Page 25 of Monster's Secret Baby

Marda's weathered face appears above mine, her gray eyes fierce. "You can and you will. This child needs you. Now, push!"

Something primal takes over, and with a guttural scream that tears from somewhere deep inside me, I bear down one final time. The relief is immediate and overwhelming as my daughter slides into Ansel's waiting hands. For one terrifying moment, silence fills the room—and then comes a furious, indignant wail.

"She's got a temper," Marda laughs, tears tracking down her cheeks. "Just like her mother."

They place her on my chest, this tiny, red-faced stranger with a shock of pale blond hair. My arms curl around her instinctively, and when she opens her eyes to look at me for the first time, my heart stops.

Adellum's eyes stare back at me—clear green, impossibly bright, rimmed with those distinctive thick lashes. I search her tiny back frantically, but there are no wing buds, no sign of her father's heritage beyond those startling eyes.

"Beautiful," Ansel murmurs, his usual stoicism momentarily forgotten. "What will you call her?"

I think of running water, of safe harbors after storms. "Brooke," I whisper, pressing my lips to her forehead. "Her name is Brooke."

As the years pass, Brooke grows strong and wild, her curly pale-blond hair catching sunlight like polished gold, her small hands perpetually dirty from digging in Eira's garden. She's mischievous and stubborn, quick to laugh and quicker to question everything around her.

By the time she's four, she's become the heart of Saufort, whispered about and adored in equal measure. I catch the villagers watching her sometimes, their eyes moving from her striking face to mine, questions hovering unspoken.

I'm placing fresh-baked bread in baskets one morning when Tamsin arrives for her daily order, Brooke perched on her hip. My daughter's face is smeared with what looks like berry juice, and she's regaling Tamsin with a story about a thalivern she saw in Eira's garden.

"And it had purple wings, Mama! Purple! Not blue like the ones yesterday!" She wriggles down from Tamsin's arms and runs to me, throwing her arms around my legs.

"Is that so?" I laugh, smoothing her wild curls. "And did Eira let you chase it?"

"She said I'd scare it if I did." Brooke's nose wrinkles. "But I just wanted to say hello."

I exchange a smile with Tamsin over Brooke's head, then notice something odd—tiny golden sparks dancing from my daughter's fingertips as she gestures excitedly. Not for the first time.

"Brooke," I say carefully, capturing her hands in mine. "Remember what we talked about? About keeping our sparkles inside when we're excited?"

Her eyes—so like her father's it still steals my breath sometimes—widen. "Sorry, Mama. I forgot." She concentrates hard, her little face scrunching with effort, and the sparks fade. The magic manifestations started when she was three, small bursts of golden light when her emotions run high.

Tamsin shifts uncomfortably. "I should get back to Holt. The order for New Solas is due tomorrow."

The name of the city sends a chill through me, as it always does. New Solas, where Adellum still lives, unaware of the daughter who carries his eyes.

"Did her father have magic?" Tamsin asks quietly after Brooke skips outside to look for more thalivern.

I stiffen, my hands automatically kneading dough with more force than necessary. "I don't talk about him."

"I know, but—the sparks, they're getting more noticeable. People are wondering." She fidgets with her apron. "There are rumors, Harmony. About who—what—he might have been."

I know the whispers. They started not long after Brooke was born, when her unusual eyes couldn't be ignored. I let them think what they want—that I fled from some xaphan who forced himself on me. That my master raped me and I escaped to where I could finally be safe.

It's easier than the truth: that I loved him, that I gave myself willingly, that I still wake sometimes with the phantom touch of his fingers on my skin. That my heart still aches with the loss of Adellum, that he was never truly the man I thought he was.

And then hatred burns in my chest at the way he used me, tore me apart while he treated me like all xaphan treat humans, and I'm able to shove him out of his mind.

"Let them wonder." My voice is harder than I intend.

Tamsin's expression softens. "No one blames you. Everyone knows what those creatures are capable of. We're just grateful you escaped."

The bread dough tears under my fingers. If only they knew how I'd run to him, not from him. How eagerly I'd welcomed his touch, believed his lies.

"He's not part of our lives," I say firmly. "He never will be."

Later that evening, as I tuck Brooke into bed in our small room above the restaurant—expanded now with Holt's help to include her own little sleeping alcove—she asks the question I've been dreading for years.

"Why don't I have a papa like Joss says he had?"

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