"He’s talking," Frost breathed, watching Teddy babble his way through another round of nonsense as he army-crawled with grim determination toward the nearest lap. "Is he saying words?"
"He’s saying everything," Felicity said, watching her son plant one fat hand in a bowl of tarts and shove the whole mess toward his mouth with a triumphant mamamammama.
Around her, the whole of Snow Team dissolved into helpless laughter, reaching to catch him, to hold him, to keep him close, and she thought—yes. Yes, this. Worth every scar, every scream, every drop of blood on white sheets. This, right here, was the whole reason.
Voss got there first, scooping Teddy off the blanket before he could face-plant into the tarts a second time. The cub shrieked with delight, jam-sticky fingers finding it fun to yank his father’s hair.
"Look at him." Voss’s tone had gone soft and stupid in a way she’d only heard from him when it was just them. "Look at this face. He’s got my humour already, I swear it."
"He smells like both of you," Damien murmured, crouching close enough that she could see him losing the war against simply stealing Teddy for himself. "Milk and cedar and something underneath that’s just" He stopped, cleared his throat like the word had lodged somewhere tender.
"Fox," Ivan finished, low and rough. "Smells like a fox."
Her ears twitched, and heat bloomed under her sternum at the wonder threading through his gravelly words.
Exile had gone very still, studying Teddy’s face like a man memorising a map he couldn’t afford to lose—the shape of his mouth, the colour running through his baby-fine hair, the stubborn set of that tiny jaw.
They were all doing it. Cataloguing. Comparing. Finding pieces of themselves in one small, loud creature currently attempting to eat Voss’s hair.
Then Damien’s attention drifted, and the laughter caught in his throat came out wrong. She followed his gaze to the empty stretch of blanket where Lucan should have been. Two cubs. Lucan had two, tucked safe with the others, and he wasn’t here to watch either of them wobble through their first syllables, wasn’t here to breathe in the crown of their heads.
The circle dimmed, just a fraction, and the ache found her too—a small bruise blooming for the man who wasn’t here.
But then Teddy shrieked, delighted, and smacked both palms against Voss’s jaw, and the moment cracked back open into gold. Victor reached for him the instant Voss’s grip eased.
Damien elbowed in for a turn. Ivan made grabby hands like a man three days from starving.
And she watched it shift—watched the hunger in all of them turn, subtle and slow, from the baby to her. It was in the way Voss’s gaze slid to her mouth and stayed. In the way Damien’s jaw worked around whatever he was too disciplined to say yet in the heat coming off six directions at once, unhurried, patient, promising later.
Her ears flattened, and she felt the flush crawl up her throat. Across the blanket Victor found her—sharp, assessing, already moving man to man like he was tallying threats to the crown jewels. Beside her, Dimitri had gone still in the particular way that meant something was about to land.
"Careful," Dimitri said, mild as milk, though there wasn’t a mild thing in his face. "Man could lose a hand, reaching for something that isn’t his."
Silence rippled outward. Voss’s grabby hands went still. Ivan’s throat bobbed. Exile discovered a sudden fascination with the blanket’s stitching.
Victor said nothing. He didn’t need to. He looked at each of them in turn, slow and terrible and unbothered, red gaze making a quiet catalogue of everyone who’d have to answer for it.
Then Teddy, gloriously oblivious to the war being waged above his head, released Voss’s hair, twisted around, and slapped one jam-covered hand flat against Damien’s stunned face.
"Da," the baby announced, with the crushing finality of a judge dismissing a case. Then he yanked his hand back, examined the smear of tart filling on his palm, and licked it.
For one breath nobody moved. Then Damien, terrifying, cursed, obsessively controlled Damien, made a sound she’d never heard from him in her life, something halfway between a wheeze and a sob, and pressed the back of his claw-tipped hand to his mouth.
"He picked me," Damien said, wrecked. "He robbed me and picked me."
"He robbed everyone," Ivan pointed out. "He just started with your dignity."
Felicity laughed until her chest hurt, until she had to press her fingers to her lips, and when she looked up, Victor was watching her instead of the baby now, and the shape of his mouth had gone soft at one corner in the way that was hers alone.
He mouthed something across the blanket, "later" and heat pooled low and slow through her belly.
Teddy, having settled the matter of his lineage to his own satisfaction, grabbed a fresh fistful of Voss’s hair and shouted his triumphant mamamama into the ringing quiet, daring any of them to argue about who, in the end, they all belonged to.
A pull came from somewhere behind her ribs, quiet and insistent, like a thread tugging loose from the centre of her chest. Felicity blinked, her fingers still curled against her lips from laughing, and the picnic blurred at the edges.
Teddy’s shriek, the jam, Victor’s mouth, later, all of it going soft and far away.
"Fel?" Ivan’s voice, but it came through water.
She didn’t answer. She couldn’t; the tug was already carrying her under, and the blanket, the sun, the six men around her dissolved into nothing at all.
The last thing she felt before the light swallowed her was Victor’s hand closing briefly on empty air where her shoulder had been, and some instinct in her, some old and certain thing, told him not to follow. Told all of them not to follow.
This wasn’t for them.
The field opened around her slow, the way her space always did, stitching itself together out of nothing—grass first, then color, then the particular hush of wind moving through something that wasn’t quite real.
Blue flowers. Endless rows of them, stretching to a horizon that didn’t need to exist because this place made its own rules, and the air smelled of crushed stems and something warmer underneath, something achingly familiar.
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