A year later.
“You look like you’re about to burst.”
I wanted to strangle my sister, even if her words were delivered with genuine concern.
Objectively speaking, I did look like an orange. I was forty-one weeks pregnant with our first child. It was clear that my son, like his father, was not to be rushed. Rather, he’d decided to opt for a grand entrance while fashionably late, something my body did not appreciate.
My breasts were the size of watermelons and constantly sore, my lower back felt like nothing but pointy needles supported it, and my hormones were all over the place.
This past week, I couldn’t even bring myself to get out of bed. I had to rely on Cillian for food and entertainment. Oh, and reaching those pesky parts I could no longer scrub while taking a shower.
I leaned over my headboard with a pout, wiggling my toes even though they were nothing but a distant memory I couldn’t see anymore.
“When are the mood swings going to be over?” I pondered aloud. Sailor and Aisling were in the room, too, fawning over me. “I’m tired of bursting into tears every time I see a Super Bowl commercial and whenever a Katy Perry song comes on the radio.”
“You cry because she sucks, right?” Belle slumped on the foot of my bed, massaging my feet. “Just want to confirm your hormones are only messing with your feelings and not your taste in music.”
I snorted, giving her a playful kick. “I’m serious.”
“My mood swings never passed,” Sailor said, draped on a recliner in the corner of our master bedroom. “I remember pushing Rooney’s stroller along a jogging trail, looking at a squirrel running about, thinking how its tail would be perfect for cleaning baby bottles. In my defense, it was really fluffy.”
“No offense, bitch, but you’re not such a great example.” Belle placed my right ankle over her thigh, digging her thumbs deep into the arch of my foot. “You got knocked up again before Rooney graduated from seeing shades to recognizing voices. Does your husband know he can put it away every now and again?”
“No,” we all said in unison, laughing. Aisling scrunched her nose. She was standing at the window, watching my lush garden. The day I’d moved back into the mansion was also the day the bleeding heart had begun to wilt and eventually die. It was like it served its purpose and then retired. I always thought of it as Auntie Tilda finally taking a breath after she granted my wish.
“Gross. It’s my brother we’re talking about.” Ash shuddered. “Come to think of it, other than you, Belle, all my friends are also my sisters-in-law, and all of them got knocked up by my brothers. It’s alarming.”
“What’s alarming is this baby is still inside me.” I pointed at my huge belly.
“Lucky kid.” My husband strolled into our room, cool and collected in his designer suit. His posture alone made me drool a little. Cillian had been most accommodating when we found out my pregnancy came with an increased sexual appetite. However, in the past couple of months, having sex became such a chore, these days we were relying on oral favors and Netflix to keep us busy at night.
“Satan,” Belle saluted. My sister and my husband got along fine these days. He’d even helped her buy out her two business partners, so now she was the sole owner of Madame Mayhem.
“Lucifer,” Sailor greeted.
She, too, had no beef with her brother-in-law anymore.
“Kill.” Ash nodded.
He ignored the women in the room, sauntering in my direction to lean down and press a long, close-mouthed kiss to my forehead.
“How’re you doing, Flower Girl?”
“Tired. Sleepy.” I stretched lazily, smiling up at him.
He rubbed my stomach through the stretchy orange fabric of my pajamas.
“And the little guy?”
“Great. I think he’s going to be a soccer player. He’s been kicking up a storm all morning.”
Cillian raised his eyebrows. “Whatever floats his boat during adolescence. But once he’s out of university, he’s going to have to take his place at Royal Pipelines.”
Groaning, I grabbed the tip of my husband’s tie and tugged him to me, shutting him up with a kiss. “We’ve been through this, hubs. He is going to be whatever he wants to be. He is not you.”
We’d had a lot of discussions about what it meant for Cillian to be Cillian. The heir to Royal Pipelines. How maybe, if it weren’t for the burden of his lineage, he wouldn’t have had to find creative and destructive ways to deal with his disorder. A disorder that still—apart from myself, Andrew, and Joelle Arrowsmith—no one knew anything about.
Not even his mother, who—Kill told me once—probably blocked the memory of that Swiss lab in order to protect herself.
“Of course,” he said flatly. “He can be whatever he wants. A soccer player, a musician, a pool boy.”
I shot him a look.
“But he’ll want to be a CEO,” Kill finished, grinning.
“All righty.” Belle tapped my ankles. “I think we’re going to leave you to it before you rip off each other’s clothes and have very pregnant sex in front of us. It’s been real. Pers, Mom says she is coming this week, and that she’s staying. She has a feeling you will pop over the weekend.” She stood, motioning for my friends to follow.
“I’ll have Petar get one of the guest rooms ready,” Kill said.
“But I haven’t rubbed Persy’s tummy yet today!” Ash protested.
“God, Ash, you need your own baby.” Sailor laughed, pushing her out.
“I’ve a feeling she’ll get one soon,” Belle murmured, closing the door behind them.
Kill flashed the door an irritated look, then turned his gaze back to me.
I raised my palms up. “I can’t help what leaves my sister’s mouth.”
“If you could, you’d have a full-time job managing it. Have you heard from Joelle this week? She asked when she could stop by.”
Shortly after Cillian and I got back together, I resumed my communication with Joelle Arrowsmith. She was going through a divorce from Andrew, who was still in therapy, working in the private sector as a legal consultant and trying to become a better father for Tree and Tinder. Joelle was relieved when I started visiting her again, often with Cillian, who kept an eye on Tinder and often provided Joelle advice and guidance.
I’d even taken the kids and my husband to see Mrs. Veitch for a Christmas celebration at her nursing home. She died a few weeks after in her sleep.
“I need to call her back, but I’m hoping the next time I see her, I’ll have a baby in my hands. Can you help me up? I need a shower.” I wobbled about the bed.
“I’ve got you.” He scooped me up in his arms and carried me into our en suite. There, I stood under the streaming showerheads, steam clouding the glass doors while Kill leaned against the marble countertops, keeping me company.
“Sailor is starting to show,” I observed, lathering my arms with soap.
“Hmm,” Kill answered noncommittally. I could see him stroking his chin from the mirror in front of us. “Does Ash really want a baby?”
I shrugged. “Wouldn’t surprise me. I’m twenty-seven. That makes her…what? Twenty-six? Not too farfetched even though she still has her residency to complete.” Ash was a doctor now. “We’ve always been the romantics out of the bunch. We’ve always wanted big families.”
“With the slight distinction that you were never obsessed with the king of the underworld,” Kill noted.
Sam Brennan was his friend, but he was also a man he didn’t want for his sister.
“No,” I agreed. “I simply fell in love with the media’s favorite villain.” I smiled, turning off the water stream and patting the tiles for my bathrobe. “Don’t worry, we’ve got your sister. We’ll keep her safe and won’t let her do anything too wild.”
“Just like they kept you from marrying me,” Kill said, unconvinced. “You are sweet but stubborn, and my sister’s much the same. I’m old enough to remember that when she was five, she almost dragged a fucking live opossum into the house because my parents had refused to grant her the pet she wanted so much.”
My husband cursed. Not often, and only in front of me and a small cluster of friends and family, but he did.
I flicked my hand to turn off the water.
Wait, haven’t I done this already?
“…will break every bone in his body and reassemble him to look like a Picasso painting if he as much as touches a hair on her head…”
“Kill,” I breathed.
“What?” He stopped talking, turning to face the shower.
“I turned off the water…” I murmured, looking down. “But the water’s still running.”
His eyes darted between my legs.
“Sweetheart, your water broke.”
We both looked at each other.
“Ready, Daddy Kill?”
“Let’s get it, Flower Girl.”
Cillian
Astor Damian Archibald Fitzpatrick was born on the warmest day in Boston’s history. Warmer than the unfortunate day on our belated honeymoon in Namibia, when my wife fulfilled her dream to lie on a velvety yellow dune and look up at the sun defiantly. At one hundred and ten degrees, I sweated my balls off nearby, waiting for her patiently with a cold bottle of water.
It was so scorching hot, the power went down, generators had to be used to keep the electricity running at the hospital, and my wife looked like a liquid version of her former self.
Then he came into the world and everything ceased to matter.
“And my fourth-grade teacher said nothing would come out of me.” Persephone pumped the air when the doctor scooped the baby, laughing and crying at the same time, which, I’d learned during my time being with her, was apparently a completely valid thing to do for a human being.
“What’s her name?” I demanded. “I’ll make sure—”
“God, Kill, who cares about Ms. Merrill! Give me my baby!” There was definitely more laughing than crying now.
Astor did not come out kicking and screaming, as babies do, rejecting the very idea of leaving the comfort and warm safety of the womb in which they were created.
He came out quiet and stern. Too quiet, in fact. So much so, that the doctor swooped him away to a nearby table before we could see him properly and began patting him with a towel and suctioning fluid out of his mouth.
“I’m just trying to stimulate his first cry,” Dr. Braxman said calmly. “His pulse and color are fine, so I’m sure it is nothing. Probably just a tough, resilient baby.”
Persephone wrapped my hand in hers, squeezing me with the remainder of her energy, dripping sweat. After a twelve-hour labor, I was surprised she was still awake.
“Kill,” she moaned, cupping her mouth. I pulled her into a hug, craning my neck at the same time to see what Dr. Braxton was doing.
“It’s fine. Everything is fine. I’ll go take a look.”
She nodded.
As I made my way to the doctor, who was still patting and touching my baby, surrounded by two nurses, trying to make him cry, the escalating force of an impending Tourette’s attack crawled up my spine. My heart raced. My knuckles popped. My desire to protect my child burned so fiercely in me, I was pretty sure I could destroy the entire building with my two hands if something happened to him.
Just as I took the last step toward Dr. Braxman, Astor opened his tiny red mouth and let out a wail that nearly shattered the windows, curling his tiny fists and thrusting them in the air like Rocky.
“Ah. There we are.” Dr. Braxman wrapped my son like a burrito, then handed him to me, supporting his head. “Ten fingers, ten toes, a set of healthy lungs, and a lot of personality.”
The doctor moved quickly, settling back between my wife’s thighs, which had been covered with a cloth, and began stitching her up.
I frowned down at my son.
The so-called goal. The endgame. My mission after successfully ticking all the boxes on my way to taking over the reins of the Fitzpatrick family.
And out of all the feelings I had felt—joy, pleasure, awe, happiness, wild anticipation, and violent protectiveness, even a little fear tossed in—I couldn’t, for the life of me, see myself passing him the burden of going through what I had to go through to make my parents proud.
It wasn’t fair to him. To me. To Hunter’s and Aisling’s children, and all the future offspring we were going to have.
Studying his face, I admired his perfection. Nature had cherry-picked our best features for him. He had huge blue eyes like his mother, my dark hair, and a prominent nose like mine. But his ears were small, like my wife’s, and he had that look—the look that could make empires fall—that only Persephone Penrose had ever managed to hone.
A look that disarmed me.
A look that told me I might not be the bad cop in the household, after all.
“Excuse me,” Persephone sing-songed from her place on the bed, waving at me. “My apologies for interrupting, but is there any way I could see my own son, too?”
I laughed, walking over to her. Astor was still screaming and throwing his little fists at me. He had surprisingly long fingernails for a newborn, but they looked thin and brittle. I lowered him to her chest, which was only partly covered by her hospital gown.
The mother and the baby stared at each other, and the world around them stopped on its axis. Astor got very quiet and very serious. Persephone sucked in a breath, and I stopped breathing, the pressure of the attack easing down.
“Hello, little angel.” She smiled down at him.
He stared at her, mesmerized.
I know the feeling, son.
I stood back and watched them.
My own little family.
A perfect thing in this imperfect world.
Knowing I might’ve passed Astor the very thing that life had cursed me with because it was hereditary.
Knowing that, in all probability, my father had it, too.
And vowing to make sure Astor would never get locked in a church confession booth with his demons.
That he, too, would one day be able to bask in the light.
