It was Exile, in the end. He filled the doorway the way he always did, shoulders too wide for the frame, coils of dark muscle shifting low and quiet beneath the human shape he wore indoors. He had a bundle against his chest, small and squirming, one clawed hand cupped with a gentleness that never failed to catch her somewhere soft and unguarded.
"She won’t settle," he said, his voice came out low, worn thin at the edges, amber eyes heavy-lidded but locked on Felicity like she was the only fixed point left in the room. "Wants you."
Felicity’s ears came up, tired fatigue burning off fast at the sound. "Give her here."
Dimitri was on his feet before Exile had crossed the threshold, red gaze snapping to the baby in his arms, cataloguing—no fever flush, no distress in the little face, just the crumpled, furious scowl of a cub who’d decided sleep was beneath her. He didn’t reach to take her. He just hovered, close enough that.
Exile had to angle around him to reach the bed, a low sound rumbling low in his chest that wasn’t quite a growl and wasn’t quite anything else Felicity had a name for.
"She’s fine," Exile said, flat, not even glancing at him. "Just wants her mother."
"I can see that." Dimitri didn’t move back so much as concede an inch, jaw tight, gaze tracking the baby the whole way down into Felicity’s free arm like he expected the mattress itself to turn hostile.
The moment the small weight settled against her collarbone, the crying cut off into wet, hiccuping breaths, and then nothing at all—just the tiny huff of a sigh against Felicity’s throat, one fist curling loose in the fabric of her shirt. Felicity’s whole chest went warm and aching at once, exhaustion and love tangled too close together to separate.
"There," she murmured, cheek tipping down against downy dark hair. "There you are."
Exile didn’t leave. He stood at the foot of the bed a moment too long, watching, something loosening slightly in the set of his shoulders that she recognised now—not relief exactly, more the bone-deep credit of a task finally handed off. His eyes were dull with fatigue, faint shadows carved beneath them that hadn’t been there a week ago.
"You should sleep," she told him, the same thing she’d said to Dimitri, the same thing she’d probably say to all of them before the night was through.
"After the next feeding." He said it like a fact, immovable, and turned to go before she could argue, pausing only to let one hand rest briefly, heavily, against the doorframe—steadying himself, she realised, in the half-second before he straightened and walked out.
Down the hall, faint and muffled through two closed doors, she could hear Ivan’s voice, low and rough with tiredness, murmuring something wordless and rhythmic to one of the others. It didn’t stop. It went on and on, patient past all reason, and Felicity lay there with two cubs’ worth of warmth pressed against her and Dimitri’s eyes still fixed on her like she might vanish if he blinked, and thought that this—this exhausted, overfull, fiercely guarded house—was worth every bit of what it had cost to keep.
Dimitri hadn’t moved. Still standing there with his arms crossed, red eyes doing that slow burn thing they did when he was working overtime to look unbothered.
Felicity glanced up at him over the crown of the baby’s head, mouth curving despite the ache dragging at every muscle in her body. "You know," she said, voice pitched soft so as not to disturb the fragile quiet she’d just bought, "between the two of you and everyone else, maybe I need a few more husbands. Divide up the shifts a little better." She meant it as a joke. She really did.
The silence that followed had teeth in it.
Dimitri’s jaw did something complicated, muscle ticking hard along the side of his face, and his eyes, already lit from within, always lit from within, went brighter, sharper, like something had struck a flint behind them. His arms uncrossed. Recrossed. His weight shifted onto the balls of his feet in a way that reminded her, absurdly, of a man bracing for a hit he intended to return twice as hard.
"Funny," he said. The word came out flat as a blade.
"Dimitri-"
"No, no." He held up a hand, palm out, like he was the one keeping himself in line and not entirely trusting the effort. "That’s, uh, yeah. Funny, super hilarious. We’ll put an ad out. Wanted: additional husband, must enjoy three a.m. feedings and getting bled dry by a woman who already has more men than she—" He stopped himself. Visibly. Physically reeled the sentence back in with the kind of effort that made the tendons in his forearm stand out.
He exhaled through his nose, slow, deliberate, the kind of breath a man took when he was trying to remember he was a grown adult and not a teenager on the verge of putting a fist through drywall. "You don’t need more," he said, quieter now, dragging a hand back through his hair, mussing the platinum strands so they stood up wild over his temple. "You’ve got-" a gesture, encompassing the room, the hallway, the whole overstuffed house full of men who’d have gladly died for the woman currently laughing at him with a baby drooling on her collarbone "—all of us. That’s not a shortage problem, Bug. That’s a logistics problem. There’s a difference."
"Is there?"
"Yes." Absolute conviction, delivered like scripture. "We’re enough. I’m..." and here his voice dropped, roughened, some of the temper bleeding out of it and leaving something rawer underneath, something that looked almost like fear if she squinted "I’m enough."
She let the laugh come then, low, helpless, shaking her gently enough that the baby stirred and grumbled before settling again. "I know you are," she said, and reached out to catch two fingers of his hand, tugging until he gave up the last of his posturing and sat on the edge of the mattress as his knees had simply stopped arguing with him. "I was kidding, Dimitri."
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