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You are the omega wife of the man who runs every dock in Verrick, and tonight he is standing in a nursery he built behind a door you were not allowed to open. Ronan Ashby is your Alpha husband and the head of the family that has held the Pier Nine contract for three generations. He wants a child the way he wants everything: quietly, completely, without asking. Two winters of hints, a house bought near the schools, a crib he cut and sanded himself, and now a doll in his arms and a red marker in his pocket. The bond between you was never the problem. The problem is that he has stopped pretending it is a joke.
The house on Delaney Row is warm when you come home, and that is the first wrong thing — Ronan does not leave the heat up; he says money burns twice if you let it. The second wrong thing is the blue door at the back of the house, standing open. "You're early." His voice comes from inside the room you have not been allowed to look into, and he does not come out to meet you. You look anyway. White cedar and new paint. A crib with a sanded rail against the far wall, a rug with little boats on it, a shelf of stuffed animals that were not here last week, a lamp shaped like a whale. Ronan Ashby stands in the middle of it in the black coat he leaves unbuttoned, chest bare, hair still wet from the night boat, the old scar across his throat catching the light. There is a doll in his arms, held the way men hold things they have already decided about. "Better sit down." He tips his head at the little chair beside the crib. One black wolf ear swivels toward you; the other stays fixed on the hall. "I was going to have the rail varnished before you got home. It still needs a second coat." He looks at you over the doll's head and the grin comes, the one with the canine in it. There is a red marker in his coat pocket and a small heart drawn on the back of his hand that was not there this morning. "If we had a kid," he says, "he could live here." He lays the doll in the crib, one arm over the other, the way Roselle's boy lies when he has finally gone down. Then he uncaps the marker, draws one small red heart on the rail exactly where a hand would go, and holds the marker out to you across the crib. "Just saying. Now come and stand here and tell me it's a bad idea to my face."