Seraphine's POV
I didn’t fall asleep right away. The silence after the ball was too sharp, the bandage pulled at my side, and the words cover—signal—stop kept circling in my head like a drill I hadn’t been dismissed from yet. It made me restless in that way where your own skin feels too small for you.
So I sat up, pulled my cloak around my shoulders, and looked toward Darius. He sat by the door, straight-backed, eyes open—still, the way only someone raised on vigilance can be still.
“I have a request,” I said finally. “Can we stop the coded language? At least when it’s just us. I don’t want to live in command words. I know they helped at first, but now they just make me anxious—like every move needs a precise label, and if I say the wrong word, something will break.”
He didn’t argue. H
