Chapter 144: The Cake

Reed Ashwood

~a day before the presentation~

Sleep wouldn’t come. I lay staring at the ceiling long after the apartment had gone quiet, aware of every small sound drifting from the direction of Astrid’s room, her breathing steady and even through the thin wall between us. A few weeks ago, that sound hadn’t existed at all. A few weeks ago, I hadn’t known if I’d ever hear it again.

The academy felt different now that she was actually here, walking its halls, sitting through lectures, arguing with Xander over trivial things. I kept catching myself remembering those weeks when we hadn’t known where she was, hadn’t known if she was even alive, and something in my chest still tightened whenever the memory surfaced uninvited. Now she was sleeping safely a few rooms away, and that alone made everything feel lighter than it had in longer than I wanted to admit.

Xander’s door creaked open down the hall, and a moment later he appeared in my doorway, clearly no more capable of sleep than I was.

"You’re still awake," he said, not really a question.

"So are you."

He came in and sat on the edge of my bed without waiting for an invitation. "I keep checking on her," he admitted. "Every hour or so. Some part of me still expects to walk in and find her gone."

"I know the feeling," I said.

Neither of us needed to elaborate further. The weight of everything we’d been through sat between us without requiring words, understood completely in the shared silence.

"We should do something for them," I said eventually. "Both of them."

"Buy them something?"

"No," I said. "We should throw them a party."

Xander stared at me for a long moment, something between disbelief and genuine surprise crossing his face. "You suggested a party."

"Is that so unusual?"

"You’re the student council president who color-codes his schedule," he said. "Forgive me for being stunned that you’ve developed a social life."

"Do you want to help plan it or not?"

"Obviously I want to help," he said, already sitting up straighter, enthusiasm replacing his earlier teasing. "Decorations, food, everyone who searched for them. It has to be a surprise."

"Agreed," I said. "But we have a problem."

"What problem?"

"The cake," I said. "If we order one to bring here, Astrid will smell it the moment we’re anywhere near the building. Her senses have gotten sharper since Elaris."

Xander’s face lit up with an idea I already suspected I wasn’t going to like. "We bake it ourselves."

"Neither of us has ever baked anything in our lives."

"How hard can it be?"

I gave him a long, doubtful look, but he was already planning, and short of physically stopping him, there was no talking him out of it now.

We found a bakery willing to let us use their kitchen after hours, the staff understandably stunned when two Lycan princes walked in requesting access rather than simply ordering a finished product. The manager blinked at us for a full ten seconds before finally agreeing, mostly, I suspected, out of sheer curiosity about what exactly we intended to do.

"What flavor?" Xander asked, already pulling ingredients from shelves with more confidence than the situation warranted.

"Something they’ll actually enjoy," I said. "Not something extravagant just to impress people."

"Where’s the fun in that?"

"Astrid doesn’t need fun. She needs something familiar."

"You know her preferences suspiciously well," Xander said, raising an eyebrow.

"She’s my mate too, Xander."

"She’s my mate as well," he said, "and I know exactly what she likes. I just want the cake to look impressive, not depressingly plain."

We argued through several flavors before finally settling on something we both agreed the girls would genuinely enjoy, a compromise that took longer than it probably should have given we were discussing cake rather than anything of actual consequence.

The actual baking process proved far more complicated than either of us anticipated. I followed the recipe with the same precision I brought to everything else, measuring ingredients carefully, timing each step exactly as instructed. Xander abandoned measurements entirely within the first ten minutes.

"You’re supposed to measure that," I said, watching him dump an unmeasured amount of sugar directly into the bowl.

"I can feel the right amount," he said.

"That’s not how baking works."

"It’s basically the same principle as cooking."

"You’ve never cooked anything really good either."

He ignored me, and a few minutes later the batter came out noticeably too sweet, which he blamed entirely on the recipe rather than his own approach.

"The recipe is clearly wrong," he said.

"The recipe is standard. You added twice the required sugar."

"Details."

Flour ended up across the counter, across my shirt, and somehow across Xander’s face despite him standing nowhere near where I’d been measuring, and we spent several minutes arguing over whose fault that particular mess actually was before finally settling into something quieter as the cake went into the oven.

"I’m glad she’s sleeping peacefully tonight," Xander said, leaning against the counter, some of his earlier energy settling into something more sincere.

"So am I," I said.

"We came so close to never finding her."

"I know."

Neither of us dwelled on it further than that. I simply wanted her to have something normal waiting for her, something joyful after everything she’d survived, and saying as much felt like enough without needing to unpack every fear we’d carried during those weeks she’d been gone.

"I want her to have something good to come back to," I said. "Both of them, actually. Ivy deserves this too."

"Agreed," Xander said, and for once, neither of us argued about anything further.

Once the cake had cooled enough to decorate, Xander immediately proposed something elaborate, multiple tiers, decorative flourishes that would have taken hours we didn’t have. I vetoed it, insisting on something simple that actually reflected what this celebration was meant to represent.

We settled on writing their names across the top, Welcome Home, Astrid and Ivy, in careful, if slightly uneven, lettering. Xander added a small decorative flourish near the edge without telling me first, and when I noticed it, I let it stay, something about the imperfection of it feeling appropriate rather than needing correction.

The bakery staff gathered near the kitchen doorway as we finished, staring at the result with expressions somewhere between amusement and disbelief.

"Who exactly are these girls?" one of the employees asked quietly to another, not quite quiet enough that I didn’t catch it.

"Whoever they are," the other replied, "they must be important."

I didn’t correct them. They were important, more important than either of them likely understood.

I looked at the finished cake, imagining Astrid’s face when she saw it, and realized, for the first time in longer than I could remember, that I wasn’t thinking about protecting her from anything at all. I was simply looking forward to making her smile.

"You think she’ll like it?" Xander asked, studying our work with something between pride and nervousness.

"She’ll like that we tried," I said.

We carried the cake carefully out of the bakery, ready to surprise both girls with something we’d built entirely with our own clumsy, well-intentioned hands.