The kitchen was the one room in the mansion where nobody argued with him.
Trafalgar had sent the staff off an hour ago, rolled his sleeves to the elbow, and taken the whole thing over the way he took over most things he cared about, quietly and completely.
The same hands that had put a blade through an Apex queen a week gone moved down a row of vegetables now, the knife going quick and even, and there was something in the plain work of it that emptied his head the way nothing at the castle ever had.
He'd always been able to cook. Long before the Academy handed him an elective and he took the one that let him stand at a stove instead of in a lecture hall, he'd known his way around a kitchen, carried over from a stretch of his life he never talked about with anyone.
