Voren heard her. That much was obvious. He just wasn’t going to answer.

He picked up the menu instead, giving it the kind of focused, unhurried attention that belonged to a man who had unilaterally decided the subject no longer existed and was moving forward accordingly.

His eyes tracked down the laminated page like he was genuinely weighing his options, which under different circumstances, with a different person sitting across from him, might have actually been convincing.

"Dragon stew, Nebula platter, crystal forest salad, volcano dumplings," he told the waiter without looking up, "and the aurora dessert sphere at the end."

Seraphine stared at the side of his face. "You should’ve let me order."

The annoyance in her voice was real, and only partly about the food. He’d dismissed her question with such complete, unrattled composure, hadn’t fumbled, stalled, or even had the decency to pretend he hadn’t heard it.

He’d just decided it didn’t exist anymore and kept moving, and that specific brand of control was somehow worse than if he’d gotten defensive about it. Defensiveness she could work with. But this, she couldn’t.

"You’ve never eaten out here," Voren said, setting the menu down. Reasonable. Patient. Like he genuinely believed he was doing her a favor. "I’ve been here plenty of times with Ravyn, actually so just trust me on this one."

Seraphine rolled her eyes and quietly made herself a promise that she would find something wrong with every single dish. It would’ve been a satisfying plan to hold onto if the food hadn’t arrived looking and smelling exactly the way it did.

The waiters arranged everything across the wide table with practiced efficiency, and the aromas that rose up from the dishes hit her somewhere deep, layered and complex, nothing like anything she could place or compare to something she’d had before.

"Try a little of everything," Voren said, watching her with the faint, knowing patience of someone who had already sat across from this exact reaction before and was in no rush. "Whatever you like most, we can get more of."

She went for the crystal forest salad first. Tall glass bowl, crunchy greens and candied nuts and fruit that caught the light like something cut from gemstone, dry ice mist curling lazily up from the base and dissolving before it reached anything, the whole thing looking like something out of a fairy tale that had figured out its own specific aesthetic and committed to it fully.

She tried one bite. Then another. Her face made a genuine effort to stay neutral about it, but it didn’t quite succeed.

"This is actually incredible," she said. "What is it called?"

"Crystal forest salad." The satisfaction in Voren’s voice was quiet, but it was absolutely there. "Try the others."

He reached for the volcano dumplings. Steamed, stuffed with molten cheese and spiced meat and served on a sizzling stone plate, a thin curl of fragrant heat rising up from the red dipping sauce, and lifted one toward her mouth with the casual, unhesitating ease of someone who simply hadn’t stopped to think about what the gesture looked like from the outside.

What it would read as, to anyone paying attention. His hand moved before the thought did. 𝗳𝚛𝗲𝕖𝕨𝕖𝗯𝚗𝚘𝕧𝕖𝗹.𝗰𝗼𝕞

Seraphine went completely still.

For a moment she didn’t move at all, caught somewhere between the instinct to pull back and the quiet, inconvenient awareness that there was nothing calculated in what he was doing. No play. No angle being worked.

He’d just reached for the food and offered it the way you offer something to someone you’re comfortable with without checking first whether the comfort was mutual yet, without running it through any filter at all.

His wolf was operating somewhere considerably ahead of his brain on this one, and it showed.

She ate from his hand.

And immediately from three different tables, heads went down.

"It’s good," she said, turning back to her plate with considerably more composure than the moment probably warranted. "But I feed myself."

Voren blinked. One clean, sharp recalibration. ’What did you just do?’ he asked internally.

Bloodfang had the grace to sound at least somewhat sheepish about it. ’You were going too slow. I was helping.’

’That is not what it looked like to the room.’

’Her wolf is warming up,’ Bloodfang said, with the serene, unbothered confidence of someone who had already decided the ends more than justified the means. ’You’re welcome.’

’Tell me you’re not flirting with her wolf.’

The silence that came back was not, in any way, reassuring.

Voren looked at Seraphine, past the composed, carefully held surface she was wearing right now, and caught the faint, distracted furrow pulling at the space between her brows.

The particular kind of furrow that meant her attention had gone somewhere internal. Her wolf was talking to her. He was almost certain of it now, and whatever was being said wasn’t simple.

He let his gaze drift around the room. Read the faces, the postures, the small adjustments people make when they think they’ve just witnessed something worth remembering.

And yeah, the story the evening had told without his permission was already out there. Already sitting in the minds of everyone who’d been paying attention, already being quietly assembled into something with a shape and a meaning.

The feeding. The proximity. The easy way they’d settled together at the best table in the room like it was a thing they did. The room had drawn its conclusions, and those weren’t the kind of conclusions you walked back with a quick clarification and a wave of the hand. They just lived there now.

He was still working through how to handle that particular reality when the waiter arrived with the aurora dessert sphere, a chocolate shell painted in colors that bled and layered into each other, cracked open right at the table to release a soft breath of cool air and reveal the glowing sorbet and sparkling sugar crystals nested inside it.

Something in Seraphine’s expression eased at the sight of it. The tight, careful set of her mouth softened into something that was almost reluctantly, against its own better judgment. A smile. Small, but real. The kind that shows up before you’ve decided to let it.

She’d just lifted the first spoonful when the waiter materialized quietly at Voren’s elbow, leaned in close, and dropped his voice down to almost nothing.

"Alpha Voren." He paused, short and loaded. "There are assassin rogues outside." He paused again, smaller than the first, barely a breath. "They’re asking us to hand over —" quieter still, the words barely leaving his mouth. "Luna Seraphine."