I move her carefully off my chest. She makes a small sound—low, half-formed—and I settle her against the pillow and she doesn't wake. I cross the room.
Oberon's image steadies in the glass. Silver eyes. That ancient stillness, the quality of something that stopped counting time long ago.
"The fifth bond," he says.
"Confirmed," I say.
His silver eyes move past me to Claire on the bed. The claiming marks at her throat catch the firelight. He looks at them the way a man looks at a ledger entry, noting completion.
"A daughter," he says. "Already."
I say nothing.
"Mist Court's contribution to the web." His gaze comes back to me. "Not strength. Not cold. Not abundance. Information. The shaping of what is believed." A pause. "The child will understand the difference between a thing that is true and a thing that has been made to feel true. That is what the fifth bond gives the prophecy."
"She doesn't know yet," I say. "What was done."
"No."
His image begins to thin at the edges.
"She will find out," I say.
He looks at me. Something in the silver eyes I cannot name and have never been able to name across four prior appearances—not sympathy, not indifference. Acknowledgement. The recognition of a variable he has already accounted for.
"Yes," he says. And then: "The fourth bond broke and remade. Stronger for it."
He fades. The mirror is just a mirror.
I stand in front of it a moment longer. My own reflection looking back—dark skin, silver braid, eyes that are not as settled as I would like them to be. I look at myself the way I look at any intelligence problem: what is the actual condition of this, and what does it mean.
Then I go back to bed.
I settleher against my chest. She goes where I put her without surfacing—the heat-sleep pulling her down, her hand finding my shirt and closing in it. Her dark hair against my throat. Her tan skin warm against mine where the claiming marks havesettled silver-bright, and the rut stirs at the contact, both cocks hardening against the backs of her thighs.
I breathe. I hold it at manageable.
She makes a sound.
Not a word. A sound from deep in the heat-sleep, low and wanting—the kind the body makes when it is chasing something it can't quite reach. Her hips shift, the smallest roll, pressing back against me. Her breathing changes—not awake, not close to awake, but something running underneath the sleep that the heat drives whether she decides it or not.
Both cocks pulse.
I press my palm flat against her lower belly, just warmth, just pressure—and she makes the sound again. Longer. Her hips press back harder. Her lips part against my throat and the sound that comes out of her is the most unguarded thing I have heard from her in thirty-seven days. No cover. No management. Just want, moving through her without her permission.
The rut makes the decision before I do.
I shift her hips forward—careful, slow—and press into her from behind. She is slick and warm and her body draws me in and I stop there, buried deep, and hold. She sighs in her sleep. Not a moan. A sigh—the sound of something landing, something wanted for a long time finally there. Her hand tightens in my shirt.
I don't move yet.
I hold it. The heat of her around me. The claiming marks warm under my palm where I've spread my hand across her ribs. Both cocks hard and aching—the lower cock pressed between her thighs from outside, the upper cock buried in her cunt—and I hold, and breathe, and wait.
She makes the sound again.
Her hips rock back. Fractional. Asleep and still asking for more.
I start to move.