"Definitely not the house cleaning."
Those five words, delivered with that particular smile, were enough.
The entire room shifted.
Spines straightened. Heads turned. Every pair of eyes in the space locked onto the door with the kind of apprehension usually reserved for exam results and hospital waiting rooms.
"Who's it?" Aaron asked.
"Guilds?" Eva guessed.
"Uhm…" Claire coughed delicately into her palm, and then did something that Aaron found immediately, deeply unsettling. She looked directly at him. Not at the group. Not at the door. Specifically at him, with the kind of loaded eye contact that meant whatever was on the other side of that door was absolutely his problem. "Someone I believe we know."
Aaron processed that for a second.
"We as in 'we' or 'WE'?" he asked, blinking several times.
There was a crucial difference between those two things and both of them knew it.
