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The rich aroma of Andoral’s Breath filled his apartment. Lucanis poured two cups, the familiar morning ritual a comfort. He’d made this exact blend for Rook and himself dozens of times—left it steaming outside her quarters the mornings before difficult missions, watched her nurse the mug during strategy meetings, so involved in planning that she would forget to take a sip. Even ordered it for her at Café Pietra that first night.
He walked back into his bedroom, where Rook was already up and waiting in his bed. She accepted the coffee with a grateful murmur, her frame swimming in his shirt, blanket gathered around her waist. The morning light traced her profile, and Lucanis allowed himself the quiet pleasure of looking without pretending he wasn’t—a reality he was still adjusting to.
As she brought the cup to her lips, he watched. Watched her take a long sip.
Then watched her face contort.
The expression lasted only a fraction of a second—a tightening around her eyes, a barely perceptible grimace—before she smoothed it into something resembling appreciation. However, Lucanis had spent months studying every nuance of her features. Had memorized the way her brow furrowed when she concentrated, the exact curve of her smile when she found something genuinely amusing versus politely entertaining.
Another small sip followed by a furrow of her brow.
“You hate it,” he stated matter-of-factly.
“What? No.” Rook sipped the coffee once more, her throat working as she swallowed. The grimace returned, although just as quickly suppressed. “It’s perfect. Thank you.”
“Rook.” He tried his best to not sound completely exasperated.
She blushed in turn. “Lucanis.”
He plucked the cup from her hands, ignoring her noise of protest. The coffee sloshed as he set it aside, dark and bitter and apparently disliked. “You’ve been drinking black coffee since we met. At the Lighthouse. At Café Pietra. Every morning that I left a cup outside your door—”
The words caught as realization washed over him.
Every morning, for weeks. Before they spent nights that bled into mornings together. He’d risen before everyone else woke—if he’d even slept—and would brew coffee, leaving a cup piping fresh on her threshold before retreating back to the pantry. It had been the only language he’d trusted himself to speak, back then. Something nice and warm, left where she’d find it without him having to watch her face and wonder if it was enough. He’d imagined her finding it, wrapping her hands around the ceramic, perhaps smiling at his kind gesture.
Meirda, this woman.
“You ordered it black that first night at Café Pietra,” he repeated, the memory crystallizing. That night now felt like a lifetime ago: her laughing across the table, the wyvern dagger she’d gifted him, the way the lanterns made her hair look like the finest of Antivan reds. “I remember because—I took note—I thought it was your favorite.”
Rook’s cheek flushed a vivid hue, nearly competing with her hair. She pulled the blanket higher, suddenly fascinated by the weave of the fabric. “You drink it black.”
“Months of coffee you hate.” He stood abruptly, pacing the small space—not out of anger, but because the enormity of it needed room. Months. She’d drunk his coffee for months and never once let on, and he didn’t know whether to be exasperated or undone by that. “Why?”
She tugged his shirt tighter around herself. “Because you made it for me.”
The confession stopped him mid-stride. He looked at her, dumbfounded.
A gentle smile crossed her face. “That first morning, after Weisshaupt… I was drowning.” Her voice softened. “Couldn’t bring myself to eat, couldn’t sleep without seeing everyone we’d lost. Then you left coffee outside my door, and I knew that was your way of reaching out to me. Of saying you were there for me.”
Lucanis caught her hands, running his thumb across her knuckles—a gesture that had become second nature, this tenderness he’d never known he was capable of until she’d coaxed it out of him. “All this time. All those mornings—”
Rook laughed, that bright chime he could never grow tired of hearing. “All those mornings, you showed me I wasn’t alone. That was worth a thousand cups of black coffee.”
He shook his head, a sound escaping him that was almost a laugh, disbelief and warmth tangling together. She’d suffered through his coffee as if it were some sacred obligation, and she’d done it with a straight face. For months.
He was in love with a madwoman.
“Rook.” He reached up, hands gently caressing her cheeks as he tilted her face towards his. Those lavender eyes held a mix of embarrassment and defiance, and the combination was so perfectly, impossibly her that his chest ached. “What is your actual favorite?”
She held his gaze for a long moment, an internal battle playing behind her eyes. Then her shoulders dropped. “Cioccolata calda.”
Lucanis blinked. “Cioccolata calda?”
“It’s not—” She pulled back slightly, defensive. “It’s sophisticated. With dark chocolate and the—it’s not childish, if that’s what you were thinking.”
He wasn’t thinking that at all. He was thinking of how much he’d enjoyed cioccolata calda as a kid, with a plate of churros. He was thinking about Rook’s sweet tooth, the way she’d devoured Bellara’s honeycakes and lingered over the pastry counter at every café they’d visited. A dozen tiny details he’d filed away without realizing he was building a map of her.
Rook was a territory he was still learning. He suspected he could spend a lifetime at it and never run out of new ground. Forever his wonder. The thought didn’t frighten him like it used to.
“Stay here.” He kissed the corner of her mouth—quick, easy, the kind of kiss that belonged to people who had long since stopped counting them. “I’ll be back.”
She made a questioning sound, still wrapped in his blanket and looking entirely too appealing with her sleep-mussed hair. He pressed a second kiss to her forehead simply because he could,because that was the extraordinary, mundane miracle of this—that he was allowed—and then padded toward the kitchen.
The apartment’s modest cooking space held more than most would expect from a safe house. Lucanis had stocked it carefully over the years, with everything from dried goods and preserved meats to small luxuries: dark chocolate from Antiva City, cinnamon from Rivain. And thankfully, some fresh cream he’d purchased just yesterday, though he hadn’t consciously planned for this moment.
Perhaps some part of him had always hoped.
He heated the milk slowly, then added the chopped dark chocolate, mixing together until the mixture became the proper color and consistency. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d prepared the drink, but the motions had come back easily enough. Cooking had always been his escape and required the same focus as blade work, the same dedication to craft.
The churros, however, would be trickier. He hadn’t made them in years, not since Caterina had banned him from the villa’s kitchen so that he could focus more on Crow training. Muscle memory thankfully guided his hands as he mixed the dough, the familiar motions grounding him the way repetition always did.
Oil sizzled in the pan as he piped the dough in carefully, watching them turn golden, and the apartment filled with the scent of frying dough and cinnamon sugar.
“You’re spoiling me.”
Lucanis looked up from the stove.
Rook stood in the doorway, his shirt hanging to mid-thigh, bare feet on the floorboards. Her hair fell in soft waves around her shoulders, and the morning light caught her in a way that made the whole room rearrange itself around her—as if she were the fixed point everything else revolved around.
His heart tightened at the sight, with the quiet, staggering arithmetic of a man trying to account for how his life had led him here, and made himself focus, very deliberately, on not burning the churros. “Sit.” He nodded toward the small table by the window. “Almost ready.”
She perched on one of the chairs, watching him work. The cioccolata calda had come together perfectly, rich and thick enough that you could almost stand a spoon in it. He poured it into two cups, then plated the fresh churros with more care than he’d given most contracts, dusting the cinnamon sugar just so, not bothering to pretend he wasn’t fussing.
After all, Rook deserved fussing.
“Here.” He set everything before her, dusting the churros with an extra sprinkle of cinnamon sugar. “Proper Antivan breakfast.”
Rook lifted the cup first, inhaling deeply. Her first sip drew a sound of pure contentment out of her, something Lucanis wanted to bottle up and keep forever. “Maker, that’s perfect.”
“Better than black coffee?” Lucanis quipped.
“Infinitely.” She reached for a churro, still warm from the oil. “Though I maintain that I would have learned to like—”
The words died as she bit into the pastry. For a moment, she simply chewed, her expression unreadable. Then her eyes welled with tears.
“Rook? What’s wrong?” Lucanis half-rose from his chair, alarmed, having no idea what could be wrong with the churros. Had someone slipped into his safehouse at some point? Poisoned his pantry? Rook was a de Riva—she would know immediately, right? “Is it—did I—”
She shook her head violently, swallowing hard. Tears tracked down her cheeks as she clutched the half-eaten churro. “There was a vendor.” Her voice came out rough. “In Antiva City. Old man, terrible scar across his jaw. He made churros every day.”
Lucanis sank back into his seat, struck with silence. He knew that tone by now—the careful, brittle modulation of her voice when she was offering a piece of her life before the Crows.
“I was… After my family, I lived on the streets for years. Before Viago found me.” She took another bite, tears still falling. “Food was hard to find. Every evening, just before he closed, he’d make on extra batch. Set them on the corner of his counter and turn his back to pack up his supplies. Told the air that churros left overnight attracted rats. That he’d hate to throw away perfectly good food. Those churros became my only reliable meal.”
The image formed in Lucanis’s mind with devastating clarity: a girl too young to be alone, too proud to beg, watching from the shadows, surviving on the quiet mercy of a stranger who’d had the grace to pretend he wasn’t being kind. This girl who’d clawed her way from the streets into becoming one of the most formidable Crows in Antiva. This woman who’d somehow, against every reasonable odd, ended up in his kitchen wearing his shirt and trusting him with the parts of herself she’d never shown anyone else.
What had he ever done, in a life defined by the blood on his hands and the completion of contracts, to earn this?
“I tried to find him,” Rook continued, voice steadier now. “After I became a Crow. Wanted to repay him, thank him, something. But he was gone. His cart was abandoned and I had no way to find him.” She met his eyes, drying the tears on her cheeks with the back of her hand. “These churros taste exactly like his.”
Lucanis picked up another churro, breaking it in half and offering her the larger piece.
Rook accepted it without hesitation, her fingers brushing his in the process. The ease of it staggered him: how she reached for him like it was the simplest thing in the world—as if there had never been a version of their story where he hadn’t pulled back, retreated into himself when she did.
They ate in companionable silence for a moment. Lucanis watched her lick cinnamon sugar from her fingertips and felt the whole of his life rearrange itself into before Rook and after.
“No more black coffee,” he said eventually. “Unless you develop a genuine taste for it.”
Her laugh bubbled up, effervescent as ever. “Deal. But only if you teach me the churro recipe.”
And in the laughter that followed, Lucanis still didn’t know what he’d done to deserve her, even as she sat in his kitchen in his apartment wearing his shirt, eating churros he’d made. He was beginning to suspect that the answer was nothing—that she had chosen him not because he’d earned it but because she’d decided he was worth choosing, and that her certainty was big enough to carry them both until his caught up.
It was catching up now.
He leaned over, pressing a light kiss to her cinnamon sugar-coated lips. “That can be arranged.”