chapter twenty two: Quiet Fire

Aria’s POV)

The kitchens were a cave of warmth at that hour, a place of steady, honest labor where night swallowed the rest of the keep and only the hearth remained witness. We’d finished the last of the evening pots; the clatter of serving had faded hours ago. I liked the quiet the way heat thinned the edges of grief and left only work. It made thinking manageable—if thinking ever was.

Tonight, only three of us remained: my mother with a basket of herbs, a tired apprentice named Mara finishing the last loaves, and me.

Word had gone out for the others to sleep;

Kaelen’s orders for strict quiet after the day’s alarms kept most to their rooms. It meant we were alone, just the three of us.

Then Serena came in.

I should have heard her before she entered. Her footsteps were always too confident; her presence a blade that found its mark. But the kitchen’s steam smothered noise into softness, and I was bent over a table when she leaned in like a shadow, the scent of her perfume sharp and