Page 53 of Slow Birth
Jason laughed.
Vale considered the name, smiled, and nodded. “Viro for short?”
Jason grinned. “I like that.”
Little Viro opened his eyes then, demonstrating the truth of Jason’s description, blinking black lashes over his stormy green eyes. He opened his pink mouth, took a deep breath, and hollered with all the irritation of a confused pup.
Twittering with sudden nerves, Vale sat up, took him in his arms. Jason helped him get situated and helped to prop Viro’s head as Vale placed him carefully to his nipple. They both smiled in awe as the baby took hold and fed. Jason watched eagerly, remembering the sweet taste of Vale’s milk in his own mouth. “He’ll grow up to be strong and brave.”
An alpha’s blessing for a first-born son.
“Urho thinks he’ll be an alpha.”
“Time will tell.”
“Yes, we’ll love him either way—beta, alpha. He’s our son.”
“Our beautiful boy,” Jason agreed. “Wolf-god’s blessing.”
Viro and Vale were both safe and very much alive, and the fear that had consumed Jason and chipped away at his joy during the pregnancy lifted like a storm off the coast—blown out to sea.
Replaced by radiant sunlight.
EPILOGUE
Vale clutched asleeping Viro to his chest as the car bounced up the rough mountain road. The best thing about the baby was that he slept like a log once he was asleep. The worst thing about the baby was how very hard it was to get him to sleep to start with. Even now, the baby still slept in the bed with him and Jason because it was either that or not sleep at all from Viro’s irritated fussing.
“Almost there,” Jason said with a glance toward Vale and then down at his sleeping son. “He never sleeps this hard at home.”
Vale kissed the top of Viro’s head, his soft, almost-black curls tickling against Vale’s lips. “Maybe we should take turns driving him around in the car for his naps.”
Jason chuckled. “He doesn’t like to sleep. He loves being alive.”
“Of course, he does. He very much wanted to be here, after all. Insisted on it practically.”
“Wolf-god wanted him here,” Jason said, unusually devout when it came to Viro’s presence in their lives. “Sent him despite our best efforts.”
“Yes, I suppose he did.”
Vale slipped his fingers into Viro’s curls and closed his eyes to take in his son’s compellingly wonderful scent. At six months, Viro was active, healthy, and if Vale did say so himself, a little bit wild. He was always pushing himself to go farther and faster than he really needed to go. He was a baby, after all, and destined to be Vale’s only one at that, so did he really have to rush through everything?
It seemed so.
Viro was already sitting up, pulling himself to almost-standing, and determined to get his knees beneath him so that he could crawl. Their mess of a house back in the city was far from child-proofed, and Vale lived in a waking terror that Viro would get away from him somehow and get hurt before Vale could find him. And yet he and Jason were still too exhausted from the sleepless nights to figure out how to get the place in order.
That was the purpose of this visit to the mountain chalet after all. Miner and Yule were going to put the house to rights and get at least three rooms baby-safe. And while it pained Vale to imagine them going through his things and making choices about what to keep and what to put away in the basement, he knew he didn’t have the energy or wherewithal to do it himself.
Being a pater was exhausting.
And beautiful. And the most compellingly captivating thing he’d ever done in his life. Aside from being with Jason, that is, asÉrosgápeand lovers.
“You’re quiet,” Jason said as they made the last curve before they’d need to turn into the driveway. “Having regrets?”
“No,” Vale said with a smile. He reached out and stroked Jason’s thigh. “No regrets.”
They’d talked about going to Jason’s parents’ house at Seshwan-by-the-Sea for this getaway, but in the end, Vale had suggested the cabin again. No one had been up to it since Jason’s father had arranged to have the ruined car hauled off and the offending tree chopped into firewood. It was just past the anniversary of their ill-fated—if that term still applied—trip the prior year, and some part of Vale wanted to reclaim the place.
Jason had been a bit harder to convince, viewing the cabin as the scene of his failure to protect Vale from danger. But when Vale talked it up, reminding Jason that Viro was the blessing that came from that trip and that he wanted the boy to visit the place of his conception at least once before they sold the property, his baby alpha had, of course, caved.
