"You have no idea what you've done, baby of mine."

Amon said it to Liora the way he said treaty clauses, like naming the harm aloud might persuade her to undo it. She laughed.

He crouched on the nursery floor in a tailored black shirt that had never known a wrinkle before last Tuesday, and he held a wet wipe between two fingers the way he might have held a rival lord's severed pinky bone. His shadow leaked from his shoulders. His brow, the same brow that had ended negotiations between demon kings, was furrowed into complete defeat by the bare thighs of a five-month-old.

Her laugh was my laugh. It was the only thing about her that was one hundred percent mine. Everything else she had split between us with the precision of a being who understood architecture. His stillness in the set of her mouth. My curls, ungovernable. The demon-black shadow at the edges of her gold irises was his; the tactical position of her left foot against her father's wrist was mine.

"The wipe is not a binding agreement," I said from the doorway, holding the ritual chalice of terrible coffee. "She can move."

"Then hold still, daughter."

"She's five months old. Holding still isn't in her vocabulary."

"I am aware of the variable."

The variable kicked. The wipe went sideways. Amon's hand closed around her ankle with the speed of a being who had survived three millennia by catching things falling toward his chest, and he held her still with such careful, contained force that the shadow bled from his fingers and curled around the changing mat like a net of spun tar.

Biscuit, Wednesday, and Lord Fancypants had arranged themselves in the geometry I had come to recognize as domestic security detail. Biscuit by the nursery door in cat form, orange tabby, tail flicking in slow judgment. Wednesday on top of the crib, silver eyes half-shut, the picture of a creature who was not asleep and had never once been asleep in the presence of this child. Lord Fancypants stood at the foot of the changing table, immovable, grey, dignified in a way that suggested he had personally signed off on the cotton thread count of the wipes before allowing them into the nursery.

I drank the coffee. It was still terrible.

"Left," I said, because I had learned I had to. "There's residue on her left."

"I have addressed the left."

"You've addressed the vicinity of the left. The actual surface remains undefeated."

Amon closed his eyes for one-half of one second, which was his version of a long-suffering sigh. Then he re-engaged with the actual left. Liora burbled something in the dialect that had arrived with her first teeth. The wallpaper shifted a pattern. A small constellation of burgundy rosebuds rearranged itself into a small constellation of something older, something that looked at me when I looked at it.

"She's doing the walls again," I said.

"She is bored."

"She isn't bored. You're bored. She's mocking you."

"My daughter does not mock."

I laughed.

"Your daughter does nothing else."

He secured the diaper. It was adequate. He looked at me with the expression of a creature who had just achieved a thing in the realm of his supposed equals and expected recognition from his wife. I did not laugh. I loved him too much to laugh at the set of his mouth when he was pretending he had not just defeated the enemy.

Instead, I crossed the rug and kissed his cheek, and the cold that had been my first warning about what he was tipped toward my skin and held.

"My hero," I said.

"Do not mock."

"I'm never mocking you. I'm worshiping you. It looks the same from the outside."

Liora laughed. Biscuit flicked his tail.

He caught my wrist as I pulled back, his thumb settling against the bond mark, a gesture he had used for three years and had never once made ordinary. The gold under the skin warmed under his hand. My pulse answered him. It always answered him.

"Coffee is ready," I said, which was a lie. The coffee was terrible. The coffee was always terrible. The coffee was a ritual.

"I made it."

"I know. I can taste the war crimes."

He almost smiled. I watched his mouth do the thing it did when it was considering the expression, the brief twitch, immediately suppressed, filed for later. Liora grabbed at his shirt with both hands. He lifted her. She went to his shoulder like a small, disgraced flag returning to its staff.

The walls pulsed warm. The 500-year-old woman in the territory had never made a sound in three years of my knowing her, but she had, at Liora's arrival, begun to breathe. Small exhalations against the brick. It was as if the child had unlocked her.

I had no word for what this place was. Every language I spoke fell short of the particular experience of watching the most dangerous being I had ever met hold a diaper-bag strap in his teeth so he could put our daughter on his shoulder.

My phone buzzed.

Lumen Studios. Monday meeting. David from People Ops asking about the scheduling constraints for the Q2 brief review. I ignored it. I had been ignoring Q2 briefs for two weeks because the Q2 brief was not the thing in my pocket that was pulling at my attention.

A weight. Three days of it. Visible in the way he held his jaw when he thought I was not looking.

The chalice found the counter. Biscuit lifted his head.

"You overheard something," I said.

Amon did not look at me. His hand adjusted Liora's weight on his shoulder, a gesture that had become automatic in five months.

"At the office. Tuesday."

"The security audit."

"And someone said something you've been worrying about for days."

His shadow shifted at the hinge of his jaw. Not anger. Something he was still filing.

"Amon."

He turned. The look he gave me was the cataloguing look, the one that meant he was memorizing the arrangement of the room. The cold in his eyes was the same cold of the first day, but it had company now. The company was me. The company was our daughter.

"I will tell you tonight," he said.

"Not now?"

"Now she needs feeding."

She made the small frequency that was hunger.

"Tonight," I said.

He inclined his head.

The walls shifted. The coffee went cold. The wallpaper held its new pattern, and I would, by evening, have a different life.