ALESSIA
The training became daily after that.
Aiden was methodical about it in the way he was methodical about everything — he built a schedule and he kept to it with the particular consistency of someone who understands that discipline is not rigidity but the structure inside which real growth becomes possible. Mornings were gait and posture. Afternoons were voice and presentation. Evenings, when the others had dispersed to their own rhythms, were the conversations.
The conversations were what I had not anticipated.
I had anticipated the physical corrections — the shoulder, the walk, the register. I had understood those as practical necessities, the difference between a disguise that held and one that collapsed on the first day. What I had not anticipated was that Aiden, in the course
