The shadows moved before Azriel did, curling under the doorway, soft and slow. They always reached for you first. Not in menace, but in memory. In knowing. As though they remembered, too, the way you used to flinch from them—before you understood they weren’t just fragments of night, but pieces of him. Of you, now.

He stepped inside like dusk falling—quiet, reverent. The cold clung to his shoulders, to the edges of his wings. Yet his gaze didn’t leave you.

You sat curled on the velvet settee near the fire, a blanket drawn loosely around you, the fabric barely concealing the faint rise beneath your gown. The fourth Archeron sister. The quiet one, always watching, always overlooked while your sisters made noise or war or love. Now, you bore something else.

Azriel dropped to one knee before you. The warmth of the room slowly began to melt the frost that had gathered on his leathers, but it was the sight of you—glowing in the firelight, hands cradling your stomach—that softened him.

He pressed his palm there. The bond between you hummed, deep and old as mountain roots.

His shadows coiled around you, resting against your skin, brushing over the swell of your stomach as if to listen. To guard. One of them curled around your wrist like a ribbon, delicate.

You let it.

Outside, Velaris slept beneath a blanket of snow, the city unaware that one of its fiercest warriors had come home to something far more fragile—and far more sacred.

Your hand threaded into Azriel’s hair, your fingers tangling gently in the dark silk of it. He rested his cheek to your belly, his wings folding in.

Peace.

Here, where you were his.