took his and squeezed it hard. I couldn’t breathe. My vision swam. I have to get out of here. Now! I knew there was a way to escape, but the how wasn’t coming to mind. My brain lost all function as it remained stuck on those five words. I looked at Tristan with desperation. He nodded and took me in his arms. The air whooshed out of my lungs, and the meeting room disappeared.
We appeared in our suite at the mansion, and I sucked in a lungful of oxygen and fell to my knees. My heart still raced, and my body still shook. And my mind still reeled.
“Holy . . . shit,” I whispered between pants. “Holy. Shit.”
Tristan sat on the bed in front of me. He placed his hands on my shoulders and studied my face.
“You heard something?” he asked. I nodded, slowly, my eyes bugging. “What?”
We already have the girl. The words echoed in my head.
Before I could share them, though, a pop came from the sitting room. I froze. What had we left behind? I’d lost all control at the end. I might have shared everything I’d been hearing with everyone else. If whoever had blocked Rina—the traitor—knew I’d heard that thought and came after me . . . but no. Tristan didn’t hear what I heard. And I recognized the familiar scent in the front room.
“Owen,” Tristan and I both said as my protector appeared in the open doorway to the bedroom.
“At your service,” he said. “Is everything okay?”
“Do they know anything?” Tristan asked.
Owen shook his head. “Sophia told them Alexis gets all whacked out about the next daughter, and she probably needed air.” He peered at me and then Tristan. “Well, not those exact words. I think she said, ‘especially sensitive.’ So . . . what happened?”
Tristan studied my face and must have seen I wanted to tell him first. Alone. “Guard the door,” he told Owen. “Just in case.”
Owen narrowed his eyes for a brief moment, but then he shrugged and disappeared to stand outside the door to our suite. Tristan turned back to me.
“So?” he asked.
I stared at him, suddenly unable to say it. Unable to put the words in the right order. Unable to believe them. Owen’s appearance and the threat of the traitor had been enough to distract me from the urgency of the actual words. From the reality of hearing them.
I swallowed, hard, my throat dry and tight. “We, uh . . . we might already have a daughter.”
He lifted an eyebrow. “Explain.”
I recalled the chaos of the meeting, everyone yelling aloud and in their heads and how I heard all of it. The energy and urgency returned in full force. I sprang to my feet and paced while rehashing for him everything I’d heard . . . including how it had sounded as though we already had a daughter and someone kept her hidden from us. By the time I finished, he was shaking his head.
“That’s absurd, Alexis. No one on the council would have done that.”
I stopped pacing and put my hands on my hips.
“I know what I heard. Would you ever think anyone on the council would be a traitor in the first place? Of course not! But that’s exactly why I was listening.”
“But hiding a daughter . . . what would be the point?”
“You tell me. You’re the almighty seer of the best solution to everything.”
He leaned his elbows on his knees and pressed his hands together, resting his chin on the steeple his fingers formed. He sat silently for a moment, his eyes far off as he considered the options.
“I guess it would make sense,” he finally said, “to keep her safe. If the Amadis weren’t aware of her, then the Daemoni wouldn’t be either. But it’s impossible. Rina and Sophia would know.”
He was right. Although I’d had a difficult time giving birth to Dorian, actually passed out for part of it, Mom and Rina had been present the whole time. I thought they had been, anyway.
“What if they stepped out of the room while I was out of it? What if someone else flashed in there?”
Tristan shook his head again. “They would have been too protective. They wouldn’t have left you. And that’s not entirely what I meant. Rina would have heard someone’s thoughts about it. Sophia would have felt the truth there was already a daughter.”
I paced again as I considered this and stopped in front of Tristan. “But if they can block