Soren had not come back yet.
Caelum did.
The kitchen was not empty when Wren came back from the supply corridor at 11:03 p.m.
She knew before she pushed through the door. The bond gave her three seconds of warning—not the low directional pull she had learned to manage across a shift, but the sharper register that meant proximity, the same quality it carried when he was in the room rather than three floors above it. She had been cataloging the difference for twelve days. She recognized it the way she recognized the stock pot’s particular silence before a boil.
She pushed through the door anyway, because there was no version of this in which she turned away.
Caelum was at the service counter. Not the preparation table, not the stock station—the same counter beside the service window whe
