Page 124 of His Darkest Desire

Vex’s hold on her tightened, and an unbidden growl rumbled in his chest. “You were not meant for him.”

Well, he’d tried to hold back that contempt. It’d been foolish to believe he could ever have done so entirely.

Kinsley smiled at Vex and smoothed her hand along his arm beneath the water. “I know that now. I didn’t then.”

Pressing his cheek to her hair, Vex strengthened his hold on her before releasing a huff and willing his muscles to relax. “I know, my moonlight. But it does naught to ease my loathing of a mortal I’ve never met. You are mine now.”

“I am.”

“Please, continue.”

She settled her hand atop his, and when Vex released the washcloth, she laced their fingers together. “Liam wanted a family of our own. So did I. And we were so excited when I got pregnant. But…we lost the baby. I was only nine weeks along when I miscarried. We were told that miscarriages happen often in the first trimester, that it was common, but that didn’t lessen the loss we felt. It didn’t stop me from feeling like it was my fault, like I should’ve been more careful, like I must’ve pushed myself too far, too hard.

“We tried again a few months later.” She shook her head. “We lost that one at eight weeks.”

The sorrow and pain in her voice was raw, as though undiluted by time, and it pierced Vex’s chest like a shard of ice. He hated the thought of her carrying another male’s child. It slithered through him, cold and fiery, constricting, choking, crushing. But it was nothing compared to her grief. Her guilt.

The past was done, but her pain wasn’t, and Vex’s heart ached for her. He couldn’t claim to know what she’d been through, couldn’t claim to understand, but he’d suffered loss of his own. He knew how it felt to have something right before him, so close he could almost touch it, knew how it felt to be awash with hope and excitement only for everything to be snatched away in an instant.

Vex gave her fingers a squeeze and rubbed his cheek against her hair. “My moonlight…”

Kinsley rested her head against him. “I fell into a depression after that, and Liam was just…absent. He was working full-time as a mechanic and studying part-time to get into law school. I was working as a receptionist then, so I was occupied during the day, but at night and on the weekends, I was alone. So, I worked on my scrapbooking and vlogging channel. I couldn’t share my hikes with Liam because he was too busy, so I shared them with the world instead.

“And some of those days were hard. I never talked about personal things on social media, so I was always having to put on a smile, but it was hard to pretend that nothing was wrong when all I wanted to do was cry. But I think that was what saved me. It didn’t make everything better, but I started to learn that things could get better in time. They would get better.”

Taking up the washcloth in his free hand, Vex smoothed it over her shoulder and down her arm, wiping away lingering smudges of paint with slow, gentle motions. Though he didn’t understand everything of which she’d just spoken, he understood the feelings behind her words. She’d been wounded and had sought fleeting moments of escape that she might heal.

In spirit, it was little different than a young goblin with heavy scars upon his heart and soul constructing a tower in which to seclude himself.

“There was strain in our marriage,” she continued, “and a lot of distance. We kept trying to bridge the gap, but it was hard when we rarely saw one another. We waited a year before we tried for a baby again.

“When I found out I was pregnant, I didn’t feel joy. I was…anxious. I was scared. I didn’t want to lose that one. Nothing could happen. So, I was careful with everything I did, with everything I ate, and I followed every instruction the doctor gave me to the letter. I stopped going on hikes. Stopped going anywhere, really. I just…stayed home. And Liam just… He just wasn’t involved. It was like he was afraid to hope, afraid to get attached. So I felt even more alone and unsupported.

“It wasn’t until I’d entered my second trimester that I was able to breathe a little easier. The fear was still there, and I was still being careful, but I was relieved the baby had made it past fourteen weeks.

“And then I felt a flutter.” Something had changed in her voice. There was awe in it, a smile that Vex could not see. “It was the tiniest, strangest, most wonderful thing. I didn’t know what it was at first, but when I realized it was the baby moving… I think that was the first time I felt true excitement. It was the moment that I realized it was happening. That a little baby was alive and growing inside me. That it…that it would survive.”

Vex’s heart squeezed at the sudden catch in her voice.

Kinsley’s body shuddered, and a quiet sob escaped her. “But it didn’t.”

Vex banded his arm around her, capturing her face and cradling it as he held her. “What happened?”

“I don’t know. Everything was perfect, but suddenly I felt this horrible cramp, and then there was blood. And I knew. I knew I was losing it. I went to the hospital, and I begged them to save it. I couldn’t…I couldn’t lose another. But there was so much blood… I went into hemorrhagic shock and nearly died.”

A void opened within Vex, a vast abyss of silence and stillness. It allowed only one thing to exist—grief.

He could have lost his mate before ever knowing her. Before ever knowing she existed.

He could have lost her, and he would never have known it. He would never have been able to empathize with her, laugh with her, walk with her, would never have shared words or meals with her, and there always would’ve been an emptiness inside him that he would never have known how to fill.

In all his years, he’d never encountered a sorrow like that in her voice now. He’d never encountered love like was in her voice now. Mayhap fae were blessed with eternal life, but humans packed their short lifespans with emotions beyond the comprehension of most fae. Fourteen weeks was nothing to a being like Vex.

But to Kinsley, fourteen weeks had been everything.

Filling his lungs with her fragrance, he tightened his embrace and closed his eyes. He was neither foolish nor arrogant enough to believe anything he could’ve said would heal her pain. All he could do was exist in that moment, exist for her, and let her take anything she needed from him.

“The doctors told me that any further pregnancies would be a risk to my life,” she said quietly. “But I didn’t want to try again. I couldn’t take the grief and guilt anymore. I ended up getting a tubal ligation to make sure I couldn’t get pregnant again. Liam agreed and supported my decision, but he was…unhappy. He wanted kids, and he didn’t want to adopt. He wanted his own children.”

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