Luna to No One

Chapter 14

The first contraction hits when I’m already at the infirmary. It feels like something with teeth, and I grip the cot hard enough to hear my knuckles crack. Neve is already moving, voice clipped. "On the bed. Now. Lira, towels—second shelf, the wool ones."

"I can't—" The second one arrives before the first finishes, and every word dissolves into a sound I don't recognize as mine. My knees buckle and a hand catches my arm—large, steady, belonging to a man I did not invite.

"I've got you." Vesper's voice, stripped of every register I know—not the alpha, not the commander, just raw wire.

"Don't touch me." I say it while my fingers close around his wrist like a vice, which undermines the message considerably. He guides me onto the bed and I let him because my legs are barely holding me.

"The contractions are too close." Neve's hands move with the practiced calm of battlefield medicine. "This is moving fast. Lira, her other hand—she's going to need both."

"I'm right here." Lira's fingers lace through mine, fierce and sure. "And if you break my hand I will never forgive you, so keep that in mind."

"Your forgiveness is not my primary concern right now, Lira." The laugh turns into a groan that exits through every nerve I own. The room hums—the actual air vibrates, a frequency that buzzes in my molars and makes the basin water tremble.

"Agatha, look at me." Neve's eyes flick to the silver light pouring from my scars and back to her work. "The energy is spiking. You need to stay with my voice."

"Where else would I go? I'm rather committed to the current situation." My teeth lock around the words as the next wave hits, and I hear myself make a sound that belongs to someone I have never met.

Vesper's hand is in mine—I don't remember reaching for it and I can't let go. His grip the only solid thing in a body that has become a corridor for something enormous.

"You're doing this." His mouth close enough that the words land warm against my temple. "Agatha. You can do this."

"I said shut up." I bear down and the light doubles—silver washing the walls, flooding Neve's face in pale fire. The power carries my son with it, and the pain layers so deep I cannot separate the birth from the surge from the scars splitting open.

"One more." Neve's hands are steady on me but her voice is not—it splinters on my name. "One more, Agatha, and he's here."

"You said that last time." My jaw locks around the words and my spine arches off the bed and I push with everything that is left of me.

The world cracks open. Something leaves my body that takes all the sound in the room with it. Then—noise—the loudest, most furious wail I have ever heard from a creature that weighs less than a bag of flour.

Neve lifts him onto my chest. Small, dark-haired, screaming with the full-throated conviction of someone who has arrived with opinions and intends to voice every one immediately.

"Nico." The name comes out before I think it—it’s finally his. I can finally put a name I uttered in the dark of the night to the face. Little, dark purple and wrinkled face.

He opens his eyes. Amber-gold, his father's exact shade, and the scars at my collarbone flood warm for the first time since the severance—not light, just heat, spreading into my chest like a door reopening somewhere deep.

"Oh, Agatha." Lira's voice, thick and wrecked, her hand still gripping mine. "Look at him. Just—look at him."

"I can't stop." The love arrives all at once—total, structural, rewriting load-bearing walls. Every equation I have ever run recalculates around the seven pounds of fury on my chest.

"Strong heartbeat. Lungs like a war horn." Neve checks him with hands that won't stop trembling. "Energy signature is—unprecedented. We'll discuss that later."

"That's your professional assessment? We'll discuss it later?" My voice comes out shredded and damp and entirely beyond my control.

"My professional assessment is that your son is healthy and loud and I need a moment before I say anything else." Neve's jaw works once, her fingers pressing Nico's pulse points. "Give me that much."

"Fine." I trace the curve of his ear—impossibly small, impossibly perfect—and something structural in my chest rearranges itself around him permanently.

Vesper hasn't spoken. I look up and find him standing exactly where he was, hands at his sides, watching Nico like something he doesn't have the architecture to process.

"Vesper." His name comes out softer than I intend. He doesn't look at me—he can't stop looking at Nico, and the raw openness on his face is so foreign I almost don't recognize him.

He reaches out—one hand, slow. Nico's fist opens and closes around his finger, and Vesper makes a sound that is not a word, not a breath, but something between them.

"He has your eyes." My voice catches on something I didn't authorize—the part of me that wants to hate this man completely keeps finding reasons it can't.

"He has your jaw." Vesper's thumb traces Nico's knuckle, and the gentleness in that gesture lands like a blade between my ribs. "He's going to be stubborn."

"Good." Lira wipes her face with her sleeve, her voice still cracked and damp. "This family could use more stubborn and less of whatever the rest of you have been doing."

"Careful, Lira." Vesper's mouth almost curves—the closest thing to warmth I have seen from him in nine months. "You're speaking to your Alpha."

"I'm speaking to a man whose son just arrived." Lira holds his gaze with the specific boldness of someone who has earned the right. "Try to be worth the occasion."

The room holds a fragile quiet—Neve's hands still, the candle burning straight, five people suspended in a moment that will not come again. Nico's fingers tighten around Vesper's, and the strength of that grip pulls something visible across his face.

"Alpha." The guard appears in the doorway, breathing hard, and every molecule of stillness shatters on impact. "Hilda. She's gone—chambers cleared, belongings packed. No one saw her leave."

Vesper's head snaps up. His hand—the one his son is holding—pulls free fast enough that Nico's fingers close on empty air.

"Stay with the boy," he says to Neve, already moving. Not to me—not a word, not a glance. The corridor swallows him at a near-run.

"Did he just—" Lira stares at the empty doorway, her arms folded tight against her chest. "Tell me that didn't just happen."

"It happened." My arms tighten around my son, and the spot on my palm where Vesper's grip held through every contraction cools one degree at a time.

"I'm going to kill him," Lira says, very quietly, with the measured tone of someone updating a schedule. "Not today. But it's going in the calendar."

I press Nico closer and breathe him in—new skin, warmth, a cedar undertone that means something I am not ready to name. Whatever secret walks beside Hilda just left the building, and whatever Vesper is willing to drop his newborn son to chase matters more than any answer he has ever given me.