Chapter 103: Kitchen Disaster

Azura’s POV

A bang. Then something scraping. Then a sound that could only be described as a pot losing an argument with a stove. Then a voice, low and controlled and clearly trying very hard not to be heard, saying something under its breath that I was fairly certain was not appropriate for polite company.

I stood in the corridor for a moment and listened to the chaos happening around the corner.

Then I heard Liona.

Not her voice exactly. Just the sound she made when something had bypassed her ability to function normally and taken over completely. The kind of laughter that had no volume control, no dignity attached to it, and absolutely no intention of stopping anytime soon.

I turned the corner.

I stopped.

The kitchen looked like it had been the site of a very specific and personal disaster. Flour on the floor in uneven patches like something had exploded and then been half-heartedly swept toward the edges and given up on. Vegetable peels were scattered across the counter and the floor below it with the energy of someone who had been peeling with great commitment and no awareness of where the peels were landing.

A pot on the stove was boiling over enthusiastically, water running down the sides and hitting the flames with a continuous angry hiss that nobody was doing anything about.

The sink was full of dishes that looked like they had been washed by someone who had heard a description of washing dishes but had never actually witnessed it.

Torin was at the table with his face in both hands. He was not moving. His shoulders had the posture of a man who had made peace with something and was simply waiting for it to end.

Liona was beside him, both arms wrapped around her own middle, tears running down her face, making sounds that were technically laughing but had evolved past the point where they sounded like anything human.

I looked at all of this.

Then I looked at the counter.

Rhydor was standing in front of the cutting board. He was wearing an apron. It was clearly Torin’s apron, and it was not built for someone of Rhydor’s size, sitting high on his chest and tied behind him in a way that suggested the strings had been forced into cooperation.

There was flour on his cheek. A streak of it, sitting there completely unbothered. His sleeves were rolled to the elbow, and he was holding a knife with the careful, focused grip of someone who was taking this very seriously.

In front of him on the cutting board was what had once been a vegetable.

I stared at it.

"What happened in here?" I asked.

Liona pointed at the cutting board. She could not speak. She just pointed.

I walked to the counter and looked at what Rhydor had done to the vegetables. They were cut. That was the most generous description available. Some pieces were enormous, wider than my palm and twice as thick. Some were tiny, barely slivers. Some had been cut at angles that served no culinary purpose I could identify. One piece appeared not to have been cut at all and was simply sitting among the others in its original form as if it had given up.

"What is that supposed to be?" I asked.

"Vegetables," Rhydor said. Flat and completely certain.

Liona made a sound from the table that was not a word.

"He said he wanted to make breakfast," she managed between attempts at breathing normally. "To apologize. For the." She waved her hand in the general direction of Torin’s face, which was healed now. "You know."

Torin had not looked up from his hands. "I forgave him before he started cooking," he said, his voice coming out slightly muffled. "I forgave him the moment he said sorry. I am not sure I can extend the same forgiveness to what he did to those carrots."

I looked back at the mess, picked up one of the larger pieces, and held it up. It was approximately the size of my closed fist.

"Rhydor," I said. "This piece is bigger than my fist."

He looked at it. "It will cook."

I picked up one of the smaller pieces with my other hand. It was the size of my thumbnail.

"This one is the size of my thumb," I said.

"It will also cook," he said.

"They will not cook at the same time," I said carefully. "One will still be raw when the other one has turned to mush. You cannot cook different pieces together."

He looked at the large piece in my hand. Then the small one. Then the collection on the cutting board. His brow shifted slightly. Something moved across his face that was not his usual expression at all.

Confusion. Genuine and unperformed. He had actually not known that.

"I did not know that mattered," he said quietly.

I looked at him standing there in the too-small apron with flour on his cheek, holding a knife, surrounded by the wreckage of a kitchen that had done nothing to deserve this, and I forgot for a moment what I was supposed to be feeling about him.

"Why are you doing this?" I asked.

He looked at the cutting board. Not at me.

"I hurt him," he said. The words came out slowly, like each one had to be located before it could be used. "I wanted to make it right."

"So you decided to cook."

"Torin said food makes people feel better."

"I meant someone else’s food," Torin said from the table. Still not looking up. "Not yours specifically. I want to be very clear about that."

Rhydor ignored him completely. He looked at the vegetables and then at me and something in his face was doing the thing it occasionally did when the Alpha mask was not sitting properly on top of whatever was actually there underneath it.

"I thought I could try," he said.

A pause.

"I was wrong."

Liona made a noise at the table. It was quiet and controlled and lasted exactly long enough for Torin to turn his head and look at her with an expression that said do not.

She pressed her lips together.

I looked at Rhydor standing there in the middle of a kitchen disaster of his own making, genuinely trying to apologize to someone in the only way he had apparently been able to think of, which was to attempt to cook breakfast despite having no working knowledge of how vegetables cut to different sizes behaved under heat.

I exhaled through my nose.

"Give me the knife," I said.

"I can do it."

"Rhydor."

He looked at me.

"Give me the knife."

He held it for one more second. Then he held it out to me.

I took it. I picked up a carrot from the pile, set it on the board, and showed him. One even slice. Then another. Same thickness. Same size. Moving through it at a steady pace.

"Like this," I said. "Even pieces. Same size as each other. Not whatever system you were using with the others."

He watched my hands. His eyes were on the knife and the board, and the way the pieces came off was consistent and clean.

"You know how to cook," he said. It came out like an observation he was still processing.

"I lived alone," I said. "You learn what you can when you can. Cooking was useful, because no one would do it for me."

He was quiet for a moment.

"I did not know that," he said.

"There is a lot you do not know about me."

I looked up when I said it, and he was already looking at me, and for a moment neither of us said anything, and the kitchen was just the kitchen with its flour on the floor and its boiling pot and Liona and Torin at the table pretending they were not watching every single second of this.

"Are they having a moment?" Liona whispered. It was not a quiet whisper.

"Shut up," Torin whispered back. Also not quietly.

I looked back at the board.

I handed Rhydor the knife and set another carrot in front of him.

"Try again," I said. "Even pieces."

He looked at the carrot. He positioned the knife the way I had. He pressed down slowly and carefully with the focused concentration of someone defusing something.

The slice came off evenly.

He looked at it.

Something crossed his face that was almost satisfaction. Small and quiet and quickly put away, but it was there for just a second before he moved on to the next one.

I watched him work through two more pieces with that same careful focus and thought about the fact that this man had led a pack through a cursed forest and fought creatures that could not die and carried me on his back for miles with a wound burning through his shoulder and had never once looked uncertain about any of it.

And he was concentrating this hard on a carrot.

The next slice came off slightly uneven. He frowned at it.

Then the knife slipped.

It happened fast and small, the blade catching the side of his finger before either of us registered it was happening. He made no sound. He did not flinch or pull back or do anything that acknowledged it at all. He just stopped cutting and looked down at his hand.

Blood welled up from the cut on his finger. A clean line. Not deep. But bleeding properly.

I moved before I thought about it.

I grabbed his hand. I looked at the cut for half a second. And then I put his finger in my mouth.

The kitchen went completely silent.

I mean completely. The pot on the stove had stopped hissing. Liona had stopped making sounds. Torin had lifted his face from his hands for the first time since I had come around the corner. Everyone was looking at me.

Including Rhydor.

He was looking down at me with an expression I did not have a word for. Not the flat Alpha face. Not the confused carrot face. Something else entirely. Something that was very still and very focused and was looking at me like I had just done something that required his complete and undivided attention.

I became aware of what I was doing.

Slowly and all at once at the same time.

I dropped his hand.

I stepped back from the counter. I did not look at anyone. I did not look at Liona, whom I could feel without seeing, was doing something with her face that was going to haunt me. I did not look at Torin. I absolutely did not look at Rhydor.

I turned.

I walked out of the kitchen.

I walked through the sitting room.

I pushed open the door to the outside and stepped into the morning air, let it hit my face, and kept walking until I was far enough from the door that nobody inside could see me clearly.

Then I stood there. In the morning light. With my hand pressed over my face.

What have I done.