Chapter 374: Four Births, One Day

Nine months.

That was how long it had been since Rose told him she was pregnant.

Nine long months, of which Mark had missed seven locked inside Mary’s dream world, and which he had tried to make up for since his return with more dedication than he had ever put into anything.

And at last, tomorrow, he was going to meet his first children.

Getting to this point, however, hadn’t been as simple as waiting for the date to arrive.

Emilia, Luna, Rose, and Cali had gotten pregnant within a very few weeks of each other, so it had long been known they would give birth around the same time.

What nobody had foreseen was that they would end up doing it on the same day.

And that hadn’t been a coincidence, but a decision the four of them had made together.

The idea had come up one afternoon, almost as a joke, during one of those gatherings they had started holding on their own to complain about pregnancy symptoms.

One of them remarked how convenient it would be to give birth all at once and get it over with, and the others laughed.

But then they fell quiet, thinking it over, because the more they turned the idea around, the more sense it made.

Making the four births coincide had obvious advantages.

The midwives, healers, and everything else needed would only have to be prepared once, instead of keeping the whole palace on edge for weeks.

But that hadn’t been the main reason.

Luna had insisted that if all the children were born on the same day, none of them would have to grow up under the label of firstborn. Rose agreed almost immediately, because each of them knew, in different ways, what such a burden could do.

Luna had watched her eldest brother, who as a child had been kind and attentive, sink under expectations he never learned to handle.

In time he sought refuge in alcohol and women, and his attitude changed until he became the jerk Mark had met.

Rose, for her part, had suffered that pressure directly.

Being the eldest and also the strongest had made her father focus a disproportionate amount of attention on her.

That had ended up isolating her, convinced that her sisters hated her, until she finally decided to run away from home.

Naturally, neither of them wanted their children to grow up feeling anything similar.

Ely was the one who broke the tension by pointing out that there was another, far more important advantage.

And that was that, if they all shared a birthday, Mark would only have to remember one date.

According to her, with how bad he was at those things, four different birthdays meant at least one child without a gift every year.

The joke made everyone laugh and let them, for a moment, stop thinking about what was coming.

But only for a moment.

Because there was still Cali, whose pregnancy had been the most difficult of the four from the start.

As a succubus, her chances of getting pregnant naturally were practically nil, and if she had managed it, it was only thanks to Emilia’s magic.

During the months Mark was missing, Cali had suffered constant dizziness, loss of appetite, and pains nobody could explain, plus more than one scare that forced Emilia to spend entire nights at her side.

At first, everyone had assumed those complications were due to how forced the pregnancy was.

But as soon as Mark returned, the symptoms began to disappear almost overnight.

Cali went back to eating normally, sleeping well, and smiling, and within weeks her pregnancy stabilized completely.

After checking her condition several times, Emilia concluded that magic wasn’t the only one to blame for the complications.

The stress of spending seven months not knowing whether Mark was still alive had affected Cali far more than anyone had anticipated.

Luckily, she was stable now.

That removed the last obstacle keeping them from moving forward.

And from that point on, nearly everything depended on Emilia.

Her position as queen didn’t change the fact that she was also an exceptional healer, an ability that, like Rose’s magical talent, came directly from her lineage as the daughter of a reincarnated.

For two days she shut herself in her chambers surrounded by books, herbs, and vials until she produced a potion specially designed to induce labor in a controlled way.

A single dose would ease much of the pain and protect both mother and baby throughout the entire process.

Mark was the only one who received the news with obvious distrust.

He didn’t doubt Emilia, but deliberately interfering with something so delicate seemed to him an unnecessarily risky decision.

That was when they reminded him that these were their children as much as his, and none of them would have accepted the plan if it weren’t safe.

Emilia had studied every possible complication before preparing the potion and, had she found a single serious reason for concern, the idea would have ended right there.

Mark still wasn’t completely at ease, but he had no more arguments left to keep refusing, and he ended up giving in.

So, with the potion finished, the date decided, and all preparations ready, there was nothing left to do but rest for the big day.

However, Emilia, Luna, Rose, and Cali had no intention of going straight to sleep.

The four of them knew the birth would mark the beginning of several weeks of recovery and that, during that time, they wouldn’t be able to have sex with Mark.

So they decided to take advantage of that last night to fuck until dawn.

A decision that didn’t leave the rest of the wives particularly happy, least of all Ely, who spent a good while grumbling about being left out.

It was precisely during those complaints that something came up that several of them had noticed for some time, though none had dared to mention it openly.

And that was that Mark seemed to enjoy sex with the pregnant ones more than with any of the others.

The accusation began half as a joke, but the more they discussed it, the more details seemed to fit.

Mark had never admitted anything of the sort and didn’t make blatant distinctions between his wives, but several had noticed that when he was with Emilia, Luna, Rose, or Cali, he seemed to show a slightly different intensity.

The strange thing was that it didn’t make much sense.

It would have been far easier to prefer the ones who weren’t pregnant, who could move however they liked and didn’t force him to be careful with every movement.

But nobody had ever said tastes had to make sense.

In the end, far from being offended, the four pregnant ones seemed quite satisfied with the possibility.

And they decided that tonight they intended to find out how much truth there was to the theory...