I’m seriously impressed with the baby evening wear. But Bazzi? Not so much.
And it feels like I’m losing a fight when I finally haul my pissed off newborn through the arched doorway of the formal dining room on the bottom floor. The dining room’s basically the breakfast nook on steroids. Inlaid and painted ceilings. Three crystal chandeliers instead of one. A long table that looks like it’s only purpose in life is to give the one from Disney’s most recent reboot of Beauty and the Beast an inferiority complex. Crown molding everywhere and all the gilt that has ever been gilted.
But at this point, I’m done being impressed.
“Thanks for the suit,” I yell at Damianos over the screaming baby who apparently thinks I’m trying to straight-up murder him by way of this outfit. “He hates it.”
Damianos stands, lifts a brow, then hisses a few words at our outraged son.
And Bazzi immediately stops crying.
“What’d you say to him?”
“To stop crying because it would no longer be necessary to wear such things once he learns to properly retract his wings.”
“And he just listened to you?” I ask, goggling at Bazzi, who still looks sullen but has stopped screaming his head off.
He stares at me intently, then replies, “Drakkon do not disobey their fathers.”
“Like, ever?” I ask. “And from birth?”
“Yes, to both questions,” he answers. “Should I make another comparison between our species? You always seem to take great insult when I do.”
“Okay well…I’m too exhausted after hauling thirty-five pounds of squirming, screaming baby down the stairs to fight with you.”
To my surprise, Damianos rushes around the table and plucks Bazzi out of my arms in response. “It will take another week or so for Basileios to learn to walk on his own. Until that time, you will summon me whenever he is to be carried. There is no reason for you to tire yourself with this task.”
“A week? Don’t you mean like a month? Tell me, I’ve at least got a month.”
“If it makes you feel any better, he is still slightly behind where a full drakkon would be, even with a father to train him from the start.” Damianos takes the baby from me like he weighs nothing and placing him in a moon-shaped highchair I didn’t notice before. Unlike the rest of the room, it’s sleek and modern and doesn’t look like it belongs in some lavish production of an opera.
No, it doesn’t make me feel any better, but… “Thanks,” I say as I watch Damianos buckle him into the chair.
Someone nicer would probably just leave it there. But I’m me, so of course, I have to push.
“Just so you know, this feels an awful lot like Reverence,” I say, taking the seat on the other side of the chair.
His back stiffens right before our mate bond goes dead. “It is not reverence but my fatherly duty to see to all aspects of care for my child.”
“Your fatherly duty?” I repeat. I’d been raised by two Vikings who’d told me to “confer with your mother” in Old Norse whenever I asked about anything that involved what they’d so quaintly termed “the women’s arts.” So I was more than a little curious by what he meant by that.
“On my home planet, fathers were the sole caretakers of hatchlings,” he answers, taking his own seat.
I wait. And when he doesn’t offer up any further explanation, I say, “Shocked face emoji…like, even when the mother survives childbirth?”
“Yes,” he answers.
And again I wait. And again he doesn’t expound.
But he’s said enough for me to note out loud, “So basically losing your father was like what losing a single mother would have been to one of us. He raised you by himself and guided you for thousands of years. Until that battle. That’s why you’re still so angry at my dads.”
This time he doesn’t respond at all. Just rings a bell I assume must summon somebody.
Like this conversation is done.
But it isn’t done. Not nearly.
“Wow.” I tell him, “Other You talked in paragraphs, but trying to have a conversation with you is like pulling teeth.”
A long moment of numb silence before he answers, “As I told you before…” he starts to say.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, you’re not him,” I finish for him. Then I say into his head, “You don’t want to forgive anybody or fall in love or even let me in just a little bit. All you want to do now that you have me is confuse me.”
His jaw sets, but other than that he doesn’t give any indication that he heard what I said. Unamused face emoji. It’s like trying to get blood from a Greek statue.
Agda appears with a huge platter of mezes, small Greek appetizers that all three of us can easily eat. Though Damianos only bothers with the meat-based ones and leaves Bazzi and me to the cheese. And dinner only gets slightly less awkward after that.