<span class="fixed-color" style="color:#ccff99">Ayla blinked, staring in the bakery window at the same cinnamon spirals she’d been looking at the other day, glancing back at lucian and wondering for a moment if he really had been following her. </span><br/><br/><i><span class="fixed-color" style="color:#4dffa6">&lt;he wasn’t following you. He was with me.&gt;</span></i><span class="fixed-color" style="color:#99ffcc"> Alexi was calm and reassuring, despite starting to feel like somehow Lucian had turned this into a date and his sister was none the wiser. He couldn’t help but feel for Lucian. As old as he was, the ten or twenty years it would probably take the two of them to get through to the fifth circle of their schools would almost certainly pass in the blink of an eye. No wonder the man was already thinking about their inevitable departure, if that was the choice they made. </span><br/><br/><i><span class="fixed-color" style="color:#a6ff4d">&lt;I know. I know. But I was definitely eyeing these up right before… I ran into sleazy-Mc Pointy ears.&gt;</span></i><span class="fixed-color" style="color:#ccff99"> her nose wrinkled up at the last thing Lucian said, shaking her head. </span><span class="fixed-color" style="color:#a6ff4d">“You try and take a piece of mine and I might bite fingers off…”</span><span class="fixed-color" style="color:#ccff99"> she murmured.</span>