Alice’s gaze drifted to Bastet, who was still sprawled across Kaiden’s lap with her head on his left leg and both hands curled possessively around his knee. The felinid had watched the entire sequence without lifting her head, purring, and showed no intention of moving for the foreseeable future.
"Yes, big brother," Alice replied with the most deadpan expression imaginable. "For all of you."
She had baked fourteen cookies. She intended for him to eat thirteen of them.
"Let feed you!"
Alice moved to sit in his lap.
But there was an issue with that. The goal was unreachable.
"Move, cat. You’re in the way."
Bastet’s nose pressed deeper into his left thigh and a low, rolling purr vibrated through the cushion, loud enough for Alice to hear and calibrated enough to make clear that the woman attached to it was suprely comfortable and had no plans to renegotiate her position.
Alice stared down at the felinid.
Bastet’s golden gaze slid open. One eye. The other stayed closed, as if the intruder didn’t warrant both.
Alice hissed.
Bastet’s ear flattened. Her lips pulled back over her teeth and she hissed in return, low and resonant, the real thing from a woman who’d been doing it since birth.
Alice hissed louder.
Bastet matched her.
"Girls," Kaiden exhaled tiredly.
Two heads turned toward him. One teenage. One feline. Both radiating the conviction that they were the wronged party.
Kaiden patted his right side with one hand and kept his left where it was, in Bastet’s hair.
"There’s room for both of you."
Alice sat down imdiately, as though the seat had been reserved since the beginning of ti and Bastet’s presence was a clerical error. Bastet reacted with dignity, her eye closed again.
Alice held up a cookie.
"Say ’ahh,’ big brother."
"I can feed myself, Alice."
"You’ve had a very long day and I’m taking care of you. Open."
He opened. She placed it between his teeth with the focus of a surgeon and watched his face as he chewed.
"How is it?"
"It’s good."
"How good?"
"Very good."
She bead. Full sunshine.
Across the table, Nyx had Alexandra locked in her lap while Luna and Aria watched the chaos with the resigned fondness of won who had long since accepted that calm was not a feature of this group.
Calypso, from the far end of the couch, reached for a cream puff. She bit into it, chewed, and her eyebrows rose.
"This is tasty!"
"Thank you, Cali!" Alexandra called from Nyx’s lap, still struggling. "Now if you’d help get ’unstuck’..."
"I’m good."
"..."
"Why don’t you show mother what you’ve learned?" Kaiden asked Alice.
The sunshine flickered. In its place arrived raw, undisguised hope - the face of a girl who had spent her childhood in a cold house where nobody baked anything, offering the first thing she’d ever made with her own hands to the woman who raised her in silence.
Alice picked up a cookie. She turned to Vespera, and the confidence that had powered her through the last minute of territorial warfare evaporated completely. She held it out in both hands, arms straight, eyes wide.
"I learned to cook, Mother. Alexandra taught ." Her voice had gone quiet. "Would you... like to try one?"
Vespera studied the cookie. Her gaze moved to Alice, studying her daughter’s face with the sa analytical precision she applied to everything. Then her attention shifted past Alice to Alexandra, still pinned in Nyx’s lap, and lingered there for a mont.
Her red eyes returned to Alice.
"You made these on your own."
It wasn’t a question but a verdict. The Shadow Monarch had assessed the cookie, the cook, and the teacher, and reached her conclusion.
Alice bead. "Yes!"
Vespera took the cookie from her daughter’s hands and bit into it. Small, asured, proper. She chewed without expression, making Alice’s heart visibly climb into her throat with each second of silence.
She finished it. The whole thing.
Alice was vibrating.
"How was it?"
Vespera looked at her daughter.
"Can I have a second one?"
Alice’s face went through four expressions in under a second. Shock, disbelief, the kind of joy that lives right next to tears, and then a brightness so fierce it could have lit the room on its own. Her mother, who did not ask for things, who did not request, who declared and permitted and ignored, had asked her for a second cookie.
"Yes!" Alice’s voice cracked. She grabbed two, then three, then stopped herself before going for more. She placed them on a tray and handed it to Vespera.
The Shadow Monarch looked at the stack, then at the girl who’d put them there. Her expression didn’t change, but she held her daughter’s gaze a beat longer than she held anyone’s.
"I’m proud of you, Alice. Records indicate that you’re the first woman in the Ashborn lineage who learned how to cook properly, at least in the past two centuries."
Alice’s lower lip trembled for half a second before she spun back to Kaiden and buried her face against his shoulder, saying nothing, hiding everything, because if she opened her mouth right now she was going to cry and she was a graceful young lady who didn’t do that in front of this many people.
Kaiden’s hand found the back of her head.
No one said a word about it.
The warmth lingered for a while longer before Kaiden’s expression shifted.
"Mother. Did you really have to give up the Ashborn manor as well?"
Vespera’s thumb stilled against the cookie in her hand.
"That house is where I failed you." She said it without inflection. "It’s where I failed all my children. It’s where my parents failed , and their parents failed them. Generations of Ashborns learning to be cold in cold rooms."
A pause.
"I do not wish to live there anymore."
Kaiden didn’t push. He let the silence hold, then asked simply, "I understand... So what cos next?"
Vespera looked at him. Then her fingers snapped.
The sound was sharp, resonant, far too loud for a human hand. It cracked through the lounge like a gunshot.
"Co in."
The door opened. People filed through. n and won in tailored suits, combat attire, formal awakened regalia. The girls’ faces changed as recognition hit - nas they’d heard, faces they’d seen on broadcasts, figures whose reputations preceded them by years. Fighters. Executives. Lawyers. They lined up along the far wall, silent, waiting.
Vespera stood. She crossed the space between the couch and the assembled line, turned, and faced her son.
Her arms parted.
"I present to those gathered here my child, the only recognized living male mber of the Ashborn bloodline. On this day, I officially declare him the rightful heir of everything my ancestral heritage represents."
She looked him in the eyes.
"My son. You are a blessing I do not deserve, and a man who will beco greater than I ever could. As leader of the Ashborn, it is my duty to make this decision."
"Everything I own, everyone who follows , every Chronos to my na. I wish them to be yours, should you choose to accept it."
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