Alina shook her head with a smile, her heart warm at the sight.
Lucien, sitting quietly near the end of the mat, was working with such slow concentration that it almost looked like he was in deep meditation rather than doing an art project. His pencil lines were faint and uneven, as though he wasn't sure where each petal should go, and when he picked up the scissors, he held them a little too tightly, making each cut jagged.
Alina glanced at him a few times.
At one point, he stopped cutting entirely and looked over at Felix's perfect fox-tail leaf, then at Vlad Jr.'s elegant curves, and finally at Boo's flame-petal chaos. His lips pressed together, and instead of redoing his own, he just kept going, as if deciding it didn't matter if his petals weren't perfect.
