Chapter146:

Chapter 146 CELESTE There was a quality to the silence that followed that I didn't have a name for. "You trained," Xenois said, and it wasn't quite a question. "Alina insisted." "I'm going to say something very inadequate, given everything," he said, his voice low and slightly rough. "And I know it doesn't cover what you went through today. But Celeste—" "Don't thank me," I said. "They're my children." He was quiet for a moment. Then: "They're ours." Something about the way he said it, the particular steadiness of it, broke through whatever emotional containment I'd been maintaining for the past three hours. I felt my eyes sting and blinked hard, refusing to cry in the driveway while Dmitri watched from twenty feet away. "The boys want to see you," I said instead, pulling back slightly. "Troy has been holding himself together by pure force of will for two hours and he's going to need to see for himself that you're intact." "Then let's go in," he said. --- **Chapter 147** The reunion wi