"Tomorrow, 08:00 at the fountain square," Liam said, at the crossroads where the inner district met the residential streets, to Mirra and Rogue, who had the look of people who had already accepted their fate. "We’re hitting the Sunken Gardens before the Catacombs. I need the legendary basil. If the Lich’s rot scent touches the meat, the whole roast is ruined."

Mirra leaned on her staff and looked at him the way she looked at her step-kids when they announced a plan she had no power to stop. "We don’t have a choice in this, do we?"

"No," Liam said.

"Thought so." She pushed off the staff and turned. "Try not to break any more pillars before breakfast, Chef."

Rogue gave a two-finger salute. "Later, Big Guy. I’m going to go find a height booster that isn’t under your boot." He disappeared into the crowd at the pace of someone who had already spotted a target.

Mirra followed, and Liam turned toward the townhouse, and Elizabeth fell into step beside him the way she had been falling into step beside him for the last six days, close enough that their arms nearly touched, far enough that she could claim it was coincidental if anyone asked.

She was stealing glances at his profile. She thought she was being subtle about it. She was not being subtle about it.

At the front door, Liam stopped and looked down at her, which required her to tilt her head back at an angle that had become familiar, and he reached out with his gauntlet, surprisingly careful for something that weighed as much as it did, and tucked a loose strand of pink hair behind her cat ear.

"You did well today," he said, his voice dropping into the lower register it went to when he wasn’t performing for a room. "The Iron Hearth is a circus, and those Ruby Eye idiots are worse. Thanks for holding the line i don’t think I’d want anyone else next to me in there."

Elizabeth’s cardiovascular system filed an incident report.

Her face went the specific shade of red that started at the neck and moved upward with no intention of stopping, and her tail froze, and then resumed at approximately twice its previous speed, and she opened her mouth and produced no words because all available processing power had been redirected.

Liam felt something flicker in his chest that wasn’t the Hearth, something warmer and less categorised, and looked at her wide, shimmering eyes for one unguarded second before his practical brain slammed on the brakes with both feet. Party member, he thought firmly. Vital asset you need to ocus. He pulled his hand back. "Go inside. You need rest if you’re carrying supply bags tomorrow." He went to check the kitchen inventory.

Elizabeth walked through the door and kept walking until she hit the bed and sat down on it with the expression of someone whose operating system had encountered a critical error and was rebooting. He said no one else, she thought, staring at the wall. He tucked my hair. He touched my ear. We are basically engaged. I need to think about venue options.

She picked up her rapier and started polishing it without looking at it, which meant she was mostly polishing the same three inches of blade repeatedly, and the shower started running in the background, and she polished the same three inches some more.

The shower stopped.

The bathroom door opened.

Liam walked out with a dark towel hitched low on his hips and nothing else, still dripping, water tracking down the jagged scars on his shoulders and following the geometry of his torso in a way that the lighting in the room had absolutely no business making look like that, and he ran a hand through his silver hair slicking it back from his eyes without looking up and walked toward the kitchen to get water because to him this was a completely normal sequence of events.

Elizabeth stopped polishing hell she stopped breathing. She stopped, as best anyone could tell, existing as a functional person.

Liam got his water. Took a slow pull. Let his eyes drift around the room with the mild curiosity of someone checking whether anything needed to be done before bed, and found Elizabeth sitting on the edge of the mattress with her mouth open, her ears flat against her skull, her tail a downed power line, and her face a colour that the system had not bothered to assign a name to because it had not anticipated this use case.

"What?" Liam said.

Elizabeth produced a sound. It was not a word. It was a high-pitched syllable that began somewhere in the back of her throat and did not successfully become language before it gave up.

"Is there something on my face?" Liam said, checking with his free hand.

"Wh," Elizabeth said. "Wh. W-w-what are you?" She stopped. Restarted. "What are you DOING?"

Liam looked down at himself, looked back at her, and arrived at no useful conclusions. "Getting water i just washed the fox boss scent off. Why are you making that face?"

He took another drink, his throat moving, and Elizabeth’s eyes tracked this with the precise involuntary attention of someone watching a car crash in very slow motion, and she gripped the rapier with both hands and stared at a fixed point on the wall behind him with the focused desperation of a person trying to remember what words were.

"Go to sleep," Liam said, already turning back toward the bedroom. "You’re acting weird. Probably the mana-drain from the feast."

He disappeared to change, the door closing behind him, and Elizabeth remained exactly where she was for a full ten seconds before slowly lying sideways onto the mattress and pulling the blanket entirely over her head until she was a small pink-haired lump with a tail sticking out of the end, thumping against the mattress in a rhythm that had no intention of slowing down.

Under the blanket, in the dark, her brain played back the water droplets on his shoulders at full resolution then played it back again.

She was not going to sleep at all.

The basil, she thought desperately, trying to redirect. Tomorrow. The Sunken Gardens. The Catacombs be professional and tactical. Party member.

The blanket thumped.

He said no one else.

The blanket thumped faster. 𝙛𝓻𝒆𝒆𝒘𝙚𝓫𝙣𝙤𝒗𝙚𝓵.𝙘𝙤𝙢

She squeezed her eyes shut, pulling the shared blanket up to her nose, her tail thumping frantically against the mattress in a rhythm that echoed her heart. She didn’t sleep a wink. Every time she finally started to drift, her brain replayed the way the water droplets had trailed down his back in 4K resolution, and she was wide awake again, screaming internally into her pillow.

[Tool Tip]:

Streaming Special Feature: [The Chef’s POV]

When Liam is cooking or preparing ingredients, the node switches to Macro-Focus Mode. It captures the sizzle of the meat and the precision of his knife work in such high detail that viewers claim they can "smell the mana" through their screens.

Ellie is Delulu