Hearing his words, Viola bit the inside of her cheek. She used to hate medication so much, but the Hollow Quarter changed that. Four years of forcing dry pheromone suppressant pills down her throat every morning had killed that fear. Pills were nothing to her now.

"Let me fix our bed," he told her, turning to look at her after putting her pills aside. Since she hadn’t eaten anything heavy that needed time to digest, sleeping wouldn’t be a problem now, and she gave him a nod, fighting not to blush at the term our bed.

She watched as Sebastian moved around the room, disappearing into the closet and coming back with clean bedsheets, stripping the current ones from the bed himself and replacing them, arranging the pillows with a care.

Viola glanced at the frameless digital clock on the wall and saw that it was nine in the evening. She had regained consciousness an hour ago, and if it weren’t for the pain in her back, she wouldn’t have believed the assassination attempt on Sebastian’s life that had happened days ago was real. The fact that she had almost lost him then was still taking its time to settle within her.

Had he died then... she shuddered, not wanting to imagine the worst, and chided herself for letting that nightmare creep its way back into her mind at this time. She had fallen in love with the man against her will, and she didn’t think there would ever be a way to stop that feeling unless the day came when he would stop needing her and she would have to walk away herself.

Watching him fluff the pillow and seeing how unlike the scary Supreme Alpha she had met months ago he looked now made her eyes twinkle. He was wearing a casual black T-shirt and loose sweatpants, the shirt emphasizing his strong tattooed biceps and forearms, veins subtly bulging beneath his skin. He was so impossibly handsome, and she stared at him until he turned around, and she quickly looked away, pretending she was looking at the closet door.

"Why are you looking away like a sneaky thief?" he said, chuckling at her reaction when he caught her staring. "I am your husband. You are free to look."

"I am not looking at you. I am looking at how you are fixing the bed and doing a splendid job at it. You must have been a cleaner or a working omega in your past life, because you made the bed so well for an Alpha," Viola remarked, not wanting to admit the fact that she had been admiring him, finding it hard to believe that she had fallen for him against all her willpower.

Sebastian let out a laugh at her words. "I wasn’t always an Alpha. When my mom was alive, she didn’t allow omegas to fix our beds, we did it ourselves. Fixing the bed isn’t such a big deal, darling."

Viola pursed her lips, noting how he mentioned his mom again and she couldn’t help but comment, "She must have been a wonderful she-wolf then, even if she made you do your own bed."

"She was." He remarked fondly, his eyes settling on her with a warmth that sat differently on his face than his usual expressions. "And if she were still here, I think she would have liked you very much."

Viola felt flattered and doubtful at once, as not many people liked her that much, and even though she thought his late mother might not have liked her, she couldn’t help but feel warm at the notion. It would have been nice to have a mother-in-law...

"You mention her often." She said quietly, looking at him. "I can tell how much you loved them both, her and the late Alpha. But I have never seen any pictures of them anywhere, not here and not in the High Tower." She muttered, the curiosity pulling the words out before she had fully decided to say them.

She had genuinely wondered about it, what the late Alpha and his wife had looked like, why there was no remembrance of them displayed anywhere in Silver. "Do you have any aversion to photographs?"

Now that Viola thought about it, there were no pictures of any of the dead, not of his dead Lunas, his twin brother or his parents. She watched as her question made his silver eyes turn dim like the light switching off a candle and she couldn’t help but think that maybe she had stepped into forbidden territory with that question.

She almost thought he wasn’t going to answer her and was about to switch it up and bring back the good mood, when he suddenly let out a sigh and said, "I don’t like looking back at people who are gone. It is not something that sits comfortably with me. I grieve and then I close it away and I focus on what is ahead. Life is easier when you move forward and don’t keep pulling yourself back to what you can no longer change."

Viola’s brows arched at those words. So he avoided keeping photograph because he didn’t want to hold on for too long, even when he cared about them. Did that go the same for his late Lunas? A thought suddenly crossed her mind. So if something were to happen to her someday, he would grieve a little and then move on with his life like she had never existed, just like he had moved on as though those two past Lunas had never been...

"But if you are curious about what the late Alpha and his wife looked like, their album is somewhere in this quarter, you can always look through it." Sebastian added, noticing the slight dim to her mood as if he had said something to disappoint her, even though he had no idea what he had said wrong. She gave him a small smile and a nod. 𝘧𝓇ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝘣𝓃ℴ𝓋𝑒𝑙.𝑐𝘰𝑚

"Sure." She muttered, looking down at her hands, completely unaware that unlike his parents, whose pictures he avoided looking at because flashes of how they had died had never left his memories over the years, Sebastian had entirely different reasons why he didn’t keep either of his past Lunas’ pictures anywhere within sight, even though it was said he had been head over heels for the first one, which was anything but the truth, but he couldn’t let the truth out, because he had made a promise to someone.

Sebastian straightened up. "Come here." He beckoned for her to come closer after he finished with the bed.

Viola’s inside quivered. She had asked him to hold her to sleep earlier and she had meant it when she asked, but now that the moment had actually arrived she felt the flutter of nerves in her stomach as she walked toward him.

"I need to look at your back before you lie down." Sebastian said, catching her small hand in his as she reached him and guiding her to sit on the edge of the bed. "Can you pull your shirt up for me?"