Chapter 287 - You should stay at my place tonight

"Sera—" Corvine started, but Seraphine was already shaking her head before he could finish. She wasn’t in the mood for excuses. Not tonight.

The connection she’d felt with Marigold the moment their eyes locked wasn’t something she could explain away, and that feeling was the only thing keeping her hopes alive right now.

"Some things don’t change," she said, her voice steady, quieter than she expected it to come out. "Eye color. Hair color. Those things travel in blood. You can’t fake that."

Something new moved across Corvine’s face. The tight line of his shoulders dropped just slightly, like a weight had been lifted clean off them.

"You know, I told Ravyn to actually look at the girl when she when you were unconscious." He exhaled slow, like the memory still sat wrong with him. "He wouldn’t. Couldn’t bring himself to. And truthfully, she had this full head of hair, thick as anything, just like his. Not long, she was a newborn, but still. A hairy little thing."

The corner of his mouth twitched upward, almost fond. "Her eyes though, were yours, Sera. Yours, or maybe even prettier, if that’s even possible."

Seraphine’s breath caught somewhere in the middle of her chest. "Voren," she said, almost to herself. "Has a daughter." The goosebumps crawled up her arms before she even finished saying it out loud.

Corvine’s whole face closed off fast. "Hold on." He pulled over at the shoulder of the road. "The five-year-old you’re talking about — you’re saying she’s Voren’s?"

Seraphine nodded. "And she calls me mom." Her voice dropped on those words, like they were almost too heavy to carry out loud. "She told us she saw me in a dream."

Corvine went quiet. His jaw worked like he was chewing through the information, trying to figure out which part surprised him most. "Goddess." He dragged a hand down his face.

"I knew it. I knew there was something between the two of you the second I saw you together, I just couldn’t name it." He looked up at her, something urgent behind his eyes now. "Sera, are you completely sure that night wasn’t him? Because what if Ravyn was right? What if the person you were with wasn’t who you thought?"

Seraphine’s jaw tightened. She’d asked herself that same question more times than she wanted to admit. "I would have entertained that idea," she said carefully, "if Tallulah hadn’t confirmed everything herself. But Corvine... Voren wasn’t at the moon festival. The last time I even saw him was before I went up on that hill and..."

She stopped and looked away. The memory pressed in from every angle and she swallowed it back down, her throat tight with something she wasn’t ready to put a name to in front of him.

Corvine didn’t push. He let the quiet settle between them for a beat, then his voice came back softer. "It’s alright, Sera. Love makes people do things that don’t make any sense. We’ve all been there."

His eyes stayed steady on her, not a drop of judgment in them. "But you’re past that now. What matters is what’s right in front of you. Check for the birthmark, or just do a DNA test and get the answer straight."

The tightness in Seraphine’s chest eased just a fraction. She nodded. "Voren invited me to his place. Day after tomorrow. I want to spend some real time with Marigold. Actually get to know her."

Corvine’s whole face broke into something warm, the kind of smile that reached all the way up to his eyes. "Sounds to me like he’s opening a door," he said.

"He’s letting you in, Sera. Think about it. The first day I showed up with you for training, he shut us both out cold. changed the venue because of you. I couldn’t figure out why at the time." He tilted his head, something clicking behind his eyes.

"But now it makes complete sense. He was protecting her. He didn’t want you anywhere near that house until he figured out what to do."

Seraphine turned the thought over slowly in her mind. The more she pulled at it, the more threads came loose, and none of them led anywhere clean or simple. Everything tangled right back into everything else.

"But if she really is yours," Corvine continued, his voice dropping to something careful now, "then what does that mean for him?"

That question landed somewhere deep, somewhere Seraphine hadn’t let herself look yet. The helplessness that followed wasn’t something she could argue her way out of.

"I don’t know," she admitted. "I genuinely don’t know. But I can’t let myself go there yet. Not until I know for sure." She looked at him, something raw and open in her eyes. "Corvine, that little girl is... there’s no right word for it. She’s just... divine."

Corvine held her gaze and said nothing. He didn’t need to, pulling back onto the road.

✧༺♥༻✧

The next day hit Seraphine like a wall before she even got both feet on the floor.

By the time the morning light was doing anything useful, she was already buried in it. It was the kind of day that doesn’t ask your permission before it swallows you whole.

The hospital didn’t care that her mind kept drifting back to Marigold’s eyes and a conversation she’d been replaying since the night before. It just kept sending patients, kept pulling her from one operating room to the next until the hours blurred together and she stopped tracking them entirely.

She moved through it all on muscle memory and cold coffee and the kind of iron focus that kicks in when your hands are inside someone’s chest and the whole world outside that room simply ceases to exist.

Three surgeries back-to-back, then a fourth that ran long, leaving her legs aching, her neck stiff, and her eyes feeling like sandpaper by the time it was done.

She was walking out of the last one, still in her scrubs, hair pulled back messy, the sharp antiseptic smell of the OR clinging to her skin when her phone buzzed in her pocket. She already knew who it was before she pulled it out.

Voren.

She pushed through the side exit and the night air hit her face like something she didn’t know she’d been waiting for.

The parking lot was mostly empty at this hour, just a handful of cars sitting under the orange wash of the overhead lights. She spotted his car right away.

He was standing near the driver’s side, arms folded across his chest, watching her walk toward him. Up close she caught his expression, eyes moving over her face quickly, like he was running some kind of calculation behind them that he wasn’t going to share.

"You look exhausted." No greeting, no softening it up. Just straight out, the way he always talked.

Seraphine almost laughed. Mostly because he wasn’t wrong. "Thank you for noticing," she said flatly.

Something flickered at the corner of Voren’s mouth. Not quite a smile, but in the neighborhood of one. "You going back in tonight?"

Seraphine shook her head and pulled open the passenger door before he could reach for it. "No. Leon’s policy whenever I pull a night like this, he gives me the next day off automatically."

She dropped into the seat and let her head fall back against the headrest. Every single muscle in her body exhaled at once.

Voren climbed in on his side and pulled his door shut. The inside of the car was warm and dim and smelled faintly like cedar and something else she couldn’t quite pin down.

Without a word he reached across her, not touching her, just moving with that calm, unhurried efficiency he seemed to bring to everything and pulled her seatbelt across, clicking it into place as her eyes cut sideways to him.

He was already looking straight ahead at the road, both hands going to the wheel like nothing had happened.

"You should stay at my place tonight," he said, as easy as if he were suggesting a different route home.