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XADEN

It's a surreal feeling to feel like your heart is beating outside your chest. I feel out of control. Like I can't control a single situation, this isn't something I have ever dealt with and it's fucking terrifying.

I have no fucking idea what I'm doing.

Every day is a new obstacle and my life is in a fucking tailspin but... My life has never been better.

I see a future, my future in her eyes.

They're the same color as mine.

Looking into her eyes is like looking into a mirror. Tink never wanted to find out the sex of the baby. She said we deserved to be surprised. That wasn't the fucking word I would have used.

The second she came out and the doctors announced she was a girl, I nearly shot him. A boy is easy, I know boys. They piss standing up, they can go out and fuck and not come home pregnant.

This is punishment.

That's what it fucking is.

I know Emery would have got a kick out of this shit. I'm completely and utterly out of my depth. Carnage and Cas find it fucking hilarious and I find their amusement deeply aggravating. I wanted to murder that son of a bitch the day Carnage walked through my front door with Harper and Cas, looked me dead in the eyes with that slow, infuriating smirk and said, “Let's hope she doesn't end up with a piece of shit like you. Imagine that, your own daughter falling in love with someone who treats her exactly how you treated her mother.”

Cas saw the look on my face and moved toward me fast. But Toren was faster. She stepped in front of me with our daughter against her chest, looked me dead in the eye and said, with the kind of calm that only Toren Kellar can produce while sleep-deprived and still recovering from childbirth.

“Fight in front of her or raise your voices and I will kill you both and have Omen help me hide your bodies.”

I looked at my daughter's face over Toren's shoulder.

I unclenched my fists.

It was at that moment I understood what people mean when they say something changes you. I had always assumed that was the kind of thing people said to fill a silence. I know better now. Something inside me shifted the moment Emmerson arrived and it has not shifted back and I don’t want it to. I may be fumbling my way through this, making mistakes I don't even know I'm making yet, but every single time I look at her, there is something that rises in my chest that is bigger and more structural than anything I have felt before.

I can't sleep.

Not properly. I lie in the dark and run threat assessments on the apartment, exits, sightlines, whether the lock on the front door is sufficient, whether the building security is adequate, whether Andrade has cleared the latest intel from the territories thoroughly enough that nothing is going to come for us in the night. I have always been good at calculating threats. I have never before lain awake doing it for someone who weighs less than a bag of sugar and sleeps with her fist pressed against her cheek.

I spend most nights in the armchair in the corner of her room. On nights when the fear gets too loud I move to the floor next to the crib, my back against the wall where I can see both the door and her face at the same time, and I stay there until morning.

Toren found me there at five in the morning last Tuesday. She stood in the doorway in my shirt and looked at me on the floor with my arms folded across my knees and she didn't say anything. She just went back to bed. She understands. She is better at this than I am, at knowing when something needs to be said and when it needs to be left alone. I am still learning the difference.

I created my own weakness.

I did it deliberately. I sat in a room months ago and told a woman to end a pregnancy that I now understand was the beginning of the only future I actually want, and I have to live with that. I do live with it. It sits in me alongside everything else.

Yet, as I stand here and look down at the thing Tink and I created, I feel this surge inside my chest that I don't have the language for and have stopped trying to name.

“I told her to get rid of you,” I whisper as I reach down and gently gather her in my arms, taking the weight of her head the way Cas drilled me on until I wanted to put him through the wall. ‘Support the head, Xaden. She is a person not a parcel.’ And make my way over to the armchair in the corner of the room. She stirs against my chest but doesn't wake, a small, disgruntled sound and then back under, already as stubborn about sleep as her mother. She isn't due for another feed for about an hour. I brush the tips of my fingers along her rosy cheek as I settle back and begin to rock, very slowly, the way that works.

I discovered the rocking by accident. First night home, three in the morning, she was crying and nothing was working and I had exhausted everything the hospital pamphlet suggested. I was standing in this room holding her against my chest and I started moving because standing still felt intolerable and she stopped.

Just stopped.

Like a switch.

I stood there for another twenty minutes rocking in place because I was afraid if I stopped she would start again, and Toren appeared in the doorway and looked at us, the expression on her face is one I have not yet been able to put away properly.

“I've never held a baby until you,” I tell her now, in the dark. She is warm against me and completely unconcerned with everything I am about to confess. “You should know that. You are the first baby I have ever held in my life and the first time I did it I was terrified I was going to break something. I have held a lot of things, weapons, grudges, grief that would have destroyed a smaller man and none of them prepared me for the specific weight of you.”

I look at her face.