Chapter 72

72

MINA

Seven Months Later

"Do babies really require all this?" Sylas said, looking around at the small mountain of gifts we'd received, after the last guest at the baby shower had gone home.

I was daunted too. "I don't really know." I didn't know anyone else who had a kid, and I was an only child. Now that I was seven months in, women in lines at the grocery store wanted to know my birth plan, and the truth was I didn't have any.

Step one: have the kid.

Step two: don't accidentally break it.

Step three: shower it with love, and be prepared to not sleep much for three years.

Which didn't seem like it rose to the occasion of this many plastic doodads? And pee-pee teepees, in case it was a boy? I hadn't even known those existed, until one of Sylas's coworkers' wives had given us some.

"All right," Ella said, emerging from the back, from where she'd been putting dishes into our dishwasher. "I've gotta run to work! Have fun!" she said, escaping out the front door of our shared house.

I knew she'd been trying to give us maximal time alone lately, seeing as in roughly two months we would never get to be. It turned out when there was Monster Security Agency wet work to be done, it was compensated very well, and Sylas had been on enough jobs that we could afford a very nice place.

I just couldn't tell normal people what he was doing. I pretended he was in some kind of tech and he'd signed a really stringent NDA. He left when they called him, when he was done he came home, and our lives went on. I didn't need to do Bluebeard's wife shit—I knew what he was capable of.

The same way I knew he always loved me, and Wisp—which was what we'd started calling the baby in my belly.

Sylas thought the nickname was because they would be a little Wisp of Shadow, or a Will-o-the-Wisp...and I didn't feel the need to tell him that I'd had a Breyer horse I'd loved that I'd named Wisp in third grade.

We each had our secrets.

"This just seems like a lot," he said, continuing to look around. He lost some coherency now that there weren't other people watching, and opened up a few extra eyes.

"Totally," I said, putting a hand on my stomach.

"Do babies come out with opposable thumbs?" he asked, sounding sincere .

I gawked at him. "Yes, of course!" I sputtered—and then I realized he was grinning. "You're just fucking with me!"

"Not yet," he said, floating toward me through a field of ribbons and bows that we'd been told we were keeping for some inexplicable reason. Some of them had been affixed to a hat, which I'd been wearing for the event, but it didn't match my maximally comfortable, and somewhat glamorous, in an "I'm really committing to this housewife bit" way, silk teal muumuu, so I'd taken it off.

"And Ella is gone now, and usually she gives us at least three hours alone..." he went on.

"Yeah?" I asked, settling my arms around his shoulders. The benefit of him being somewhat incorporeal was that I could hug him without my belly getting in the way.

"I do worry that we're traumatizing him some," he said, pretending to sound grave.

"First off, it's a girl, secondly, he knows his mother needs to get some."

One of his eyebrows arched up. "You changed genders there."

"I'm waiting for it to pick, Sylas, but in the meantime, you've got about thirty-seconds to fuck me."

He gave an evil chuckle. "On the couch?"

"Absolutely—don't hit that playset though. It looks super expensive."

He traced a line of himself beneath my voluminous dress, but instead of coming for me with it, he raised a portion of the fabric itself, making it hover between us like a ghost while he made ridiculous woooooo noises, and I began laughing helplessly.

"If you tell me that's your dick, we're done here, Mister. "

"You like my dicks. All of them," he said, laughing too, moving to catch me from the back and shift me to the couch, in one smooth motion. I squealed with delight, and he flung up the bottom of my dress, diving beneath, and with him hidden from me and the rest of his shadows trailing around the living room, it was like my vagina was about to get haunted, and I was one hundred percent okay with that.

I felt the pinpricks of his claws above the wide, high waistband of my completely unsexy underwear—at the same time as pieces of him began to press against the cotton between my legs, rolling up and down, while hands I couldn't see rode up my dress to cup my breasts beneath my bra. We were approximately three seconds away from mouth-town, and Sylas had trained my body like Pavlov's dog. "May I, my queen?" he asked politely, but I could hear the hunger in his voice.

"Yes—please—I've got more," I promised, and he shredded them off at once. I gasped, as his shoulders became more solid beneath my knees, and pieces of him started kissing me all over, at the same time a forked tongue started teasing at my clit. I groaned and threw a helpless hand up over my head to push off of the couch's arm, as I arched my hips up into him.

"Greedy, greedy," he teased, while feathering a different, thicker tongue against my slit.

"Only for you."

He made a pleased sound, then paused. "What if I hit him on the head?"

I reached down and yanked the voluminous extra fabric up around my chest, so that I could see him, past the half-moon of my belly. "What if I die of the horny? I don't think you're thinking through all of the possible ramifications of leaving me hanging here, my king. "

"I was teasing," he said with a laugh.

"I wasn't," I said, arching my hips up and giving him a wicked grin.

He rose up at that and flared his shadows out all around me, blocking all the other light in the room. "And do you think I would ever let anything happen to you or Wisp?" he doubled down.

And in that moment...I had precisely too damn long to think. I shook my head and answered honestly. "No..."

"But?"

"My own parents died, Sylas." And I was hit with a sudden pang of emotion, like a lightning bolt. Our baby would never know any grandparents, and my mom will never see them, and—and—and?—

"Oh, Mina," Sylas said, wrapping himself around me, right before I sobbed.

"I hate this!" I protested, turning into him. I'd read online about how emotional pregnancy could make you, but I didn't believe it until it happened to me. "I saw a three-legged dog on a walk the other day while you were gone, Sylas, and I started bawling," I complained to him, as my eyes filled up with tears. "I don't even know why! The dog looked happy!"

I felt a chuckle rumble through his body. "My queen," he murmured, and pushed me back so he could see my face.

"And then there's everything else—what if it hates me? Or you? And what about global warming?"

He brought his lips down to kiss my tears off of my cheeks. "Your fears are as delicious as they are unfounded."

"How do you know?" I said, pouting.

"I just do. Come here," he said, shifting himself and me, so that he was now under me on the couch, and I was using him as a pillow. "You may cry when you like, my queen, but try to save your tears for me. You know I will make you feel good afterward."

I sniffed. "It was a really cute dog," I said in my defense, and he laughed, placing one of his hands against my belly, where the difference between my pale skin—now with a few stretch marks—and his fingertips was stark.

I couldn't even see my lambda scar from here—but I wore the empty hourglass mark on my arm with pride.

He nuzzled his face against mine and whispered in my ear. "Open your legs for me and let me pleasure you."

I did as I was told, while making a small, surrendering sound.