Chapter Sixteen

I decided not to tell Aien about the baby.

I loved him. Oh, how I loved him. I could not imagine my life without him. He felt as much a part of me as my own body. I believed that he felt the same and that he, too, imagined a future together. However, neither of us spoke of such things, and the longer that it went without the words uttered, the harder it seemed to be to bring them onto my tongue.

There also existed a fear, a small burrowing thing that was nonetheless insistent in its presence – that we hadn’t spoken about such things because he didn’t feel like that about me. Were we friends, companions, who shared our bodies? If I told him that I loved him, that to a dragon marriage was as simple as two people agreeing to be together so to me it felt that we were married, would he tell me that he felt the same and was happy to share that understanding, or would he tell me that he did not return my feelings.

If he did not share my feelings, telling him about the baby might force him in