The café smelled faintly of roasted coffee beans and old paper, the kind of warm, quiet place most people passed without noticing. Cassandra slipped in through the door, hood pulled low, scanning the room almost reflexively. She moved with fluid precision, every step quiet, measured. Her eyes landed on a young woman at a corner table, scribbling in a notebook, her presence calm but purposeful. Cassandra felt a subtle shift—something in the air, a softness that pulled at the edges of her usual guardedness. “Uh… hi,” Cassandra said, voice low, careful, as if testing whether words could be trusted.Cassandra froze for a moment. Wow. She can read me. “I… I think so,” she said, letting the edge of tension in her shoulders soften slightly.Cassandra blinked, a small, almost imperceptible smirk tugging at her lips. “That’s… accurate,” she admitted.For the first time in a long while, Cassandra didn’t feel the need to hide behind walls. There was something about this stranger—warm, empathetic, unshakably attentive—that made the world a little less sharp, a little less dangerous.“Cassandra,” she replied, letting her fingers brush Daisy’s. A quiet spark lingered in the contact—one neither of them fully understood yet, but both felt.