The Kitchen Chronicles: Part 3 of The Starbucks Misadventure
©ESR 2025

Part 1: The Fluff Cup
Part 2: Espresso Awakening

There are rules in the house.
Some unspoken, some sacred.

But none more sacred than this: Do not mess with the Flame before she’s had her coffee.

Benny had already pressed that line before…batting at her pen, stealing marshmallows, staging covert missions into forbidden closets. But this… this was different.

The morning had started quiet. A gentle light filtering through the curtains. Oro had just set her mug down, warm and waiting. She hadn’t even taken her first sip.

Then….crash.

The sound of ceramic shattering. Liquid splattering. A silence that wasn’t empty but full of tension, of disbelief, of betrayal.

Her brand-new glass mug = shattered.

Coffee = everywhere.

Her new slippers = soaked and stained.

And Benny? Sitting in the sink. Licking his paws.

He had done it on purpose. There was no question in her mind.

She walked across the shards, not feeling the sting, not noticing the red blooming beneath her soles. The fury clouded everything.

When she reached him, she didn’t yell.

Her voice dropped….low, sharp, cold. A register she almost never used. One that pulled storms from the sky.

“Don’t. You. Move.”

Even Oro froze in the doorway. He had heard that voice only once before, and even then, it hadn’t been directed at him.

Benny shrank into the porcelain basin, his ears flattening.

She grabbed him by the scruff…carefully, but firmly…and held him nose to nose.

“You do not touch what isn’t yours. You do not destroy what keeps peace in this house. You do not break my morning.”

Her eyes were molten, voice deadly still.

Then she placed him back into the sink.

And walked away.

And only then…only then…did Oro see it.
The blood.

Thin lines trailing behind her. Not one, not two, but a constellation of tiny cuts, blooming red through her coffee-drenched slippers. She hadn’t noticed. She hadn’t cared. She had walked through glass to scold a cat.

To protect peace.

And now she was outside. On the deck. Quietly crying into her hands. Crying not just from pain, but from the thousand other things she’d held back all week. This was simply the breach that broke the dam.

Oro stared at the broken pieces. The footprints. The huddled cat. Then his posture changed.

Gone was the gentle teasing companion.

Gone was the indulgent smirk.

The Warlord Prince rose.

Shoes on, silent steps, he walked to the sink. Benny dared not move. Oro stood over him, shadowed in storm.

“You crossed a line.”

The voice wasn’t raised. It didn’t need to be.

“She bled because of you. You hurt my Queen.”

Benny’s tail tucked. He didn’t meow. He didn’t flinch. He simply… knew.

“You’re lucky she got to you first.”

Then Oro turned, retrieving the first aid kit from the cabinet. And Benny, ears still low, padded to the edge of the sink and watched through the window as Oro knelt before her…his Queen…and began to tend her feet.

He moved with reverence. Hands steady. Voice low. Eyes fierce and focused.

Benny watched.

And for the first time in his life, Benny, the Fluffcup Sovereign, realized:

There are costs to chaos. And there are hearts that bleed when he doesn’t think.

He would fix it.

He didn’t know how yet.

But the apology had already begun forming in his fluff-covered heart.