Lysara sat with her back to a wall, her bowl warming her hands. She wasn’t hungry. The warmth was the point.
Footsteps came down the path—heavy, uneven, then correcting themselves, like the person had remembered how to walk properly mid-stride.
She looked up.
Kayden.
He paused when he saw her, as if he’d expected the space to be empty and was deciding whether her presence counted.
“You’re loud,” she said, because it was easier than asking if he was all right.
He exhaled once through his nose. “Celebrating.”
His hand held a bottle by the neck. The glass looked expensive. The kind of expensive that didn’t want to be touched by hands like theirs.
“What?”
“My birthday,” he said.
“Nineteen.”
He said it like it didn’t matter. Like it was just another number to file away. But his posture was subtly off—too relaxed in the shoulders, too tight in the jaw.
“Happy birthday.”
“Thank you.”
He crossed the distance and sat opposite her, leaving space between them like a habit he didn’t question. Not close. Not distant.
He set the bottle on the floor near his boots and stared at it for a moment, eyes unreadable.
“Did the captain give you that?”
Kayden’s mouth twitched. “Yes, Xyrion did indeed.”
He unscrewed the cap and poured into a cup.
The scent reached her a second later. Smoke and sweetness and something old. Not the clean burn of cheap liquor. This smelled like wealth.
He held the cup out slightly.
“Join me?”
Lysara hesitated. Then nodded once.
“One sip,” she said. “To honor your day. I wish I had known. Happy birthday.”
She took a small sip and handed the cup right back to him.
Kayden stared at the cup as if it had something to say.
“Did he celebrate with you?”
Kayden hesitated. A small pause.
“He showed up,” he said, holding the bottle up. “That counts for him.”
She wanted to ask. But she didn’t. Some questions weren’t yours to pull open. Not when you could feel the bruise under them.
Kayden drank again.
He didn’t look drunk in the way people in taverns looked drunk. There was no slurring, no careless laughter. Just… a loosening.
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“I didn’t come here for company.”
“I don’t remember inviting you — I would have, had I known.”
His mouth curved faintly. A real reaction, brief and startled.
Then Kayden’s head turned slightly, as if he’d caught something.
He went still.
Lysara felt it too—the subtle shift in the air around him, the way he listened with more than ears.
His gaze moved to her like it had been pulled there.
Lysara’s stomach tightened. She didn’t like being examined.
“You always smell like the outside,” he said, then paused as if he’d realized how odd that sounded. “I didn’t mean—”
Kayden’s eyes stayed on her for a beat too long.
Then he looked away like it had burned.
“I grew up in the forest,” he said abruptly, as if the words pushed past his teeth. “Before all of this.”
Lysara didn’t move. She simply listened.
“We traveled,” he added. “Not like merchants. Just… moving. Following seasons. Mostly down in the south. Velkara Forest. Before it was fenced in.”
“Following what fed us. Fires at night. Too many voices. Too many hands trying to do the same job.”
There was a warmth in his tone.
“A pack.”
“Birthdays were loud,” he said. “Not… expensive.” His gaze flicked to the bottle with a hint of bitterness that vanished as quickly as it came. “Someone always made too much food. Someone always complained they made too much food while eating it anyway.”
He smiled, small and involuntary.
Lysara felt something in her chest tighten at the sound of it.
“And then,” Kayden said, his voice shifting—less warm, more controlled again—“I ended up here.”
He rolled the cup between his fingers. “Xyrion thinks a bottle softens the lack of knowing.”
“It doesn’t,” Lysara said.
Kayden’s eyes lifted to her.
“No,” he said quietly. “It doesn’t.”
He drank again. A little more this time.
Lysara watched his hands. Steady. Always steady. Even now.
“Where I grew up,” Kayden said, his voice rougher around the edges, “Beastkin and Shae didn’t separate themselves.”
The words landed like a stone dropped into still water.
Lysara went very still.
Kayden didn’t look at her when he said it. He stared at the cup, at the floor, at anything that wasn’t her face.
“We lived how we should,” he continued. “Out in the open. Together. It wasn’t—” He shook his head once. “It wasn’t something to apologize for.”
Lysara’s throat tightened.
Her hands stayed around the bowl like it was the only thing anchoring her.
“Hiding,” Kayden said, and the word sounded sour, “meant danger had arrived in Velkara.”
Lysara understood how he knew.
Kayden’s breath caught—not dramatic, just a small involuntary break. He looked at her then, properly.
His gaze settled on her, sharper now, like he’d noticed something he hadn’t meant to.
“It’s wrong,” he said, restraint stretched thin. “That you have to—” He stopped, jaw flexing. “That we can’t just exist everywhere.”
Lysara’s eyes stung unexpectedly.
She hated it.
She hated feeling anything that made her look weak.
But she couldn’t deny the ache in the words. The way he spoke as if he had known a world where she wouldn’t have needed to become careful.
“You don’t know what I am,” she said, not harshly. Just truth.
Kayden’s mouth twitched, not quite a smile.
“I know enough.”
He leaned back against the wall behind him, head tilting as if he’d surrendered to gravity for the first time in weeks.
“I’m not good at this,” he said.
“At birthdays?”
“At… talking,” he corrected.
Lysara felt the corners of her mouth move. “You’re doing fine.”
Kayden huffed quietly. “That’s not reassuring.”
She let the silence come back.
It felt easier now. Like something had been named without being claimed.
Then Kayden spoke again, his voice lower. Warmer. The alcohol finally slipping past the last careful gate.
“You feel like home.”
The words were too honest. Too intimate. Too much.
Lysara’s spine went still as a drawn bowstring.
Kayden seemed to realize it the moment the sentence left him. His eyes sharpened, regret flashing across his face like a quick shadow.
He exhaled. “I—sorry. That wasn’t—”
Lysara set her bowl down carefully, hands steady.
“Kayden,” she said gently. “I can’t be anyone’s home.”
He froze.
Then he nodded immediately, like a soldier taking an order he respected.
“You’re right,” he said. “You’re right.”
“I’m sorry,” he repeated, more firmly. “That was unfair.”
Lysara’s chest eased a fraction at the clean acceptance.
“It’s okay,” she said. “You’re just… hurting.”
Kayden’s gaze flicked to hers, startled by the accuracy.
He looked away again.
“I’ll go.”
He stood. He left the bottle where it was, as if it had done its job and failed at it.
He paused as she softly called after him.
“Happy birthday.”
Kayden’s shoulders shifted—almost a laugh, almost a sigh.
“It was,” he said. “For a minute.”
Then he left.
The night settled back into quiet.
She picked up her bowl again and held it to her palms until the warmth stopped the shaking.
