POV: Aria
The lessons became our routine.
Every evening after dinner, Dominic would find me in the library or the main room or, on one memorable night, the kitchen while Rosa pretended not to listen. He would sit across from me, never beside me, and talk.
Thirty minutes. Sometimes forty. Never more.
He spoke without emotion, like a professor delivering a lecture he'd given a hundred times. But I was the only student in the room, and my questions seemed to catch him off guard more often than he liked.
"How do you know when an alliance is real versus convenient?" I asked on the second night.
"You don't. You watch what they do when it costs them something."
"What's the difference between a soldier and a weapon?"
"Soldiers think. Weapons don't. Never treat a thinking man like a tool."
