POV: Verity
Petra had lied to her.
Not about the dinner invitation — that part was real. She had lied about who asked for it. She had knocked on Verity's door an hour ago and said very casually that the duke requested her presence at dinner, and Verity had believed her, and now she was standing in the dining room doorway looking at a twelve-year-old boy with soup already on his chin who was very clearly the person who had arranged this entire thing.
Emmett looked up and waved like she had been expected all along.
Dorian was standing at the head of the table with the expression of a man who had agreed to something reasonable and was only now understanding what he had actually agreed to. He looked at Verity. She looked at him. Neither of them said anything about the obvious fact that they had both been very neatly managed by a child and a housekeeper.
She sat down.
The first ten minutes were the quietest meal she had ever been part of, and she had eaten alone for most of her life. Dorian ate with the focused efficiency of someone fueling a machine. He did not look up. He did not speak. He worked through his food in the same way she imagined he worked through everything — completely, methodically, with zero wasted movement.
She watched him without being obvious about it.
He had sent her four blankets. He had sent Corvin to warn her on the road. He had put her in the room closest to his for reasons he had not explained. And now he was eating soup across from her at a dinner he had clearly not wanted but had agreed to anyway because a twelve-year-old asked him to.
She was building a picture. It was a complicated picture. But it was getting clearer.
Emmett tried twice to start a conversation and got very short answers both times. On the third try, he turned to Verity instead.
"What was the bakery like?" he asked. "Where you worked."
She opened her mouth to give a simple answer. Then she looked at Emmett's hopeful face and Dorian's carefully blank one, and she made a decision.
She told the truth. But she told it the way she had always survived hard things — by finding the part that was almost funny, and holding onto that part until the rest became bearable.
She told them about old Mr. Hatch, the bakery owner, who counted every single roll every single morning like he expected the rolls to steal from him overnight. She described the counting — the little finger-point he did at each one, lips moving, suspicious eyes — and Emmett started smiling before she even got to the good part.
She told them about the cat. A large orange cat that had absolutely no business being in a bakery and was there every day anyway, specifically targeting the butter dish, operating with a level of commitment that she had genuinely admired. She had named it Thief. Mr. Hatch called it something much worse.
Emmett laughed.
Then she told them about the wedding cake. The bride had ordered the tallest cake the bakery had ever made. Verity had been carrying it alone across the kitchen — she had been told to wait for help and had not waited because she never waited for anything — and she had made it almost the entire way before her foot found the one wet patch on the floor.
She did not describe the fall. She just described the moment right before it — the feeling of knowing exactly what was about to happen and being completely unable to stop it — and somehow that was funnier than the fall itself.
Emmett laughed so hard he choked on his soup.
It happened fast — the coughing, the cup tipping sideways. Dorian's hand moved before anyone else registered what was happening. He reached across, steadied the cup with two fingers, kept it from spilling, and was back in his original position so quickly it was almost like it had not happened at all.
He did not look up. Did not comment. Kept eating.
But Verity had been watching.
She saw it. The corner of his mouth — just the right side, the unmasked side — moved. Barely. A flicker. The ghost of something that on any other face she would have called the beginning of a smile.
She looked back down at her plate immediately.
She filed that away in the part of her brain where she kept important information. A man who moves to protect someone without thinking about it first. A man who almost smiles at a story about a dropped cake.
She was still building the picture.
After dinner she walked back toward her room alone. The corridor was quiet. She was nearly at her door when she saw it — a small folded paper on the floor, just outside, like it had been slipped underneath and pushed too hard.
She picked it up. Unfolded it.
Four words in handwriting she did not recognize.
Do not drink the tea.
She looked up fast. The corridor was empty. Silent.
She looked back at the paper. Then at her room door.
Then at the cup of tea Petra had left for her earlier, still sitting on the small table by the window.