Apart from confirming that the Yudha boys had successfully made their way to the nursery and that Callida had taken up residence in Avena’s room for a desperately needed nap, Verum hadn’t had the time to think too hard about the Lion General and her family, but when the day’s business had finished, dinner with his own wife and son was eaten distractedly.

“The nurses were thrilled to have Callida’s babies in the nursery today,” Flore was saying, and Verum did his best to engage in the conversation fully. “They're so cute! I can’t even imagine trying to juggle three babies all at once. I thought just the one was challenging, and I had all the help in the world! I don’t know how Callida and Rogue do it all.”

“She’s been really tired.”

“I can only imagine,” Flore nodded with appreciation while coaxing Optatio into eating another bite of ground up… something.

“Flore, I’m sorry, would you excuse me? I have something I need to take care of.”

“I thought you said you’d finished all of your council business for the day,” she pouted.

“It’s… not council business. It shouldn’t take long. Maybe an hour? I should be back in time to help put Tatio to sleep.”

Flore’s frown deepened just a little, but she didn’t press the issue. “One hour?”

Verum stood up with a smile and leaned over the corner of the table to kiss her. “I’ll be in my study if you need me. Thank you, Dearest.”

Once in his study, Verum got to work writing out a formal note in his usual, carefully crafted calligraphy, finishing it off with a crimson wax seal and the royal crest before passing it to a messenger for immediate delivery. And now we wait.

***

Time was about as relevant as he felt. Rogue had woken up sometime in the afternoon to a quiet house with a hangover making his head pound. He’d gotten up, bathed, forced himself to swallow the water his body was screaming for, and then aimlessly wandered the gardens while waiting for an appropriate hour to return to the tavern for dinner and another bottomless round of mind-numbing beers. And he hated himself for choosing the alcohol over his wife and… her kids. But he also hated his life, how useless he felt, how badly he needed her even through this crisis of trust and self. And he hated how, recently, Shyaam had been fighting him — trying to persuade him that the boys were his despite logic saying otherwise… despite logic not existing at all. None of this made sense!

“Qiangde Yudha?” A palace messenger interrupted his brooding as the day’s light had faded just enough to justify the trek into town.

“Yes?”

“I have a message for you from the palace.”

One look at the seal and Rogue felt viscerally angry. “If you’re looking for the Lion General, she’s not here.”

“No, sir, I’m looking for you.” The messenger rotated the letter to display the name of the intended recipient, and Rogue found fault with the gorgeous penmanship when the messenger was proved correct.

Accepting the letter and breaking the seal, Rogue sped through the invitation and only barely managed to stifle a rising scoff. “He wants to see me right now?”

“Correct,” the messenger said with a snip to his voice that made Rogue prickle all the more. “Follow me, please.”

Spending the walk to the palace brooding about what the Lion King wanted with him, Rogue found himself staring at the door of the royal study prepared to accept the worst case scenario he’d been able to conjure: the Lion King had fathered Callida’s children and had now found an excuse to get rid of her husband.

“Come in!”

He took a deep breath and took the plunge. “You wanted to see me, Your Majesty?”

“Ah, Qiangde, yes. Thank you for coming,” the king began with a somberness that set the tone for a dark conversation.

“What can I do for you, Your Majesty?”

“Verum,” he corrected, and Rogue felt his temper flare. “Flore has told me that you are an incredible healer. I… have need of your talents.”

“Oh?” That was not the direction he’d seen this conversation taking at all.

“One of my best councilmen collapsed this morning in the middle of our meeting. I know he’s been under a lot of stress recently, but he’s young and otherwise very healthy…. I think he might be depressed? I don’t think he’s been sleeping well, he’s lost weight, and… well, I’m worried about him. Would you be willing to examine him?”

Rogue blinked, processing things a half second slower than he’d have liked. “I… sure. I’ll need to get my medical supplies, but–”

“Oh, don’t worry about that. Assuming you’d be willing, I took the liberty of requesting a full medkit from the hospital wing. It’s just there by the door.”

Rogue’s brow lifted in surprise, but he knelt down to indeed find the medkit very thoroughly stocked. “It looks good,” he admitted awkwardly. “Um, where’s the patient.”

“‘Next room over. I’ll take you to him.” Rogue nodded and followed the king out, arriving in front of a floral-carved door that seemed vaguely familiar. “In there,” Verum directed, and Rogue let himself in, taking in the darkness of the room and the vaguely human shape on a large bed to the left before the door was shut quietly behind him… and locked.

“Hey!” The shout was muffled automatically for the professional quiet he’d adopted for his patient’s sake. But trying the handle, the door was definitely locked from the outside.

Ok. I guess… check on the patient?

But as he got closer, Shyaam’s growing agitation told him who was on the bed before he could see her face, and his wolf’s desperation was quickly matched by his own feelings of betrayal.

She set this up: some plot to manipulate me by forcing me into a confrontation. But even as he thought it, he knew it didn’t make sense. Callida wasn’t waiting for him to arrive. In fact, she was so deeply asleep, she hadn’t even budged from his shout of surprise and subsequent bumbling about.

He sighed and drew a curtain back, letting the last rays of sunlight help him locate a different light source, returning to the side of the bed with an oil lamp flickering in his palm.

She looked haggard. Male pronouns aside, the king’s assessment of his “patient” seemed accurate if her gaunt cheeks, dark eye sockets, and bruised head were any indication. Had she really collapsed?

A twinge of guilt mingled with a need to help her…

Rogue shoved Shyaam’s feelings aside and began the promised examination. The bruise on her head was recent and swollen. Her breathing and heart rate were normal. Her temperature was normal, but her hands were cold. Poor circulation? That didn’t mean anything by itself, but it might indicate that she was still battling anemia after giving birth. It’s been over three months though. She shouldn’t be anemic still… unless she hasn’t been eating. And she was skinny. Wearing a thin, cotton night dress, Rogue didn’t need to do more than watch the rise and fall of her chest while she breathed to count her ribs.

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“Primordials…” he found himself muttering as the guilty feeling Shyaam was projecting suddenly became oppressive. My fault…

And then he started noticing other details — her normally silky hair heaped in an oily, sweaty tangle against her throat instead of sprawled across the pillow in a fluffy, citrusy curtain, the rigidness of her posture as she lay on her back, rather than curling comfortably on her side, the tension in her jaw, the permanent furrowing between her eyebrows, a subtle, periodic twitch in her left hand as she fought the demons in her dreams.

He couldn’t help it; he reached out a hand, setting it against her sternum, his eyes closing in reluctant concentration. Shyaam found his Beta at least as tortured as Callida appeared. A naturally vibrant and vivacious creature, Goldie was pale, her glowing gold essence dull and taking on a similar appearance to Callida’s snaggled mane. Instead of welcoming Shyaam’s connection with her usual affectionate enthusiasm, she couldn’t muster more than a bankrupt acknowledgement.

Self-imposed hatred… His need to connect, comfort, and strengthen was building into a frenzy.

“Rogue?! What– What are you doing here?! Get out!” She’d rolled away from him and off the bed, breaking the connection before he could even open his eyes and putting as much distance between them as she could. Shyaam was begging; Rogue teared up. “Get out. Please, Rogue, don’t do this to me again. I can’t… do this again.”

“Again?”

“You don’t remember? Of course not,” she laughed and sobbed all at once. “Of course you don’t remember. That would be way too convenient.”

“What are you–?”

“Last month? You came into the boys’ room sloppy drunk? It was all I could do to redirect you to our room before you could wake them. You started apologizing; I wanted to believe you. I let you kiss me even though I wasn’t ready… even though it hurt. Maybe you remember waking up and finding blood on the sheets,” she accused.

“I–”

“Well, congratulations, Rogue. You’re going to be a father again, if you care to claim the child this time. I confirmed the pregnancy last week.”

“You… you’re pregnant again? Already?!”

She was trembling, even in the pale light and across the room, he could tell. “Just get out!”

“Callida–”

“No. No, I don’t want to hear it! You promised me last time that we were in this together. You lied. I can’t handle any more empty promises from you. I can’t. If you want to walk away from this family, then go. I don’t have that luxury. I can’t explain why they are what they are, but I can’t conveniently reject and abandon them because they came out of my body! It doesn’t matter that I wasn’t ready for one, let alone three of them. It doesn’t matter that I know you are their father. It doesn’t matter that I love you more than anything in this world or that you are the only man I even want. So if you want to run away, then… then DO IT already! And this time, don’t come back.”

The tumble of words felt like a dagger to his heart — delivered with a tearful earnestness that testified of a deep, underlying pain — because they were true. And he hated that he couldn’t help but believe her because he still wasn’t ready to accept what she was saying. He didn’t even want to ask: “do you want me to leave?”

“No…. Primordials, Rogue! But I can’t take this anymore. If you don’t trust me, then there is literally nothing that I can do to convince you that those babies are yours! You’re my only, Qiangde. That’s a fact. They can only be yours, so if you don’t believe me, just go. Please. Every time you come back drunk, every time you leave… it breaks me all over again, and I can’t–”

“Callida–”

“CHOOSE! You either trust me and believe me, or you don’t. You’re either my husband and their father, or you’re not. Choose to engage, or choose to leave. I can’t do this in between anymore. I can’t.”

“You’re giving me an ultimatum?” he gasped as he suddenly couldn’t breathe. Somehow, despite the logic requiring him to doubt her loyalty, despite the rift he’d been tearing through their family, it hadn’t really sunk in that he could completely lose his family — lose her — permanently.

“I guess I am,” she replied after her own moment spent in stunned silence. Perhaps she hadn’t fully realized the gravity of what she was proposing.

His mouth went dry while his sober brain grappled with the pain he’d spent the last three months trying to drown in liquor. Time had complicated and compounded that pain with a blistering guilt — guilt of rejecting three infant boys and abandoning their mother to care for them by herself. If he accepted that Callida was telling him the truth, had been telling him the truth all along, then he’d have to accept that ponderous burden of guilt too.

The facts that he couldn’t ignore remained unchanged despite an unwillingness to acknowledge them. The boys each hosted a different species, and there wasn’t a man alive who could reasonably claim to have fathered all three of them. The boys looked like him; literally everyone thought so. But perhaps the most pressing, Callida really was the most honorable person he’d ever met; that’s why he’d married her. Her raw, guileless pleadings were honest… which meant….

Shyaam continued to beg while Rogue wrestled with his thoughts, and Callida remained quietly crying in a corner where the early glimmers of moonlight brought her trembling frame into sharp relief. It felt like it had been forever since he’d truly seen her and recognized her as a person, and there she was respectfully awaiting his decision to her ultimatum — a decision that could truly break her. Yet, she stood bravely, unapologetic and unwavering despite the obvious torture he was putting her through…

And he knew.

“M’lady….” Words wholly failed him, but it didn’t matter. Callida sank to her hands and knees and bawled for the use of the nearly forgotten endearment, and Rogue gingerly approached her to take a knee and set a hand against her back, just hoping that the contact wouldn’t be rejected. Drained and weakened, Callida collapsed further beneath his palm, curling up on the stone floor at his toes. “Callida, let’s get you in bed.”

She allowed him to help her to her feet, support her walk back to the bed, and tuck her into the blankets without any resistance. As soon as he tried to step back, however, Callida’s hand snatched his wrist in a death grip. “Don’t go.”

Again, the words he needed to express himself didn’t seem to exist, and the vulnerability and fear in her eyes were not lost on him. He bent down to offer her a delicate kiss, a kiss that she leaned into hesitantly but became a short series of cautiously hopeful caresses. “Do you want me to sleep here or on the couch?”

Her grip still tight around his wrist, Callida tugged his hand to her heart. “Do you believe me? Rogue, please, do you believe me, or are you just going to run again? I need to know.”

He searched her face, the way her very soul seemed to lay bare before him... “If you tell me right now that they’re mine, I’ll believe you.”

A small, desperate sob… “They are, Qiangde. They’re yours. There never was, never has been, anyone else.”

“Okay,” he choked, willing himself to internalize his next statement. “I believe you.”

Her tears of relief merged with his tears of regret, and while Rogue wanted to hide in shame, Callida couldn’t get her arms around him quickly enough. Nudging and coaxing him onto the bed next to her, Callida adjusted to curl up in the crook of his shoulder, her head against his chest seeking the comfort of their former sleeping habits as she quickly grew sleepy.

But Rogue was troubled. Even if Callida really could so easily forgive him for months of neglect and abandonment, he couldn’t forgive himself. And…

Primordials! She said she’s pregnant again?! His hand dropped to her abdomen in a sudden panic, hoping that somehow she was mistaken or that he’d misunderstood, but there was no mistaking the telltale energy beneath his palm.

He felt sick. It was dangerous for her to get pregnant so soon after the last high-risk pregnancy, especially in her current condition…. He curled into her, drawing her close to kiss her forehead with the fear of losing her forever morphing to take on a new shape.

My fault. This is all my fault. I did this to her. His self-hatred was approaching fever pitch when his wife sleepily shifted, wrapping an arm up and around his neck with the bleary-eyed, mumbled declaration, “love you, Qiangde.”

Time stopped, just for a moment, suspending the opposing narratives in a bizarre juxtaposition that demanded resolution: on the one hand, his broiling self-hatred, on the other, her fiercely undeterred love. And while he was making the choice to trust and believe her, it seemed to make sense that he should also accept her version of this narrative while his own judgment remained clouded by a mind in turmoil.

One thing was certain: holding her and soaking up her stubbornly uncomplicated, unyielding love, he needed this, and for the first time in months, Rogue found sleep easily without a drop of alcohol.