Sera did not, in fact, need cake as an excuse. She needed roughly four hours and access to Cole's kitchen to turn "we survived an emergency assembly" into a full celebration nobody had agreed to have, complete with string lights she produced from somewhere and music low enough not to travel past the porch.
"You cannot tell me," she said, arranging a truly excessive number of candles on a cake that had clearly been bought rather than made, "that after the week we've had, we don't deserve one single normal evening where nobody reveals a secret bloodline or a dead councilman's grief."
"Thorne's not dead," I said.
"You know what I mean." She lit the candles anyway, for no occasion in particular, because Sera had never once let the absence of an occasion stop her from creating one. "Besides.
