Kaelith woke up with her neck bent at an angle that felt personally insulting.
For one long, stupid second she had no idea where she was.
There was velvet under one arm, a blanket half sliding off her legs, and a thin line of silver moonlight cutting across the floor from Aliyah’s balcony doors.
The room smelled faintly of candle wax, perfume, and the remains of the wine she had very heroically consumed in the name of emotional support.
Then memory slammed back in.
Aliyah’s room.
Aliyah’s tiny sofa.
Her own brilliant plan to explain her catastrophic marriage situation, drink through the conversation, and absolutely not fall asleep like a disgraced aunt at a winter reception.
“Fuck,” she muttered, sitting up too fast.
The room was quiet now.
Very quiet.
Aliyah and Neris were nowhere in sight, which meant they had either gone to bed or decided Kaelith snoring lightly on expensive furniture was a problem best left to sort itself out.
That felt fair.
Kaelith rubbed both hands over her face and squinted toward the clock on the mantel.
Three in the fucking morning.
She stared.
Then louder, with genuine outrage this time, “Fuck, I missed dinner.”
The word echoed softly off Aliyah’s pretty walls and disappeared into the rich quiet of the sleeping castle.
Kaelith dropped her head back against the sofa and glared at the ceiling like it had arranged this.
Dinner.
Her first proper evening in the castle after bringing home a politically inconvenient elf wife, and she had slept through it in Aliyah’s room like an overgrown cat with bad coping mechanisms.
Then again…
Maybe that was good.
Actually, yes.
Maybe that was excellent.
Irielle had probably noticed she never showed up.
She had probably sat there all elegant and cold and silently judged Kaelith for vanishing on the first night.
Good.
Perfect.
Let her think Kaelith was a jerk.
Let her think living with her would be unbearable.
That was the plan anyway.
Make the little ice-princess miserable enough to beg for a divorce.
Missing dinner was practically strategic genius.
Kaelith narrowed her eyes at the ceiling.
She was choosing to remember it that way.
Her stomach made a low, offended sound.
Right.
Strategy was lovely.
She was also starving.
Slowly, with the dramatic suffering of a woman who had paid dearly for three glasses of wine and a terrible sofa, Kaelith got to her feet.
Her hair was a mess, one sleeve had wrinkled under her, and her mouth tasted like old wine and regret.
She looked around Aliyah’s room, found a glass of water on the side table that had absolutely not been there before, and smiled despite herself. Visit novelping.com for the full chapter.
Aliyah.
Kaelith drank it in three quick swallows, muttered a curse at how dry her throat was, then headed for the balcony instead of bothering with the halls.
The night outside was cool, the sky deep and clear, stars sharp above the Celestian towers.
Teleporting with a slight hangover was usually a terrible idea.
Kaelith did it anyway.
Magic rose under her skin with familiar heat, a quick gathering of force and intention.
The air bent.
The balcony blurred.
A heartbeat later she reappeared on a high terrace of the demon castle with enough grace to almost make it look planned.
Almost.
She caught herself against the stone railing and exhaled through her teeth.
“Still got it.”
The terrace around her was quiet, bathed in blue-black moonlight.
Below, the castle slept in layers instead of silence.
Demon castles were never truly silent.
Somewhere far below, a guard laughed softly at something.
A door shut.
Wind moved through the banners.
Warm light glowed in a few high windows where insomniacs, lovers, or overworked officials still lived against the hour.
Kaelith knew exactly where she wanted to go.
The kitchen.
Not the formal banquet kitchens in the east wing, where everything became polished nonsense the moment nobles got involved.
No.
She meant the real kitchen.
The one that smelled like bread even at indecent hours, where cooks bullied each other with affection and knives, and where there was always, always something good hidden somewhere if one knew how to look.
She slipped through the corridors in boots softer on the stone than they had any right to be, one hand running through her hair again as she walked.
The castle at night felt different from the day.
Wider somehow.
More honest.
Sconces threw warm pools of light over dark walls.
Carpets softened the long halls.
Her own footsteps, for once, had space to think around them.
And annoyingly enough, her thoughts wandered back to dinner.
Not the dinner itself.
She had not been there.
But the idea of it.
Irielle seated at the family table for the first time.
Malvoria being terrible in a charming way.
Elysia being warm enough to confuse gods and enemies alike.
Ruby and Violet talking too much.
A nd Irielle, somewhere in the middle of that, trying to pretend she was perfectly composed while internally calculating seventeen escape routes.
Kaelith snorted under her breath.
Good. New chapters come out on g.com first.
Let her suffer.
Then a traitorous second thought followed close behind:
Did she?
Kaelith scowled at nothing in particular.
No.
She was not going to start imagining the emotional state of the woman who helped trick her into marriage.
That way lay weakness, softness, and perhaps even conversation.
She rejected all three on principle.
The smell hit her first when she turned the last corner.
Fresh bread.
Melted butter.
Something savory with herbs.
Something sweet too, maybe honey.
Her stomach woke up with violent enthusiasm.
“Yes,” Kaelith whispered to the empty hall.
The kitchen doors stood slightly open.
Light spilled through the crack, warm and golden against the darker corridor.
Kaelith reached them with the quiet confidence of a woman returning to a beloved shrine and pushed one door inward just enough to slide through.
Then stopped.
What the actual hell.
The kitchen was awake.
Not fully, not in the broad roaring way of daytime.
This was the softer version of life after midnight, where only a few lamps burned and most of the worktables lay clean and quiet.
A pot simmered low on one side.
Bread cooled on racks.
Someone had left out figs, nuts, and half a wheel of soft cheese beside a carving board.
And seated right there at the central table, as if this were the most natural thing in the world, were Ruby, Violet, and Irielle.
For one stupid second, Kaelith honestly wondered if the wine had come back to haunt her.
Ruby was halfway through what looked like a second pastry and talking with her mouth full.
Violet had one elbow on the table and the expression of a woman pretending she wasn’t just as delighted as her sister to be awake at three in the morning causing problems.
And Irielle…
Irielle sat between them with a plate in front of her and her pale hair loose now, falling over one shoulder in a way that hit Kaelith square in the chest for reasons she rejected immediately.
She was not wearing formal dinner composure anymore either.
She still held herself neatly, of course, because apparently even sleep deprivation and political exile couldn’t fully dislodge that, but something had softened around the edges.
Worse, she looked comfortable.
Or near enough to it that Kaelith could not dismiss it at a glance.
Ruby was in the middle of saying something dramatic when Violet noticed Kaelith first.
Her silver brows rose.
Ruby twisted around.
Then both of them grinned with synchronized shamelessness.
Irielle turned last.
Her green eyes landed on Kaelith across the warm-lit kitchen.
And Kaelith, standing there half rumpled, hungry, and suddenly far more awake than she had been one breath earlier, could only think:
Why the fuck are they having a snack together at three in the morning?