Aligned.
That’s the part that makes my skin prickle.
The tension that used to sit in the air like a live wire has shifted into something else overnight—something denser, warmer, gravitational. It feels like the moment in a storm when lightning has already struck and the air is still buzzing from it. The danger isn’t over. It’s just changed shape.
They’re moving around each other differently.
So is she.
I’m in the kitchen first, because I’m always in the kitchen first. It gives me an angle. Sunlight filters through the east windows in thin, pale stripes, catching in dust and steam. Coffee’s already on. I stand at the counter with a mug cooling between my hands, pretending I’m reading something on my phone when I’m really doing what I always do.
Collecting…. Cataloguing. Noticing what the others don’t.
I hear them before I see them. Footsteps on the old hardwood floors. Low voices. The shift of weight you learn to identify when you share walls with men built to do harm.
Wraith walks in first. He’s different, and I’m sure it has something to do with Ember. He’s always had that slow, stalking presence — predator pacing perimeter, reading exits, calculating threat. That’s still there. But something’s looser in his shoulders now. Charged, but not short-fused. It’s…settled. Claimed.
He goes straight for the stove, like it’s automatic. Puts water on. Starts setting out things for breakfast without asking anyone if they want it. He never used to do that. Feeding the room is Saint’s game when he’s in a decent mood, or Vale’s when he’s feeling theatrical. Wraith is not domestic.
Except this morning, apparently, he is.
Then Rook steps in. No jacket. Shirt open at the collar. Watch glinting at his wrist. King in his own house, absolutely, but not wound like barbed wire the way he has been for weeks. He looks—steady. Which should be comforting and is instead unnerving, because steady for him is another word for decided.
And then her…Ember.
Bare feet. Sleep shirt that’s not hers. One of ours—someone’s black Henley hanging loose to mid-thigh, sleeves pushed to her elbows. Her hair’s a lazy fall of red and copper, unbrushed, a little wild. There’s a small bruise at her jaw, the kind you only get from a mouth and a hand that wanted at the same time. Her eyes are clear.
She moves into the kitchen like she’s allowed to.
That’s new.
Three weeks ago she moved like a trapped thing: sharp, coiled, ready to bolt, calculating the distance to every exit in case it all went feral.
Today, she moves like gravity is something she commands.
She passes by Wraith first, brushing his arm with her fingertips in a touch that could be accidental but isn’t. He tilts his head down toward her, so slightly it’s almost nothing, but I clock the angle. Deference. Protection. Claim.
“Morning,” she says to him, voice still rough with sleep.
He’s not a morning person. He hates morning. He grunts at morning. He threatens morning.
“Morning, little fox,” Wraith says, low and warm.
I go still at the words. He doesn’t look at her when he says it. He just reaches for a mug and slides it across the counter toward where she’ll sit like he woke up knowing where she’d land.
Her mouth lifts at the corner. That tiny half-smile she gives when she’s pleased but trying not to show it.
Rook watches the exchange. His jaw twitches once, not in anger—more like private acknowledgment. Then he pulls a chairout with his foot, not looking at her when he does it. “Sit,” he tells her.
Ember glances at him. “You ordering me?”
“Yes,” he says.
Ember hums. That little sound she makes when she’s pretending to be annoyed but secretly enjoying the attention. She takes the seat, but doesn’t sit across from him. Ember sits right next to him, thigh pressed to his. Rook doesn’t move his leg. There’s no flare-up. No territorial flash. No blade unsheathed between the two of them or between him and Wraith. Just acceptance.
And that, more than anything, is the problem.
Because last week? That would’ve started a war.
