Chapter 3: The Midnight Garden
The conservatory at night was a different creature. By day, it was a decaying spectacle; by the pale light of the full moon, it was a silvered corpse. Barnaby moved through it, a ghost in silk pajamas, his hands pressed against the hard, tight curve of his stomach. The kicks had become relentless, a synchronized internal drumming that stole his breath and promised no peace. He couldn’t hide in his gilded room anymore, couldn’t just lie still and pray the servants didn’t notice. He needed air that didn’t smell of royalty and regret.
He found a stone bench near a dead fountain, its basin filled with black water and rot. He sat, letting his head fall into his hands. Three days. The wedding was in three days. The dressmakers had clucked over his “softening middle,” planning to add more strategic draping. His mother had bought him a vial of scent-masking oil. “For the nerves,” she’d said, but her eyes were sharp. She knew something was off.
A low, guttural sound ripped through the silence.
It wasn’t animal. It was human, or something like it, strained through a throat full of broken glass and pure agony. It came from the deepest thicket, where the vines formed a wall and the glass roof had fully caved in.
Barnaby froze, every rabbit instinct screaming at him to bolt. But another sound followed—a wet, tearing scrape. And a choked curse.
He moved without conscious thought, drawn by a thread of dread that felt like fate. He pushed aside a curtain of ivy, its leaves cold and slick.
Moonlight fell in a jagged column through the broken roof, illuminating a scene that rooted him to the spot.
Leo was on his knees. Shirtless. His powerful back, a landscape of coiled muscle, was scored with four deep, parallel gouges. Fresh blood, black in the moonlight, welled from the wounds and tracked down his spine. His own claws, still extended and glistening wet, hung at his side. His head was bowed, his breath coming in ragged, shuddering gusts that clouded in the cold air.
“No,” Leo growled to himself, a raw and private sound. “Not real. A phantom. A trick.”
He lifted his hand, staring at his crimson claws as if they belonged to someone else. Barnaby’s stomach lurched. He must have made a sound—a sharp intake of breath, the scuff of a slipper on grit.
Leo’s head snapped up. He turned.
His face was a mask of torment, sweat-streaked, eyes blazing with a golden fire that held no reason. They locked onto Barnaby. The rage and pain didn’t soften; they sharpened, focusing into a single, razor-point of awareness.
“You.” The word was a landslide.
Barnaby stumbled back, but Leo was already moving, a study in terrifying grace. He was on his feet and crossing the space in three strides. He didn’t grab Barnaby this time. He simply crowded him, his presence a physical wall of heat and blood and wild, desperate scent. Barnaby’s back hit the cold, rough trunk of a strangled tree.
“Your scent,” Leo hissed, his face inches away. His nostrils flared, drawing in the clouded, complicated air around Barnaby. “It has been in my teeth since that ruin. It’s in the walls. It’s in my wine. I can’t scrub it from my skin.” He raised his bloody hand between them. “I tore myself open to get it out. It’s still there.”
His eyes dropped to Barnaby’s mouth, his throat, the neckline of his thin pajamas. They lingered on the swell of his stomach, disguised by loose silk but unmistakable this close. Leo’s confusion deepened, a crack in the fury.
Barnaby’s heart was a trapped bird. He had to say something. Anything. “You were poisoned,” he whispered, the words tearing loose. “In the ruins. You didn’t know what you were doing.”
“I remember enough,” Leo snarled. “Heat. And… peace. And a scent that was clean. Like meadows. Not this… this chaos.” He leaned in, his breath hot on Barnaby’s cheekbone. “What is wrong with you? What have you done?”
The accusation, the proximity, the sheer animal suffering in Leo’s eyes broke something open in Barnaby. Fear molten into a sudden, shocking defiance. He shoved at Leo’s chest, his hands smearing against blood-slicked, fever-hot skin. “Me? What have I done? You think I asked for this?” His voice rose, cracking. “You think I wanted to be some… some fever-dream for a king? To be left in the dirt with your legacy kicking my ribs to pieces?”
The silence that followed was absolute, broken only by the drip of water from a leaf and Leo’s halted breath.
His gaze drilled down into Barnaby’s, the gold fracturing with dizzying speed. Fury, confusion, denial. And then a slow, dawning horror that was worse than any rage. His eyes traveled down, deliberately now, to Barnaby’s hands splayed protectively over his stomach.
“No,” Leo breathed. It was not a refusal. It was a realization, vast and terrible.
“Yes,” Barnaby said, all fight gone, leaving only a hollowed-out truth.
Leo stumbled back a step as if struck. His wounded back hit a vine-covered pillar. He didn’t seem to feel it. He just stared at Barnaby’s middle, at the life growing there that his body had recognized even as his mind had fought it. “It’s… mine.”
“Who else’s?” Barnaby laughed, a brittle, terrible sound. “I came here to marry a stranger to hide it. From him. From you. From everyone.”
The savage king looked utterly lost. He looked at his bloody claws again, then at Barnaby’s pale, terrified face. The mate he’d longed for, the one his soul had howled for in that drug-hazed night, had been here all along. And he’d been circling him like prey, carving open his own skin to kill the pull.
“The scent,” Leo said, his voice rough. “It’s confused because…”
“Because I’m carrying your children,” Barnaby finished flatly. The plural hung in the air, a new seismic fact.
Leo’s jaw worked. He pushed off the pillar, approaching again, but slower now. The predator was gone, replaced by something baffled and raw. He stopped an arm’s length away. “Let me,” he said, a command that sounded like a plea.
Barnaby didn’t move. Leo’s clean, blood-tanged hand, trembling slightly, came up. He didn’t touch Barnaby’s stomach. He hovered his fingers over the silk, over the curve that housed the impossible.
A powerful, rolling kick landed right against the fabric.
Leo jerked his hand back as if burned, his eyes flying to Barnaby’s. The shock in them was naked, total. A thousand questions. A thousand fears.
Another kick, harder.
Slowly, Leo brought his hand back. He pressed his broad, warm palm flat against the spot.
The movement beneath answered him, a life—lives—stirring to the touch of the other half of their origin. Leo’s breath caught. A single, sharp tremor ran through his entire frame. The bloody, self-mutilating king, standing in a tomb of dead flowers, connecting for the first time with the only thing real he’d touched in years.
He looked from his hand to Barnaby’s eyes. The gold was still there, but the fire had banked, replaced by a profound, unsettling disorientation. “Rabbit,” he whispered, the old condescension gone, leaving only a stark need for an anchor. “What do we do now?”