Aísē: My Five Supernatural Wives Chapter 144 144: Just the Three of Us

The room was quiet.

Liliana had left twenty minutes ago. Sothing about Aisha needing her for sothing important, sothing neither of them had explained beyond rest, we'll be back later, which was the kind of sentence that would have concerned more if I hadn't been horizontal and considerably less capable of argunt than usual.

So I was resting.

Or attempting to.

The attempting was complicated sowhat by the fact that I had one person pressed against my left side and another pressed against my right, both of them warm, both of them quiet, both of them pointing at the sa place in the bond that had been running since the cathedral. The sa person.

In two separate bodies.

Hugging .

I stared at the ceiling for a while.

'I have a question,' I thought. And then 'Several, actually. I have several questions. I am going to ask one of them.'

.....

"So," I said.

Neither of them moved. Eva.....my Eva, light green hair against my shoulder, her breathing slow and even.....made a small sound that ant she was listening. The other one, on my right, simply waited with the sa patience she applied to everything.

"Will you tell ," I said carefully, "why there are two of you."

A beat.

"We thought you'd ask sooner," the other one said. Her voice was the sa as Eva's and entirely different. Sa timber, sa quality, but carrying sothing Eva's voice didn't carry. That settled, faintly amused certainty. The voice of soone who found most things interesting and very few things surprising.

"I was processing," I said.

"You were staring at the ceiling."

"That's how I process."

Eva lifted her head slightly from my shoulder. She looked at with those green eyes, soft and steady, the expression that ant she was about to explain sothing and had already decided how.

"You know what a Darach is?" she asked.

'Vaguely,' I thought. Dark druid. The thing a druid beca when they fell fully into corruption, when the balance they were supposed to maintain inverted entirely. I had picked that much up sowhere between everything else that had been happening to .

"A corrupted druid," I said.

Eva nodded.

"When I broke my vow," she said quietly, "it didn't happen all at once. You know this part. You were there for so of it." She paused. "But what you didn't see was what it was doing to afterward. My nature as a druid is balance. Neutrality. The vow wasn't just a rule I followed. It was woven into what I am. Breaking it didn't just change my circumstances." Her voice stayed even. She was telling it the way she told most things, without performance, just the facts of it, plain. "It started tearing apart from the inside. The part of that had broken the vow and the part that still carried it couldn't exist in the sa body without one of them eventually consuming the other."

I looked at the other one over Eva's head.

She t my gaze. There was sothing in her expression that was harder to read than her usual settled satisfaction. Sothing older, layered. The expression of a thing that had been fighting a long war from the inside and had, eventually, won a different kind of peace.

"She was going to beco a Darach," the other one said. Simply. "Or I was going to disappear. One of those two things was where it ended, if nothing changed."

"So nothing changed wasn't an option," I said.

"No."

I thought about that .Eva had gone sowhere. Alicia with her.

Eva explained….The witch queen, the soul separation. Eva saying I'm ready before Anastasia could warn her again.

'That was a long ti ago,' I thought. 'Before England. Before any of this. She was already carrying all of that and I didn't know.'

"Alicia took you to the witch queen after our first night together," I said.

Eva looked at with sothing that was almost surprise, then softened into sothing that wasn't.

"You rembered."

"I rember most things," I said. "I just don't always ask about them at the right ti."

A pause. The other one made a sound that was approximately the sound of soone choosing not to comnt.

"Anastasia agreed to help," Eva continued. "But she said the separation couldn't happen until....." she glanced at the other one, the smallest glance, the kind that carried the weight of a conversation they'd been having with each other for a long ti, ".....until we were both developed enough to survive it separately. Until I had genuinely accepted her as real. Not just an inconvenience. Not just a darkness I wanted removed. Real."

"How long did that take?" I asked.

Eva was quiet for a mont.

"Long," she said.

The other one said nothing. But sothing in the way she was holding herself shifted slightly. Not much. Just the smallest acknowledgent of what long actually ant.

I thought about the tiline.

It was ssy.

The Timr moves differently across dinsions

How many months it had been. What Eva had been doing while I was in England, while the Austin situation was building, while everyone else's lives were moving forward in ways I was only now beginning to understand.

'I missed it,' I thought. 'I missed all of it.'

Not just this. All of it. Everything that had been happening to my wives while I was dealing with the next crisis and the one after that and the one after that. Eleanor's pregnancy. I hadn't been there after the shock of that, the adjustnt of it. Liliana's training, two years of it. Eva fighting a war inside herself that ended with her soul being split in two.

I had known them for months. I had married them in circumstances that left no ti for anything except survival.

I didn't know them.

Not the way I should.

'When I get ho,' I thought. 'When all of this is over and we get back to wherever ho actually is now. I'm going to fix that. Properly. One at a ti, if that's what it takes. I'm going to know my wives.'

I said it internally with the specific conviction of a man making a promise to himself that he intends to keep.

.....

"So the separation finished," I said. "And you....." I looked at the other one, ".....you woke up."

"I woke up," she said. "And found out you were fighting a fully restored Duke in an abandoned cathedral." A pause. "Good timing, I thought."

"It was," I said.

She looked at . Sothing moved in her expression. The sa thing it had done in the cathedral when she looked at over Austin's shoulder. The long-held thing, finally set down.

"You're not going to ask what I am," she said. Not quite a question.

"I know what you are," I said.

"What am I."

I thought about it. The bond pointing at both of them simultaneously. One warmth. One presence. The dark gold flas had understood it before I did, born from a bloodline, from sothing that understood what it was at a level that didn't need to argue about it.

"Eva," I said.

Not Eva-but-different. Not Eva's dark side. Not two separate people who happened to share a soul.

Eva.

She looked at for a long mont. Then sothing in her face did what it had done in the cathedral. That sa quiet release, the held breath finally gone.

"Yes," she said. "That's right."

Eva.....my Eva, the one on my left.....made a small sound. She had buried her face against my shoulder at so point in the last few minutes and was now making no particular effort to move it. I could feel her smiling against my arm.

.....

A comfortable silence for a while.

Then I turned and kissed Eva.

Just her, for a mont. Gentle. The kiss that was trying to say I'm sorry I didn't ask sooner and I'm glad you're alright and I didn't know it was this hard all at once, without any of that being stated outright because stating it outright would have embarrassed both of us.

She kissed back with the warmth she always brought to everything. Soft and unhurried, like she had all the ti in the world and had never once been in a hurry about anything that mattered.

When we separated she looked at with those green eyes and smiled. Small and steady.

I turned to the other one.

She was watching us with an expression I was now learning to read. Not the cold satisfaction she wore publicly. The underneath version. The one that showed up when she stopped performing.

She was pouting.

Not dramatically. Not in the way the gesture was usually ant. Just the faintest downturn of the mouth, the slight compression of an expression that was trying very hard to be neutral and was failing in the most specific and contained way possible.

"I want one as well," she said.

Flat. Dignified. The delivery of a woman who had decided sothing and was stating it as a fact rather than a request, because requests implied the possibility of being refused and she had no interest in that framing.

I looked at her for a mont.

'For the dark side of my innocent wife,' I thought, 'she is not especially different.'

Actually.

She was worse.

Eva in her natural state was gentle in ways that sotis made feel like I should be more careful around her. This one was gentle in ways that made feel like I had been outmanoeuvred and hadn't noticed when it happened.

She was cuter.

I was not going to say that out loud.

"You know," I said, "for soone who spent the first half of today holding a Duke in tree roots, the pout is a surprising choice."

"I'm allowed to contain multitudes," she said, with perfect composure.

"You are," I agreed. "You really are."

I kissed her.

She was still for exactly one second. The involuntary stillness of soone who had been prepared for almost any response and had not prepared for this one. And then she wasn't still anymore. Her hand found my jaw. Her fingers were cool, the way they always were, and her mouth was certain, the way she was certain about everything, and the kiss had that quality her first words always had…..unhurried, complete, the expression of soone who had made their decision long before the mont arrived and had simply been waiting for the world to catch up.

When it ended she pulled back and looked at with those dark green eyes.

The pout was gone.

In its place was the expression I had first seen in the cathedral. That deep, settled satisfaction. Warr now. The version of it that existed when she wasn't performing anything for anyone.

"Took long enough," she said quietly.

"I've been busy," I said.

"Mm." She considered this. "I'll allow it."

Eva, from my left, made a sound that was definitively a laugh this ti and was not making any effort to hide it.

'This,' I thought, looking between them. Sa face, sa antlers, one warm and one cool, one unhurried and one who had decided that unhurried was simply a style choice. 'Is going to be my life.'

I thought about that for a mont.

'Yes,' I decided. 'That's fine.'