Sarisa had barely managed to say "Hi" back before Malvoria smiled at the two of them like a woman arriving at a funeral with fireworks hidden under her coat.
"Can we join?" she asked pleasantly.
It was not a real question.
Before Vaelen could shape an answer polished enough to sound generous, Aliyah had already slipped around the side of the table and climbed into the empty chair nearest Sarisa, while Malvoria folded herself into the seat beside her with all the lazy confidence of someone taking possession of conquered land.
The romantic dinner died instantly.
Not loudly. Not dramatically. It simply gave one last weak twitch under the candlelight and then expired.
Sarisa felt it happen and, to her eternal shame, nearly smiled.
Vaelen, however, looked like a man trying very hard to remain noble while someone set his evening on fire one napkin at a time.
Malvoria looked radiant.
Aliyah looked at Sarisa first, and all at once her face brightened with that fierce, uncomplicated affection that always managed to hit Sarisa somewhere unguarded.
"Wow, Mom," she said, eyes going wide as she took in the sky-blue gown. "Your dress looks beautiful."
For one brief second, Sarisa forgot Vaelen existed.
Then Aliyah added, with the devastating timing only children possessed, "Can't say the same about the company, though."
Sarisa choked on absolutely nothing.
Malvoria made a sound that might have been a cough if she had been less delighted.
Vaelen blinked.
The poor servant at the far wall looked as though she had just seen the gods themselves descend for gossip.
"Aliyah," Sarisa said, trying for reprimand and missing it by a mile because laughter was already threatening at the corners of her mouth.
Aliyah only leaned farther onto the table and looked directly at Vaelen with the solemn frankness of a child who had not yet learned that some truths were apparently too rude to speak aloud.
"Mama Lara is much more handsome than him anyway," she announced.
The silence that followed was so sharp it could have cut crystal.
Sarisa looked down at her hands. This was for survival. If she met Malvoria's eyes now, she would lose the battle entirely.
Vaelen recovered first, to his credit. Or perhaps to his misfortune.
"Well," he said with brittle courtesy, "maybe. But let's just eat."
Aliyah tilted her head, studying him as if he were a puzzle she had no real interest in solving. "Don't worry," she said kindly. "You are not that ugly anyway."
That did it.
Sarisa laughed.
Not a proper little princess laugh either. Not controlled or discreet. A real one, brief and helpless and startled out of her before she could stop it.
The sound escaped into the pavilion and seemed to change the whole atmosphere at once.
Vaelen looked wounded.
Malvoria looked as though she might ascend into another plane of existence from joy alone.
Sarisa pressed one hand over her mouth, trying to recover. "Aliyah."
"What?" Aliyah asked, deeply sincere. "I was trying to be nice."
"You were," Malvoria said at once. "Exquisitely nice."
Vaelen's jaw tightened. He looked at Sarisa as if hoping she would rescue him from this. Sarisa, who had spent the whole evening trapped beneath layers of blue silk and politeness, found that she had absolutely no desire to rescue anyone.
Still, she tried for some minimal dignity. "Aliyah, perhaps less commentary."
Aliyah nodded. "Okay."
Then, in the same breath, she reached for a strawberry and asked Vaelen, "Do you even know Mama's favorite color?"
Sarisa closed her eyes.
Malvoria leaned back in her chair and took a long, satisfied sip of wine. "This is much better than whatever was happening before."
The rest of the meal collapsed into chaos after that.
Aliyah asked too many questions. Malvoria answered most of them badly on purpose. Vaelen attempted, several times, to steer conversation back toward gentler ground and was immediately ambushed by either Aliyah's bluntness or Malvoria's silk-wrapped cruelty.
At one point he tried to compliment the flowers.
Aliyah said Lara liked wildflowers more because they looked less "bossy." At another he mentioned music, only for Malvoria to begin describing demon battle drums in loving detail until one of the servants dropped a spoon.
Sarisa, seated at the center of it all, felt the evening unravel in a way that should have been horrifying and was instead deeply, wickedly satisfying.
It was not even that she wanted Vaelen humiliated.
Not exactly.
It was simply impossible to mourn the destruction of a "romantic" dinner she had never wanted in the first place. If anything, watching Malvoria lounge in candlelight while Aliyah dismantled the atmosphere one innocent sentence at a time felt like justice stepping lightly through the room in silk slippers.
By the time dessert arrived, Vaelen was no longer pretending particularly well.
His smile had thinned. His voice had gone quiet and careful in the worst possible way. The prince who had arranged candlelight and sky-blue manipulation now looked like a man who had been mugged by domestic reality.
Good, Sarisa thought, and felt bad for thinking it for perhaps half a second.
Then Aliyah asked if he knew how to braid hair, because Lara did, and the half second passed.
Eventually, at long last, the dinner ended.
Vaelen stood so quickly his chair scraped. He bowed to Sarisa, barely looked at Malvoria, and offered Aliyah a smile that did not survive contact with her frank little stare.
Then he excused himself with all the strained dignity of a man one more comment away from walking directly into a lake on purpose.
When he was gone, the pavilion exhaled.
Sarisa did too.
Aliyah slid off her chair. "I need the toilet."
"Take a maid," Sarisa said automatically.
"I know."
She ran off with one of the attendants before Sarisa could add anything else, her little shoes tapping over the stone path beyond the pavilion.
For one blissful second, it was only Sarisa and Malvoria.
The candlelight softened. The music from the hidden musicians had mercifully stopped. Outside, the garden glowed silver-blue under the rising night.
Malvoria leaned one elbow onto the table and said, with absolute conviction, "He was giving small dick energy."
Sarisa burst out laughing again.
This one she did not even try to stop. It came out warm and scandalized and far too free for a woman supposed to be on the brink of marriage.
When she finally caught her breath, she shook her head and reached for her wine.
"Hey," she said, still smiling despite herself. "That's mean."
Malvoria looked offended. "No, it's observational."
Sarisa hid another laugh behind the rim of her glass.
Malvoria watched her over her own cup, eyes glittering with that vicious, knowing amusement Sarisa had come to recognize as deeply dangerous. There was a beat of harmless quiet.
Then Malvoria said, "Says the woman who made love to Lara in my castle all night last night."
Sarisa nearly died.
The wine went down the wrong way. She coughed, sputtered, and shot Malvoria a look of pure betrayal while the Demon Queen smiled like a cat watching a chandelier fall.
"Shut up," Sarisa hissed, voice dropping at once even though no one close enough to hear remained in the pavilion.
Malvoria's grin only widened. "What? I'm just saying. You're in no position to criticize my comments on male energy."
Sarisa set down her glass with far too much force. "You are impossible."
"Yes," Malvoria said. "But I'm also right."
She leaned in a little, lowering her voice with all the intimacy of a woman sharing state secrets.
"Lara has big dick energy, right?"
Sarisa felt the heat rush all the way from her throat to her face.
It was catastrophic.
She hated that Malvoria could do this to her. Hated it because the answer existed far too vividly in her body, in her memory, in every soft place under her skin.
The answer lived in the way Lara looked in morning light and in the way her hands settled at Sarisa's waist like belonging. The answer was entirely, humiliatingly yes.
So naturally Sarisa said, with as much dignity as she could assemble from the wreckage, "I am not discussing Lara's… energy… with you."
Malvoria leaned back and laughed, victorious.
"That means yes."
Sarisa covered her face with one hand. "I'm going to throw you into the fountain."
"You won't. You need me."
"That is the worst part of our relationship."
Malvoria lifted her glass in a little toast. "To terrible truths."
Sarisa shook her head, helplessly smiling despite herself, and looked out into the night where Aliyah's voice was already carrying back toward them through the garden.