Breakfast settled into a rhythm that Vaelira had no part in.
Alexandra moved between the stove and the counter with fluid, practiced steps, adjusting heat levels and checking timings without breaking stride. Alice trailed her like a determined apprentice, tongue poking out slightly as she focused on slicing bell peppers into even strips.
The results were... uneven.
"Thinner," Alexandra corrected gently, reaching over to adjust Alice’s grip on the knife. "You want them to cook at the sa rate. If one piece is twice the size of the others, you’ll end up with half of them burnt and the other half raw."
Alice grumbled but adjusted. Her next few cuts ca out marginally better.
Kaiden took his seat at the small dining table and gestured to the chair across from him. "Sit."
Vaelira flinched.
The word wasn’t harsh. Wasn’t cold. It carried the sa casual, unbothered tone he’d used when telling her to co inside.
But her body reacted before her brain could catch up, shoulders stiffening, breath catching, muscles locking as if the single syllable had been a hand around her throat. The phantom pain of the curse flared briefly in her chest.
She sat.
Her posture was immaculate. Back straight, hands in her lap, chin level. Every inch of her scread ’composed,’ and every fiber beneath that composure scread sothing else entirely.
Kaiden didn’t comnt on anything else, so Vaelira watched.
She had nothing else to do.
Alice held up a mangled pepper slice and squinted at it with visible offense, as if the vegetable had personally wronged her. "This is pointless. Waffles are not only tastier but also much easier to make. There’s a reason they’re the superior breakfast food."
"Superior? If you spend your entire day on your brother’s head as a halo, maybe," Alexandra replied without looking up from the eggs she was plating. "Alice, listen to . Your brother needs proper nutrients. He runs around the battlefield all day long."
"Hmph!!!" Alice scoffed, cheeks puffing. She turned her head away with exaggerated indignation, clearly searching for a logical rebuttal and finding the cupboard bare. Her mouth opened. Closed. Opened again.
Nothing ca out.
She attacked the next pepper with renewed aggression instead, which was not the sa as renewed skill.
Alexandra smiled and gently repositioned Alice’s elbow without being asked. Alice let her, grumbling under her breath about nutritional science being a conspiracy against dessert lovers.
Vaelira stared at them.
The dissonance was staggering. The girl who had beaten her so brutally that the healers questioned whether all her bones would set correctly was standing in a nightgown, pouting over vegetables, while a woman in a demonic maid outfit patiently taught her how to hold a kitchen knife properly.
They were friendly.
Not just coexisting. Genuinely comfortable with each other. There was a warmth in the way Alexandra adjusted Alice’s movents, a tenderness that only ca from soone who actually cared whether the other person learned. And Alice, for all her grumbling, never once pulled away or rejected the guidance.
The image didn’t fit. It clashed against everything Vaelira had constructed in her mind about these people, and the friction it produced left her feeling hollowed out in a way she couldn’t na.
Then Alice turned her head, and Vaelira caught the full profile.
The split hair. One side dark, one side white. The mismatched eyes, one crimson, one pale.
Alice.
The na rolled through her mind again, slower this ti.
Alice.
She’d heard it before. Not here. Not from Kaiden. From sowhere older, deeper in mory, sowhere that made her stomach tighten before her conscious mind could explain why.
Her gaze traced the girl’s face. The bone structure. The sharpness of her features beneath the softness of youth. The way she carried herself, even while doing sothing as mundane as chopping peppers, that unconscious authority, that weight in her presence that had nothing to do with physical strength.
The dark hair. Full black. Not split. Crimson eyes, both of them matching. A manic grin and power that tore reality at the seams.
The mory surfaced with sickening clarity.
Alice Ashborn.
S-tier awakened.
The Light That Destroys.
Vaelira’s blood turned to ice.
She understood now, with perfect, terrible precision, why Alice’s power had felt so familiar during the beating and following cruel torture session. Why the overwhelming force pressing down on her had triggered sothing primal, sothing beyond just pain or fear.
It had reminded her of Vespera.
Because this girl was Vespera’s blood.
Vaelira’s hands went cold in her lap. Her fingers curled inward, nails pressing into her palms as the revelation settled over her like a shroud.
The girl who had thrashed her within an inch of her life was the daughter of the Shadow Monarch.
At the counter, Alice set down her knife and turned toward Kaiden with an expression that had shifted from indignant to genuinely wounded. Her mismatched eyes went wide and droopy, lower lip pushing forward just slightly.
"Big brother... is it really true that you don’t want to eat waffles every morning?"
The corner of his mouth twitched before a warm chuckle escaped him. "Yeah. Sorry, Alice. Waffles are great, but not every single day."
Alice’s face crumbled into a pout so severe it bordered on tragic. "Traitor..." she whispered under her breath, turning back to the cutting board with the energy of soone who had just received devastating news.
Alexandra giggled softly and patted her shoulder.
Vaelira heard none of it.
Big brother.
The two words detonated inside her skull.
Alice Ashborn called him big brother.
She called Kaiden... her big brother.
Vaelira’s face drained of color. Not gradually, not in stages, but all at once, as if soone had pulled a plug and let every drop of blood flee southward. Her skin went from pale to ghostly to sothing that resembled parchnt left in the sun too long.
Her lips parted, but no sound ca out.
Her hands began to shake. Not the subtle tremor from earlier, not the manageable kind she could hide by pressing her palms together. This was visceral. Her fingers jerked against each other in her lap, and she couldn’t stop them, no matter how hard she pressed.
Is he...
Her throat constricted.
Is Kaiden Grey...
The dining table in front of her blurred. Her vision tunneled, edges going dark as her heart hamred against her ribs with enough force to make her chest ache.
A secret Ashborn child?
The pieces crashed together with the subtlety of a collapsing building.
The Shadow Monarch’s son.
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