JASMINE
Breakfast turned out far warmer than I had expected.
For a while, I managed to forget the system's words echoing in my head and let myself sink into the strange little peace of the morning.
Jaden had a way of doing that. The boy could fill an entire room with noise, questions, and dramatic stories about things no one had asked him about, and somehow it made the mansion feel less heavy.
Stephan sat at the head of the table, one hand around his coffee cup and the other occasionally reaching out to steal fruit from my plate just to annoy me, while Jaden sat between Stella and me, talking so much that Elena had to remind him three times to actually chew his food before starting another sentence.
Stella smiled here and there, and sometimes even laughed, but I noticed it each time her expression slipped when she thought no one was watching.
After we ate, Stephan was called away for what he described with a tired sigh as an emergency meeting.
