things I craft—and I jump in the shower alone before Brice gets any ideas of joining me.
It feels good being able to host everyone at our place. We’ve started doing that—inviting everyone—a couple years ago when Brice and I realized that everything with the rebuilding of Paris and politics had made it so we didn’t see our families enough anymore.
With Brice being on the new world council representing the bat-shifters, Elhyor flying all over the world to show Angélique more of it than the city she had grown up in, the girls’ studies, and Cassiopé and Léandre’s ever-growing family, it was rare that we saw each other.
So I started organizing these gatherings, and they’ve been a fixture in our lives ever since.
That’s the only thing I agree to take responsibility for these days.
When they built the council—a two hundred seat heavy machine—to lead the world in a fairer way, I was offered one of the human seats, without knowing Brice had been offered one of the shifter ones.
They wanted to honor my creations and the way they—greatly—helped end the war against the birds, but I refused.
I’ve had enough responsibilities for a lifetime already. I still have nightmares of that day, about the dead and the blood everywhere, about the fact a decision I made rushed everyone into a bloodbath. Yes, we won, but in my mind, I still think humanity lost a lot on that day and I didn’t want my days to be built around the worst day of my life.
I’ve found other ways to be useful. It was Marie’s idea to work for her at the hospital, but I’ve fully embraced it—as long as I don’t have to stay during surgery and the only thing that’s asked of me is coding.
For all the lives that got lost on that day because of me, I’m repaying my debt by saving as many as I can, one after the other.
Brice knows I need this.
“Where did your mind go?” Brice asks me, hugging me from behind as we watch everyone leave our property. Today was everything we needed it to be, but it’s always so busy and noisy when everyone is here … I’m enjoying the return to calm once they leave even more, though.
