“If you had been able to keep f**king them, I think they would still be tied to you more, but when the doctor told you not to risk it with the babies …” I could feel him shrug in the circle of my arms.
“You think they want to be free of me?”
“Holly does,” Kitto said. “Ash will do whatever will give them the most power.”
“It will be six weeks before I can have sex with anyone, according to the doctors.”
“And longer before you would risk such roughness in bed as they or Mistral prefer,” Kitto said.
I petted Kitto and tried not to betray with even the stillness of my body the secret I’d been keeping. Holly and Ash were perverted by goblin standards. They actually liked gentle sex, and Ash enjoyed giving o**l s*x, which was a sign among the goblins that he considered himself subservient to me, or anyone he would go down on. It had taken me weeks to convince Kitto to allow me to go down on him, for he feared that it would hurt my reputation among the goblins, and we still needed their threat to keep our enemies in check, or at least to give them pause about attacking me. If the goblins learned the kind of sex that the brothers enjoyed, their reputations would be ruined. It could cost them their lives, because if you were perceived as weak, the challenges to combat could come so fast and often that eventually you would fail, and there was only one cure for failure in a duel among the goblins—death. I was lucky that the sidhe gave other options, or I would have died long before I escaped to Los Angeles.
Kurag, Goblin King, and Niceven, Queen of the Unseelie Demi-fey, had both agreed to forgo their price of treaty until after the babies were born. The goblins would have to wait until I was cleared for sex and had had it successfully with some of the fathers of my children, but Niceven could ask for her blood price to continue sooner. It was but a bit of blood offered to their tiny mouths, but the wild magic that had returned with my own late-blooming hands of power had given wings to the wingless among them, and given extra powers to some among them who had shared my blood and then my bed. Legend had said that some among the demi-fey could change to human size, but we had thought that lost with so much other magic among the fey, until we’d met demi-fey who could do it. I still thought they would be the perfect assassins, though Niceven said that they had never acted as such. I wasn’t sure I believed her.
“You’ve thought of something that makes you sad, or worried,” Kitto said softly.
“The demi-fey can demand their bit of blood again sooner than the goblins can demand their bit of flesh,” I said.
He snuggled his face against my shoulder and stroked a hand down my back. “You fear the demi-fey, don’t you?”
“Remember the case we helped the police solve? That proved to me that the demi-fey can be just as insane and dangerous as any of us.” I shivered at the thought of what had almost happened, when our tiny murderer had tried to cut the babies from my body and destroy what she could not have, a regular life with the human she was in love with. They say lovers want the world to love with them, but love thwarted can turn as ugly and dangerous as any hatred I’d ever seen.
He kissed my shoulder. “I am sorry, our Merry, it was careless of me not to remember.”
I shook my head, my longer hair sliding over the silk, which meant I was moving more than I thought, as if I could shake the memory of that evil from my mind, but it was too recent a memory to fade. I had been in my first trimester with the babes then, and it had been the case that made the men veto any other cases for the Grey and Hart Detective Agency until after the babies were born. So many things had been waiting for the babies, and now we stood surrounded by all of them. Triplets, the first ones born to the sidhe in more centuries than anyone could remember.
Now, everything and everyone that had been waiting for the births would be wondering when to approach me, and how, and if they wanted to continue with treaties, alliances, or … There were those among Taranis’s court who had been waiting to see if my children were born deformed monsters, which was what the Golden Court had believed happened to all sidhe who joined the Unseelie Court. It wasn’t true, but like all truly ugly rumors it was strongly believed by many.
Now that the babies and their first pictures were disproving the rumor, we would see how serious the Seelie nobles had been about doing anything to have children of their own. If I could truly give them babies they would do much, including perhaps killing Taranis for me. I much preferred his death by his own nobles to risking the men I loved in battle against him, and me battling him … it was too ludicrous to think about. He’d kill me. He would just kill me. Of course, what he wanted to do to me was to force me to be his queen, because he thought his rape had gotten me with his child. That he thought that was reasonable was just one more example of his insanity.
I stood there wrapped in the warmth of my robe and Kitto’s arms, surrounded by our three children, and I wanted to feel content and happy, but there was still too much work to do, too many deaths to accomplish, because I finally owned that only the deaths of at least one of my relatives would bring safety to me and mine.
One of the babies shifted in their crib, making a small sound like the mewing of a kitten or the soft rustle of a bird. Kitto and I tensed, waiting to see if the noise grew and the baby woke, but the movement quieted and the room was full of that contented sleepiness that babies can give off, so you struggle to stay awake around them like being covered in dogs on the couch.
As if my thoughts had called them, I heard a snuffling at the door. The quiet voice of one of the guards came. “No, pups, you’ll wake the babies moving around in there.”