The Keepers' Evil: The Shattered Star

2: We don't let our own die

"I want you to talk to Selwyn." Shadows often stood in Gaunt's study, prancing around the walls as if to torment his very soul until he purged whatever plan he had sat behind his desk to concoct like a perfectly precise potion. He should have known that the darkness played in hours too early to see life other than him, it teased and it tricked until the sun snatched it away and punished it like a child who had done wrong, but it always startled him when it approached him, even if it was just Hemera.

"Hemera, go back to bed, please. It's late and you should rest, darling." He pressed his fingers into his eye sockets, watching as she loomed further into the study just to find any seat that she could to take the pressure from her fragile bones. It was no secret that neither of them had found any luck in sleeping, not since the burden of Hemera's secret had caught up to them.

She was small, she was delicate, and her petite frame had not taken long to expose what she had desired to keep to herself. Corvinus often pondered on the idea that had her body not wished for him to know of the baby, that perhaps she would have never told him and given him away to some stranger in Knockturn Alley.

Hemera had kept the knowledge of her pregnancy to herself for three months before Corvinus had demanded that she explain why she refused to see Celeste or Gabriel every time he suggested visiting them, or why she had barely eaten in weeks, or why she locked herself in the house with drawn curtains as though she was terrified of the outside world. He had held her hands to stop them from shaking, told her that he would not be angry when she told him that he would be, and then he had proven why his child would be a victim to the devil for the surname that they would hold.

Corvinus had watched her cry for a while, he had listened to her apologise for what was likely an entire hour, and then he had stormed from their bedroom and he had not returned for two days. When he had felt too guilty to stay away, he had peeled their bedroom door open again and the smell of salted tear stains against fabric had hit him first before the sight of how emotionally exhausted Hemera had become, how she slept against his pillow so that she could hold a piece of him close, a piece of him that did not walk away from her when she needed him most.

After that he had watched intently as their child had grown within her, but he had noted the vulnerability of her that they could not afford. They were not married, and this meant that their knowledge of their own child was a risk to their lives. Their society was not kind to women who bore children outside of the confines of gold and silver rings of diamond, it was not afraid to commit tortuously cruel crimes to ensure that they were shamed and shunned from their homes, from their husbands even.

Corvinus would never let expectation murder her, and so he had hidden her and their growing baby, forcing Hemera to become a prisoner to their own home until he could figure out a way to let her survive this. It was not as simple as placing a ring on her finger, the timing of their baby would coincide too closely, it would be far too obvious, and becoming his wife was not the title that it seemed. If Corvinus was to wed her, the abuse of his parents would grow worse, she would have an obligation to allow the bruises, his baby would be painted in black and blue before he even turned two.

"You never came to bed." He knew that Hemera could not sleep without him, that she feared the dark without his touch over her. It had not always been this way, and he assumed that it was just another burden of carrying another life, of being responsible for creating a human being, so he only smiled when he noticed how her eyes had dropped under the weight of the dark circles that strung her eyes into exhaustion.

Corvinus had always felt guilty for the way that watching her hold the dramatic swell of her stomach made him feel possessive. There was something unhealthy within him that corresponded to the violence that settled in his veins when he saw how her hands laid small touches to their child inside of her. It growled at his mind upon seeing how innocent she was, how softly she held herself now that it mattered how she was touched, and it reminded him over and over that if someone were to invite themselves to hurt her, he would splatter their blood over the landscape of the world as a reminder that she was his, there was no denying that now.