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

The room was quiet.

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

So I was resting.

Or attempting to.

The attempting was complicated somewhat 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 same place in the bond that had been running since the cathedral. The same person.

In two separate bodies.

Hugging me.

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 meant she was listening. The other one, on my right, simply waited with the same patience she applied to everything.

"Will you tell me," 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 same as Eva's and entirely different. Same timber, same quality, but carrying something Eva's voice didn't carry. That settled, faintly amused certainty. The voice of someone 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 me with those green eyes, soft and steady, the expression that meant she was about to explain something and had already decided how.

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

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

"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 some of it." She paused. "But what you didn't see was what it was doing to me 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 me apart from the inside. The part of me that had broken the vow and the part that still carried it couldn't exist in the same body without one of them eventually consuming the other."

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

She met my gaze. There was something in her expression that was harder to read than her usual settled satisfaction. Something 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 become 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 somewhere. 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 time 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 me with something that was almost surprise, then softened into something that wasn't.

"You remembered."

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

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

"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 time, ".....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 moment.

"Long," she said.

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

I thought about the timeline.

It was messy.

The Timr moves differently across

dimensions

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 adjustment 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 time for anything except survival.

I didn't know them.

Not the way I should.

'When I get home,' I thought. 'When all of this is over and we get back to wherever home actually is now. I'm going to fix that. Properly. One at a time, 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 me. Something moved in her expression. The same thing it had done in the cathedral when she looked at me over Austin's shoulder. The long-held thing, finally set down.

"You're not going to ask me 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 flames had understood it before I did, born from a bloodline, from something 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 me for a long moment. Then something in her face did what it had done in the cathedral. That same 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 some 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 moment. 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 time in the world and had never once been in a hurry about anything that mattered.

When we separated she looked at me 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 meant. 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 something 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 moment.

'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 sometimes made me feel like I should be more careful around her. This one was gentle in ways that made me 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 someone 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 someone 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 someone who had made their decision long before the moment arrived and had simply been waiting for the world to catch up.

When it ended she pulled back and looked at me 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. Warmer 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 time and was not making any effort to hide it.

'This,' I thought, looking between them. Same face, same 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 moment.

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