Page 226 of Onyx Cage: Volume II

I raised my eyebrows at Kirill, who shook his head. She still hadn’t emerged.

With a sigh, I rapped on the door as I had earlier, two short knocks that weren’t quite loud enough to wake her if she was actually still sleeping.

When the door opened several seconds later, I let out a relieved breath before realizing it was not my wife emerging. It was Mila, holding an imperious finger to her lips as she shut the door behind her.

“She’s still resting.”

“She should be awake by now.” I voiced my earlier thought aloud.

“Perhaps it was exhausting to change the tides of an entire war,” Mila shot back.

Kirill chuckled, and I didn’t deign to look at him in response.

“Or perhaps she was injured in the many hours she spent fighting,” I growled.

“You know that Taisiya has already checked.” Mila crossed her arms under her chest, balancing them just over her small bump and looking no less fierce for it.

That didn’t stop me from letting out an irritable growl. “What I know is that my wife fought in a battle for hours, then disappeared into that room and hasn’t stirred since.”

Mila’s face softened incrementally. “She has stirred a bit, and she has not acted like she was in any pain. You talk about the battle, but you forget that you left her weeks ago and she showed up with an army today. Before that, she was at the war camp. She is just tired.” She brought a hand to my arm, her gaze flitting over my own exhausted features. “And so are you, Evander. Get some rest. I will stay with her until she wakes.”

“And you’ll tell me when she does?” It was more a demand than a question, but Mila let out a slow sigh, pulling back her hand.

“I will tell you when she wants you to know,” she countered.

I opened my mouth to argue, but she held up a hand, not giving me the chance. “Whatever your reasons, you have taken a choice from her already. You won’t do yourself any favors if you ignore her wishes on this, too.”

She slipped back into the room before I could respond, leaving me with only Kirill, who, in spite of his previous chuckle, was looking at me with more sympathy than ire for a change.

I sighed, nodding a dismissal.

“Go home to your wife. I’ll take over here.”

It wasn’t like I was going to sleep anyway until I knew my lemmikki was all right.

“Thanks, Van.” He didn’t waste any time before taking off down the hall.

Minutes ticked by while I sorted through strategies in my mind, making mental lists of what to reorder for supplies, doing anything to keep myself from obsessing over the silence from Rowan’s rooms.

It was only partially successful. As the shock of Rowan’s arrival wore off, it made way for a host of other feelings.

Gratitude, obviously, that she had saved my people.

But there was a bit of fury, too. In the darkest hour, when I had been convinced that Bear would fall, I had clung to the certainty that she was safe. She was out of his grasp.

Instead, she had been creeping right alongside his troops, then throwing herself into battle against them. What if it hadn’t been enough? What if we had still lost, and she had been there in her glorious armor with her very obvious red hair?

Her reckless maneuver might have worked, but I still wasn’t sure she had escaped from it unscathed.

The minutes turned into hours, and my agitation grew. What in the storms-damned-hell had Korhonan been doing? Had he just changed his mind about deciding she should be far from where his brother was waiting to torture her?

Or had something happened to him? But surely, she would have led with that.

Taras interrupted my mental tirade when he came to check on his own wife, which only resulted in her shooting a glare my way.

“I see you took my suggestion to rest to heart,” she said sarcastically.

I shrugged with all the nonchalance I didn’t feel. “I will rest when I am assured of her wellbeing.”