But I taste the syllables every time I swallow.
I hear her voice in the steam rising off the broth. I see her eyes reflected in the gleam of knife steel. Everything reminds me. Everything burns.
Late dinner rush. I’m plating a fireroot lamb dish—seared, sliced thin, drizzled with a reduction that took six hours to perfect—when I hear someone say her name from the corner table.
The patron’s voice is light, curious, unaware she’s just stuck her hand inside a trap.
“She used to come here, didn’t she?” the woman asks.
I look up.
She’s half-Human, half-Voreni—four-fingered hands, star-blue eyes, hair braided in a style common in the lower districts. She’s been coming here for years. Tips well. Brings her friends. I’ve always liked her.
“Kristi?” she says again, turning toward the table of coworkers around her. “I saw her in the news. Didn’t she?—”
The growl is out of my throat before I register it.
“Enough.”
The room goes quiet.
The table freezes.
Kiv’s head snaps up.
The woman blinks, startled. “I—I didn’t mean?—”
“She doesn’t eat here anymore.”
It comes out tight. Controlled. But hot enough to scorch.
There’s no yelling. No thrown plates. No spectacle.
Just the sound of a door slamming shut.
The table falls silent.
I turn back to the lamb. My claws tremble slightly as I slide the knife through the meat. Not from anger.
From something worse.
Shame.
Father watches me from the end of the line. Says nothing. But his eyes—deep as war trenches—narrow.
His voice reaches me later, when the rush has thinned and the staff is moving through their closing routines.
“That wasn’t like you.”
“It was,” I say.
He studies me. The room hums with candlelight and the fading echo of laughter. Someone’s playing that old human jazz on the stereo—a slow sax line that makes everything feel dim and crowded.
“It hurt,” he says simply.
I don’t answer.
He’s not wrong. But saying it out loud feels like a betrayal of something primal. A warrior doesn’t name the blade once it’s in his chest. He fights until he drops.
