JEOPARDY: The Cursed Soldier.

Interlude--The dead girl.

The smell of lentils and spice waffled through the air.

Lianna inhaled and hummed as she stirred the contents in multiple pots. Cooking is what she did when she felt suffocated by the silver walls around her. Or when she felt like her past mistakes were closing in on her and she had nowhere to run to.

Today, she felt both. Hence why she was cooking a feast.

Cooking reminded her that she could still feel, create, and enjoy something good. It was proof that all wasn't lost. That she was still alive. And that there was still hope for her.

When Kayla was around, she didn't have to cook. She only had to look at her beautiful daughter, and all these reminders would fill her mind and revive her.

Just the thought of her baby away from her, and in the den of her enemies, the monsters that had hurt her, snatched everything from her, and destroyed everything that had been good about her, drove an unquenchable rage through her veins that made her want to shift and race all the way to Soleria to take her baby back.

It was urges and thoughts like that that drove her to cook--a distraction from how bad things were. And how far she had fallen from being The Lunarheart pack's It Girl.

She lifted a steel lid from one of the pans and peeked at the cooking rice. It needed a little more time. She replaced the lid, and finally, felt him behind her.

A water-ripple silence ensued around her.

All the zetas who were cooking with her had stilled like they always did when their commander entered a room. Lunarheart werewolves, free or incarcerated, were constipated like that. They liked their rules and hierarchy to a nauseating extent.

His warmth and scent blanketed her so she knew that he was now standing right behind her, but she still acted like she hadn't felt him. If he needed her attention, he'd better earn it.

"Lianna, a word?" Anthony Hernandez, her husband and the commander of the hellhole they lived in, trembled behind her.

Because Lianna was that girl, she swirled in her little, yellow dress, making it twirl and expose a little more thigh, and faced him.

Anthony was a hard-trained gentleman, so of course, he had left enough space between them for more than one person to witness her little teasing show and evade their eyes. Anthony took two intimidating steps her way to shield her from their spectators and glare at her for her 'immaturity'.

Anthony was a brooding, heavily built tower of a man, whose glare could shrink the strongest of zetas, but not Lianna, who dared to put a sassy hand on her slim waist and cock an eyebrow at him. "I'm cooking."

Every eye in their vicinity peeped at them, scandalized by her audacity. They were all terrified of her husband. But she couldn't care less.

"The cooks will take over. It won't take long." He pressed and shifted his glare to Fredrick, the dungeon's head cook.

Fredrick hurriedly stepped beside Lianna and started fussing with her cooking. Lianna scoffed in disbelief. And not for the first time, she wondered how such a coward of a man had ended up in the prison meant for the most notorious criminals of Lunarheart. Or if it was Anthony who had managed to beat a bastard of that caliber into such a coward.

"Please, ma'am, I will continue from here. Thank you so much for helping us." Fredrick stammered as he stirred the rice that absolutely didn't need any stirring.

"Quit messing with my hard work. I'll leave. Just make sure everything turns out exactly right, okay? " Lianna placed a spatula atop a lid, rounded Anthony's uniformed frame, and asked as she walked ahead. "Your office or your room?"