Page 95 of Grave Curse

“Actually, that’s why I’m here.” He motioned to a nurse I hadn’t even clocked standing nearby. “When your wife hit the recovery room, she began hollering for you. In fact, she became quite, erm,colorfulin her demands to see you.”

“You hear that, everyone?” Mabel, who had crept up behind me to eavesdrop, turned to the waiting room at large. “Ginger’s cussing out everything that moves. She’s gonna be fine!”

A celebratory cheer went up.

“We had to remove her from recovery, so she’s in her own room now,” the surgeon continued, clearly bemused that an entire waiting room of people had somehow turned into a cheering section. “The nurse will show you upstairs to whereyour wife will be our guest for a couple of days, just to make sure there are no further complications. Congratulations on the birth of your triplets—identical, by the way. They all were in one placental sac, so that means you and your wife are going to be very confused for the next eighteen years or so.”

I couldn’t even remember if I told him thank-you or not. I had no idea who gripped me in a huge bearhug or who pounded my back in congratulations. It was all family, and I loved them for all the support, as frigging batty as they were.

What mattered to me in that moment was getting eyes on Ginger.

The second floor, marked Telemetry when I stepped off the elevator, was shockingly silent after the celebratory mood in the waiting room downstairs. Before I knew it, I was led to a single room with Ginger lying unnaturally still in the slightly inclined bed. Light from a fluorescent bar mounted on the wall spotlighted the brilliant splash of her red hair over the pillow. The rest of her was nearly as pale as the sheets covering her, her lips almost gray, just like when I’d found her. Grimly my mind played that scene over and over in my head, because in that moment I’d been certain the Colgrave curse had reached out for one last hurrah and taken everything that I loved, just when I’d begun to believe in the miracle that was my Ginger—

“Tyr?”

In a heartbeat I was by her bedside, my hands gripping the bedrail while I looked into her heavy-lidded eyes. “I’m here.” My voice was so hoarse I had to clear my throat. Real. This was real. I’d been so certain I’d never talk to her again that I could barely believe this was happening. “I’m right here, Ginger.”

“Uh-oh,” she said, and it was such a weird response my heart tried to leap out of my chest in alarm. “You called me by my real name. Are you mad at me?”

“Mad at you?” A scoff burst out of me, and even I had to admit it sounded damn near close to a frigging sob. “Why would I be mad at you?”

“I probably ruined your day by giving you a scare.” The words seemed to drag out of her. She sounded drugged and exhausted, and suddenly all I wanted her to do was close those amazing gray eyes of hers and get some much-needed healing sleep. “And I didn’t check myself in to the hospital yesterday the way our doctor recommended, so all this drama could have been avoided. And also, you’re not touching me, so I’m feeling really, really in the doghouse right now. Please don’t be mad at me.”

“Jesus, baby, no.” I couldn’t seem to get my throat unlocked as I took her hand in one of mine and caressed her knuckles with my lips. “I’m just too damned scared to touch you. I might dislodge something vital. And for the record, I’m not mad at you. You scared the shit out of me, that’s all. I didn’t know fear like this existed until I thought I was going to lose you.”

She made the sweetest little worried sound. “You don’t get scared.”

“I do when it comes to you, Snap. What we’ve built together, what we share, is the best thing I’ve ever known. I didn’t know life could be this sweet. Thisperfect. The possibility of losing it all—by losingyou—had me spinning so far out of control I was thinking that if you died, I’d fucking die too so we could be together. That’s how bad it was.”

“Tyr, baby, no.” That had her eyes widening before she seemed to sag back against the pillow. “We belong together. We’re two halves of a whole. But you have to promise me to always fight to stay in this life we’ve built, no matter what.”

“As long as you promise to do the same.”

“Deal. Someone has to look after you and the boys.” She glanced at the door behind me. “The nurse told me to ring forthem when we were ready for the boys. Are you ready to meet your sons?”

“Yeah.” But I leaned over the railing and gently kissed her, savoring the last few moments when it was just us, my Gingersnap and me. Then I backed up and smiled into her eyes. “I’m ready.”

*

Ginger

Three months later

“Tyr, babe, you know I love you. But you need to know this stroller isn’t built for off-roading.”

“We’re not going far.” He hefted the triple-tiered stroller up and over a curb, a chilly autumn breeze sifting through trees that were fast losing their leaves. Today was my thirtieth birthday, the day before Halloween, and we had a ton to do at the house to get ready for my annual birthday party. I had been told by Ashtray and Roxie—Roxie, of all people!—that they wouldn’t feel like it was a successful party unless someone wound up axed by the end of it.

I had the weirdest friends.

The one thing I hadn’t expected was for my husband to wake me before dawn with his mouth between my legs, making me come so hard my cries woke our sons in the next room. But I wasn’t complaining. Having an orgasm as the first thing you did in your thirtieth year was a stellar way to kick things off.

The sun had just begun to peek over the horizon by the time he let me out of bed, with instructions to get the boys fed and dressed warmly for a little surprise he had for me somewhere in the great outdoors. I wasn’t known to be an outdoorsy girl—total urban girlie all the way—so I was a teeny bit leery that he might want to surprise me with some sort of fishing or camping activity that I literally had no clue how to do.

The one thing I never imagined was Tyr packing us all up in my trusty Mommy Mobile, a heavy-duty Suburban that felt more like a tank than a car, and driving us to a freaking cemetery.

The birds began to awaken as we at last came to a stop at a simple square grave marker embedded into the ground. Tyr maneuvered the stroller off to one side of it, gave each boy a quick murmur and kiss before turning to grin at me.

“Did you know most Colgraves are cremated, and not buried? My old man was cremated, but his father, Titan, really went out with a bang. According to my dad, they gave him an honest-to-God Viking funeral. I’ve got it in my will that I get a Viking funeral, too. Same with Loki.”

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