She had dried her waist-length black hair until it hung in soft, damp waves down her back, dark as spun obsidian against her skin.
Without the structural tailoring of her blazer, the heavy drape of her wool trench coat, or the combat boots, she looked remarkably young, a twenty-year-old girl whose natural, striking beauty was unmarred by the harshness of the world.
Her skin was luminous and clear, her obsidian eyes calm and clear beneath her arched brows.
Yet, Noah’s sharp, observant gaze immediately caught the detail of her attire.
Despite the air-conditioned coolness of the bedroom, Celeste had not changed into the light, breathable cotton sleep-shirts or short-sleeved pajama sets typical of capital girls in the middle of July.
Instead, she wore a high-collared, long-sleeved, dark charcoal silk pajama set that she had unpacked from her tactical bag.
The collar rose stiffly to the base of her throat, buttoned to the very top; the sleeves extended all the way to her wrists, neatly concealing every inch of her forearms; and the trousers fell smoothly to her ankles, leaving only her bare, pale feet exposed to the air.
Noah tilted his head, his small brow furrowing with a flicker of child-like curiosity.
‘Is Sister cold?’ the little boy wondered silently, his eyes tracking the high collar of her dark silk shirt.
‘The air conditioner is only set to twenty-three degrees.
When Rosalle or Mother sleep, they always wear those light silk dresses with no sleeves because they say the summer heat makes their skin feel tight.
Why is Sister wearing clothes that look like they could be worn outside in autumn?
Is the fabric of her shirt breathable enough?
He opened his mouth, on the verge of asking if she wanted him to raise the room temperature or fetch a lighter set of cotton pajamas from the linen closet.
Then, he stopped.
Noah might have been only ten years old, and he might have spent his life sheltered behind the walls of his books and his quiet isolation, but his intuition regarding human emotional boundaries was extraordinarily acute.
He looked at the serene, composed expression on Noah’s face; he looked at the deliberate, careful way she had buttoned the cuffs of her sleeves.
A quiet maturity settled into the little boy’s chest.
He remembered the stories his father had told him, about how his sister had been taken away when she was only nine, how she had grown up in a distant, unfamiliar boarding school without her parents there to buy her clothes or comfort her when she was sad.
Maybe she was used to sleeping in clothes that covered her entirely because she had never felt completely safe in those foreign dormitories.
Maybe those long sleeves were her armor, just like his books and his silence had been his armor against Rosalle’s secret bullying for the past three years.
‘Good brothers do not ask questions that make their sister feel awkward,’ Noah decided with his internal resolution.
‘If Sister likes wearing long sleeves, then long sleeves are the best pajamas in the world.
If she feels warm later, I will just quietly turn the air conditioner down two degrees while she is sleeping so she doesn’t wake up sweating.’
He closed his astronomy book with a soft thud, set it onto the reading table, and slid off the sofa, trotting over to the large queen-sized bed in the center of the room.
He grabbed the corner of the thick, pristine white cotton quilt and pulled it back, patting the mattress with his hand.
“The bed is ready, Sister,” Noah said brightly, his voice devoid of his previous questioning curiosity.
“I put my extra pillow over there on the sofa. The velvet cushions are very wide, so I won’t roll off in the middle of the night. You can have the whole mattress to yourself so you can stretch your legs out.”
Celeste stopped in the center of the room, her towel hanging loosely around her shoulders.
She looked at the massive queen-sized bed, a mattress wide enough to comfortably accommodate three full-grown men, and then looked at the ten-year-old boy preparing to exile himself to a reading sofa to give her space.
A soft, amused chuckle escaped her lips.
Without warning, Celeste closed the distance between them with two smooth, silent strides.
Before Noah could even register her movement, she reached down, her hands slipping beneath his arms, and effortlessly lifted the thirty-five-pound boy into the air as if he were a fluffy kitten.
“Wah! Sister!” Noah squeaked, his legs kicking harmlessly in the air as he suddenly found himself elevated four feet off the floor.
“Your sleep planning is faulty, Fourth Brother,” Celeste said, her dark eyes dancing with dry, teasing warmth as she swung him over the edge of the mattress and deposited him directly into the dead center of the plush white bedsheets.
“You are ten years old and possess the physical mass of a standard field pack. This mattress is five feet wide. Even if I were to execute full-body defensive rolls during my REM cycle, there would still be two feet of surplus territorial buffer between us.”
She leaned over him, her high-collared charcoal silk shirt rustling softly, tapping one finger gently against his nose.
“Furthermore, you are my biological baby brother. In what universe does an elder sister seize a ten-year-old child’s bed and force him to sleep on a sofa in his own room? You will sleep on the right flank. I will occupy the left flank. That is an order.”
Noah blinked up at her from the center of the soft pillows, his cheeks turning a bright, happy shade of pink at the sudden physical closeness.
In his entire life, no one had ever tossed him onto a bed or teased him with such casual, effortless affection.