Chapter 1

Wren's POV

The bell over Maison Bellerose's door was still swinging when I felt the room shift, the way a kitchen goes quiet right before something boils over. I hadn't even tied my apron. My name tag was still in my pocket. And already the morning had that particular, familiar taste in the air burnt sugar and bad news.

Lysandra Marrow held court at the corner table, gold hair catching the light like she'd arranged the sun around herself on purpose, her eyes bright with the kind of glee that only ever meant someone else was about to bleed for her entertainment.

Beside her sat a man I half-recognized from Court functions Foster Grey, a low-ranking cousin of some minor house, the sort who spent his whole life standing two steps behind real power and calling it belonging. He was red-faced already, chest puffed, working himself up to something.

"This is unacceptable," Foster snapped, not at Lysandra, at me. "Do you people not understand what a proper temperature is?"

I hadn't clocked in yet. My hands were still cold from the walk over.

"Sir"

"Don't sir me." He shoved his cup an inch across the table, coffee sloshing over the rim. "She asked for it hot. This is lukewarm garbage. Is that supposed to be some kind of statement?"

"I just walked in," I said, and I heard how flat my own voice came out, worn thin before the day had even started. "I haven't touched an order yet. If something's wrong, it happened before my shift."

Lysandra turned her cup slowly on its saucer, watching me over the rim of it like I was a show she'd paid good money for. This made four times this month she'd walked a new man in here just to watch him perform outrage on her behalf. It was cheaper than therapy and twice as satisfying, apparently, reminding the Emberless orphan exactly where she ranked.

"Careful," she said softly, almost sweetly. "Foster doesn't like being corrected."

"I'm not correcting him. I'm telling him the truth."

"Are you arguing with me?" Foster's voice climbed, loud enough now that two human regulars by the window looked up from their pastries with the specific, uncomfortable curiosity of people who sense a scene but don't yet know its shape.

"I'm answering you," I said. "There's a difference."

That was the wrong thing to say to a man like Foster. Men with no real standing in the Court hierarchy always spent the hardest on the one target they were legally permitted to spend it on someone with no Ember, no house, no one who'd raise a hand in her defense.

"You've got some mouth on you for something that can't even shift," he said, and then his hand was already moving, closing around the pitcher of steamed milk beside his cup.

I saw it coming the way you see weather coming too late to do anything but brace. It hit me full in the face, scalding, and for one white second the whole world was just heat and the smell of burnt milk and my own voice tearing out of me before I'd decided to scream at all.

I stumbled into the pastry case, one hand slapped over my eyes, my skin already tightening under the burn like something trying to shrink away from itself.

"Oh Wren!" Lysandra was on her feet, all performance, smoothing her skirt like she hadn't orchestrated the whole thing from the first sip of coffee. "Foster, honestly, that was excessive. I told you I didn't mind if it was a little cool."

Then, low, just for me, under the sound of my own ragged breathing: "Careful, honey. Steam's not a good look on Emberless skin. Though I suppose it's an improvement."

My hands wanted to become something they weren't built to become. I wanted to feel my bones rearrange and my nails turn to claws and tear that smile clean off her face but I knew exactly what that fantasy cost. Her father ran the Second's office. If I so much as raised my voice to her here, I'd be explaining myself to Garrick Marrow by sundown, and explaining myself to Garrick Marrow never ended with me walking out the same way I walked in.

"Get back." Tobias was suddenly there, an arm braced across my shoulders, steering me half a step away from the counter's edge. He smelled like flour and, underneath it, like the kind of calm that didn't come from not being angry it came from choosing not to show it yet.

"She's fine," Lysandra said, voice sliding back into its polished, public register. "Little accident. These things happen."

"An accident doesn't come out of a full pitcher," Tobias said, and there was nothing easy in his tone now. He was already pressing a bar towel, wrung out under the tap, against the side of my face. "I made that order myself twenty minutes ago. It was hot enough to strip paint, and he let it sit there while he talked about himself instead of drinking it. I'm calling this in."

The word in landed on the table like a dropped tray.

"Now let's not be dramatic," Lysandra said, eyes narrowing just slightly, the only honest thing about her face in the whole exchange. "Wren doesn't want a report filed. Do you, Wren? Think about how complicated that gets for everyone."

I knew exactly what shape that complication would take. I'd worn it before.

Then, from a booth near the window, a voice cut clean through the noise a stranger, phone already in her ear.

"Yes, hi, I need to report an assault. A man just threw scalding milk on an employee at Maison Bellerose. Please send someone."

Something cold dropped through my chest. A human woman doing the decent thing, and it was going to cost me everything downstream of it. Lysandra's face didn't so much fall as rearrange, the pleasant mask slipping just enough to show the thing underneath it, fixed now on the woman with the phone.

"Kitchen," Tobias said quietly, already moving me. "Now."

He got me past the swinging door before Lysandra's temper found its next target, filled a mixing bowl with cold water at the prep sink, and didn't wait for permission before pushing my face down into it.

"Hold still. If that sugar sits in your pores it'll blister worse than the burn."

The cold hit like a second shock, but underneath it, something in my chest finally unclenched by half an inch.

"They're going to want a statement from you," Tobias said, handing me a clean apron for the ruined one.

I straightened, blinking water out of my eyes, my skin still furious and tight along one cheek.

"I can't give one, Tobias. If I put my name on paper against a man Lysandra brought here on purpose, Garrick will make sure I regret it. He always does."

"You can't keep taking this," Tobias said, though even he didn't sound like he believed there was another option on the table.

"I just need to get through today," I said. "Help me clean up before the morning rush finds out there's a scene to gossip about. I can't afford to lose the tips."

I caught my reflection in the steel of the walk-in door skin blotched red along one side, eyes still stinging, and underneath all of it, something steady looking back that hadn't broken yet. They could scold me. They could not have that.

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