by Leta Blake
“Fuck,” Urho muttered, and Jason’s heart galloped. If Urho was losing control, then he had every right to be scared. The optimism of the last few months felt as though it was circling the drain, replaced by cold, cold fear.
“Sir,” Ren went on like he really didn’t want to. “Mr. Janus is seizing now. His fever has gone too high for his body to hold. The cook is trying to cool him with cold water, but he’s not responding.”
Jason didn’t turn around, keeping his eyes and hands on Vale, but he felt nauseous. That didn’t sound good. It didn’t sound good at all.
Urho tore into his medical bag and brought out a bottle of medication, a syringe, and an empty hypodermic needle. “One syringe now. If he doesn’t calm, then another in eight minutes.” Urho returned to Jason and Vale’s side. “I’m sorry. I know this isn’t your job but—”
Another cry from Caleb’s room rattled them all. Ren gasped, and Jason’s heart squeezed. He met Urho’s gaze, rocked to the core by the grim line of his mouth. Vale shouted as well. His body clenched all over as he held onto the back of the chair he’d had his foot on. Jason hushed him, but Vale was lost to him, gone deep into his pain. Eyes rolled back, Vale gritted his teeth and began to push. Jason stared as Vale’s asshole bulged.
“Wolf-god!” Ren exclaimed in horror. He grabbed the medicine and syringe from Urho’s hand and rushed away to administer the medication to Janus.
Adrenaline flooded Jason, leaving him feeling raw to the touch. He blinked in overawed shock as Urho knelt to the floor and spread Vale’s ass cheeks wider, tugging the taut hole open enough to see a hint of something dark and fuzzy.
“Is the baby coming?” Jason asked, rubbing Vale’s straining back and bending low to look. “Oh, wolf-god, is that his head?”
Urho shoved Jason aside. “Get out of the way.”
Rage filled Jason, and unthinkingly he shoved Urho back with a snarl and growl. A need to protect his omega overriding rational thought.
Vale whimpered. “I will murder you both if you get into a fight right now. There is a baby coming out of me and—aaahhhh!” He howled, hunching again, his entire body going tense as he pushed harder, flushing all over.
“Yes, that’s the head,” Urho said grimly as slick rushed from Vale’s asshole.
Another scream came from Caleb’s wing, along with the sound of breaking wood. Then a violent thump. And another. Jason felt ill. Cold. Hot. Everything all at once. Sweat slipped down Jason’s back, though nothing like the sweat flowing from Vale’s body. His hands shook as he continued to rub Vale’s haunches, and he stared at Vale’s bulging asshole, breath held, waiting.
“What the fuck is going on?” a new voice snarled from the doorway.
Jason and Urho’s heads whipped around to see Xan standing outside Vale’s open door, his blue eyes dangerously narrowed, his curly hair a mess, and a large bruise on his cheekbone and another on his jaw. A combination of confusion and rage warred on Xan’s face. “What the fuck is happening here?”
Vale gripped the chair hard and pushed again, wailing. The screams from Caleb’s room came even louder.
Urgently, Urho turned to Jason. “Explain to him! I need to just…” Then he slipped a finger in beside the baby’s head, and Vale shouted.
Instinct rose up hard, and Jason kicked Urho in the thigh. “Hurt him again, and I’ll kill you.”
“Stop!” Vale whimpered. “I can’t… Let me… Oh, wolf-god, fuck!” He grimaced and pushed like some power greater than his own strength had hold of him. His hole opened enough to reveal a swath of the baby’s brown-fuzzed head.
“Mr. Riggs is locked in, Mr. Heelies, sir,” a beta servant from the hallway explained to Xan. “He’s in heat.”
“Well, don’t just stand there—take me to him!” Xan barked.
Urho looked like he yearned to go to Xan and explain to him what was happening, but things with the baby were moving too quickly. A rush of blood gushed down Vale’s legs. Head spinning, Jason cried out in panic. Urho shoved him away hard.
The baby slipped out into Urho’s hands. Perfect, whole, and covered with slick, mucous, and blood. The child let out a lusty scream. Jason stared at him in shock, and then Vale collapsed onto the chair, blood still coursing from his asshole. His beautiful hands reached out for the baby, and Jason blinked, staring at the umbilical cord that pulsed between them.
Jason’s knees gave out then, and he found himself kneeling beside Vale as Urho passed off their blood-covered, plump, and screaming child to them. Vale took the sweet thing into his arms.
“Look, baby alpha. Look what we made.”
Jason burst into tears. Vale kissed Jason’s head, and then the baby’s, and then Jason scented them both. All three of them huddled close, damp, slick, and full of emotions too raw to bear.
“I should feed him,” Vale whispered. He tugged open his robe, placing the babe to his chest and cooing as the infant latched on and began to suckle.
Jason wiped tears from his eyes and kissed Vale’s forehead. The moment was intimate and sweet, but Urho apparently had some work to do on Vale’s insides. While they stared at their son, Urho convinced Vale to get into the bed with Jason and their baby, while Urho set about the work of making sure Vale would heal inside well.
Jason and Vale snuggled their child and whispered names back and forth as Urho worked silently. But between the babe’s screams, Vale’s whimpers when Urho’s instruments pinched, and the sounds coming from down the hall in Caleb’s room, there was still plenty of shouting going on.
With tears leaking down his face, Jason held Vale’s still body in the bed, the breeze from the still-open window pouring over them. In the crevice between their forms, an equally still, tiny body rested, perfect and utterly beautiful.
With Vale’s nose and dark hair. All ten fingers and toes.
And the sweetest breath that pulled in and out in little huffs that made Jason’s heart ache.
Vale’s steady breath was a delight as well. There had been a terrifying moment when blood seeped from Vale’s body in copious amounts, and Jason had thought he might lose him. But Urho had gone in and sewn him up neatly, promising that Vale would live, that the babe would live.
And then Vale had declared them a family.
A family.
Jason hadn’t been able to stop crying since then. All the tension and fear he’d held back through the majority of the pregnancy and then the labor let loose in a storm of emotion. Vale didn’t blame him for it, because he was crying, too. And Urho couldn’t tease or judge, because he’d gone on his way to help Xan with Caleb’s heat. So, it was just him, his giant feelings, and his beautiful new family now.
He’d never thought they’d have this. Every moment since the birth was so perfect, beautiful, and raw. It almost hurt to hold so much joy in his arms.
Jason knew he should call his parents and tell them all had come to pass and that their son was perfect, and that Vale was strong. But he couldn’t bring himself to get out of bed. He couldn’t bring himself to stop staring at the miracles in his arms. His living Érosgápe. His beautiful son.
“What will we call him?” Vale’s green eyes fluttered open, and his tired voice asked the question as if they’d been talking for the last few minutes. Another question among many.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Jason said, kissing Vale’s eyelids, his nose, his bearded cheek, his mouth.
“Surely you’ve had something in mind?” Vale kissed Jason back. The tiny baby shifted between them, making soft suckling sounds in his sleep.
In all the months, Jason had refused to entertain the discussion of names, superstitious that if they gave the child a name too soon, they’d lose him. Or each other. “What about naming him for one of your parents?”
“Rupert and Dideon?” Vale shook his head. “I wouldn’t want to saddle him with either of those names.”
“Dido for short?” Jason offered.
“No. I was hoping for something more…”
�
��Poetic?”
Vale smiled. “Well, if I can’t write poetry, at least I can give birth to it.”
The baby twitched in his sleep, and Vale touched his tiny nose. Jason took a deep breath and ventured, “Virona?”
“Ah.” Vale seemed to consider it. “After the place he was born.”
“His eyes are sea-green.”
“They’re likely to change.”
“No. They’ll be like yours.”
“You insist on it?”
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 a sleeping 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, as Érosgápe and 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.
“A week up here will be perfect for us,” Vale said. “Your pater already sent someone up to baby-proof the place last week so that Viro will be safer here than at home.”
“And Zephyr will get a break from him.”
Vale pressed his smile against the top of Viro’s little head. “Yes. Poor Zephyr.”
Viro was obsessed with the cat and screeched with joy whenever Zephyr strolled into a room. Zephyr, for her part, was less enthusiastic about the wobbly, unpredictable, and loud creature who had invaded her home. She spent much of her time these days hiding in cupboards and avoiding the family.
“They’ll become friends as he gets older,” Jason asserted again for the thousandth time. “She’ll see that Viro loves her.”
Vale hoped he was right, but part of him suspected Zephyr would always despise Viro for stealing Vale’s attentions, and Jason’s comfortable lap.
“Ah,” Jason said with a hint of lingering tension in his tone. They’d come through the tunnel of trees that made up the drive and pulled into the open space before the cottage. It looked very much like it had when they’d pulled up the first time—except for a massive stack of firewood against the side of the house, the remnants of the damnable tree that had taken out their car.
“It looks as if we’ll be all set for any amount of snow and heat this time,” Vale offered up with a touch of playfulness. If Jason was going to be solemn about this, then he’d have to break him out of it early. His baby alpha had felt guilty for too long. “Plenty of firewood, and a shockingly large box of alpha condoms.” He shot Jason a sly look.
He wasn’t kidding either. There was indeed a big box of alpha condoms in the trunk of the car. Chestfeeding would keep the heat at bay until Viro stopped nursing, but Jason wasn’t taking any chances. Vale had barely restrained his laughter when he’d first seen the enormous box. “Darling, I’d have to be in heat every day of the rest of my life to need that many.”
To which Jason had replied darkly, “I’ll never let a residence of ours run low on condoms again. Better safe than sorry.”
And Vale had let that go.
Though he wasn’t sorry. Not at all. And, he knew, neither was Jason. Viro was worth all the fear and pain. But risking it again for a second child wasn’t worth it to either of them—much to Yule and Miner’s clear disappointment. But they made up for it in hogging Viro all they could. Which was part of the reason they were getting away to the cabin—to escape Vale’s still-overbearing in-laws.
Jason got out first, walking around the car to open the door for Vale. He helped him out so that they didn’t wake Viro, both of them marveling at the deep sleep of their usually restless child. Urho maintained it was evidence that the boy would likely present as an alpha eventually, but neither of them really cared. They just wanted him to sleep. And thrive. And
grow up to be happy.
“It’s too bad Rosen and Yosef couldn’t join us after all,” Vale said as Jason hefted the box of emergency condoms and grasped the handle of the biggest piece of luggage. They started toward the house. “Yosef is so good with Viro. And Rosen is so handy in the kitchen. He could have taken some of those responsibilities off your shoulders so you could truly rest.”
“I can take care of my omega and child,” Jason said defensively. “I don’t need help.”
Vale chuckled. “Of course, oh alpha, my alpha. You are the best provider in the world, and never need sleep or rest.”
Jason sputtered, but Vale calmed him with a hot glance. “If this one keeps sleeping, we could see if the mattress is as soft as I remember.”
Jason’s exasperation vanished, replaced by a glimmer of interest. “If we don’t fall asleep first.”
Vale lifted his chin, and Jason put down the luggage to grip it in his hand, fingers stroking Vale’s beard. “We won’t fall asleep, baby alpha,” Vale said. “I’ve been missing you.”
Jason got the front door of the cabin open quickly after that, though the sight of the living room and the sofa where he’d found Vale in such agony seemed to stop him in his tracks momentarily. But then he straightened his shoulders, put up his chin, and said, “I’ll put the groceries away. You try to get him down. I’ll meet you in the bedroom.”
Vale nodded and shoved away his own memories of pain and desperation and the fear that had clouded their lives in the aftermath. Here was a beautiful view, and another, and a bedroom that was decorated with love. He took Viro into the guest room and noticed that at some point, Miner or Yule had arranged for a crib to be delivered. It took up the space along the inside wall, and Vale noted the sheets and fittings were sweet little gray cats with halos.
Carefully, with bated breath, he put Viro down in the crib. He bit into his lower lip and waited for the usual furious yell to rise up, but it didn’t. Instead, Viro lay on his back, one small fist curled by his flushed face, his eyelashes black on his cheeks, and his hair curling sweetly all over his head. His breathing was steady and deep. His mouth pursed in a slight O. He was delicious-looking, and it was all Vale could do not to scoop him up again and cover him with kisses. But that would surely wake him up.