Nero POV
This was bad.
Not just bad. Catastrophically bad.
The steak was. Something.
I had spent years in difficult situations. Battle. Venom. Sleepwalking toward certain death. My mother's company.
None of it had prepared me for this steak.
The outside was the color of coal. The inside was the color of concern.
The cornbread had the structural integrity of wet sand. It dissolved on contact with the fork before it reached the plate.
The potatoes tasted like someone had described potatoes to a person who had never seen one.
And I had drunk medicine that tasted better than this. The terrible bitter tea Remi fed me when I was half-dead. That tea had been an improvement over the potatoes.
Everyone was eating. Slowly. Carefully. With the specific facial expression of people being very
