Still hanging out at Dragos’s heels, Skeeter barked. Dragos closed his eyes. He looked like he was in real pain. “S-sure.” Pia tried to keep her voice from wobbling. “Go right ahead.”

“Awesome. There’s also some kind of casserole thingy. I had a bite. It’s delish.”

Pia waved her hand. “You might as well.”

“Thanks.” The harpy wandered back into the kitchen.

“And there goes the breakfast part of the agenda,” Dragos muttered, making her laugh harder.

Sensing movement at the top of the stairs, she sobered. Niniane came down. She was drier, not quite so manic, but the strange cloak still dampened her energy. “Are you okay, honey?”

“I’m pregnant.” Niniane dropped the cloaking and burst into tears. Suddenly Pia could sense it and smell it in her changed scent.

Dragos said, “Oh shit.”

Niniane wailed louder.

A while later, they sat at the kitchen table. Niniane’s story had come out punctuated with great honking sobs.

She had been drinking a lot lately.

(“Because, why not?”)

The pressure of being the Dark Fae Queen was unrelenting. She spent a lot of time thinking about what could’ve or might’ve been.

(“The old coulda, woulda, shoulda,” she said with a sad hiccup.)

Then, one night, she’d stopped blocking the possibility of a pregnancy.

(“I was drunk, there was no excuse, and I dropped the birth control spell for a night. It was like poking holes in a condom. Let’s see what happens, I thought. Probably nothing’s going to happen in a single night. I mean, I know Wyr males have mighty, irresistible sperm, but Tiago would have been blocking things on his end too. Right? I just… I felt so tired. That’s not an excuse. I’m not making an excuse. I’m just saying that I’m tired of pretending to be single, even though everybody and their grandmother knows Tiago and I are lovers. But to the Dark Fae, having a Wyr for a lover is like having a dirty secret. To them it’s a perversion, it isn’t something we’re supposed to talk about, and I was tired of everything and everyone. And when I reached for Tiago that night, I wanted to pretend and forget.”)

Pia sat with her arm around the smaller woman’s shoulders, listening to the outpouring of pain. Dragos sat at one end of the kitchen table, turned sideways in his chair, arms folded and frowning into space. Skeeter lay with his head on Dragos’s shoe.

Aryal’s belligerence had completely disappeared. At one point she left the room quietly and was gone for several minutes. When she returned, she leaned against the doorway at the edge of the room.