Chapter 32

  Cinnamon Recap

  Blah!

  Blah!

  Blah!

  The damn alarm again. Why does reaching for it

  feel so wrong? Like my body knows this isn’t how the morning is supposed to go.

  Shouldn’t this thing just know I’m awake? Hell, we have smart everything these

  days—why hasn’t someone invented an automatic alarm shut-off? Then again… maybe

  I’m the only idiot still using a bedside analog clock.

  I slap it off with more force than necessary.

  That’s when it hits me—thick and syrupy, hanging in the air like a bad

  decision. The smell alone makes my muscles scream betrayal.

  "Fuck yoga..."

  Of all the ways I could’ve spent last night,

  waging war against my own body wasn’t exactly on the vision board. I’d rather

  do equations and trajectory simulations, trying to figure out how to land on a

  moving object traveling at billions of lightspeeds.

  My blanket? A fortress. Its warmth? The last

  bastion of my sanity. And I’m not surrendering without a fight. Because let’s

  be real—my body feels like absolute shit.

  I will say this about yoga… I thought I was fit.

  Yeah. No. Turns out? I’m an idiot.

  "Co?o."

  “?Carlos! ?Levántate!”

  Abuela’s voice slices through the fog like a

  broadsword—unyielding, uncompromising.

  “Son of a—”

  “?Qué? ?Qué? Son of a QUé?”

  I sigh. “Abuela…” I exhale the breath of a man

  whose fate is sealed. “When I gave you a spare key… it was for emergencies.”

  Another sigh. “I mean, come on. I could’ve been naked.”

  “Are you?”

  “No.”

  “?Entonces?”

  I groan. She’s already moving, sweeping through

  my closet like she’s raiding a crime scene. Clothes pushed aside. Empty spaces

  inspected. Then she’s at my bed, crouching, peering under.

  “?Qué haces?” I ask, voice still half-buried in

  my pillow.

  “?Dónde se está escondiendo ella?”

  “She who?”

  “?La yogui?”

  I laugh. Hard. She gives me a look like I just

  told her the sky isn’t blue.

  “She had a boyfriend,” I manage.

  “?Cómo que tiene novio?”

  That tone? It could make a hurricane pack up and

  leave.

  I kiss my pillow goodbye and force myself up,

  staggering like a newborn deer. I shuffle over, kiss Abuela on the forehead,

  and croak out, “Oh yeah. Dude looked like a mix between Eduardo Yá?ez and Mario

  Cimarro… but on steroids.”

  "?De verdad?!"

  “Sí.”

  The door creaks open. Enter Marisol—majestic,

  unstoppable, and wielding a plate of churros like an offering to the gods. Or a

  bribe. No. A weapon. A sugar-dusted, golden-brown declaration of victory.

  "?Y entonces, mi hermanito, qué bolá?"

  Marisol grins.

  I snatch a churro off the plate, scowling. “What

  is this? Am I your entertainment? Better yet—what am I, a damn telenovela? The

  Bachelor: Carlitos Edition?”

  Marisol’s eyes twinkle. “We don’t. But she does.”

  The churro melts in my mouth—almost, but not

  quite, enough to dull the pain of impending social doom. I glare between bites,

  but they’re already halfway out the door, mission accomplished.

  From the kitchen, Margarita’s voice rings out.

  "?Dale, mi vieja! El café ya está listo."

  Abuela pats my cheek. “Come. Tell us everything.”

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

  Mornings are usually dull. Unremarkable. A

  loading screen between sleep and whatever nonsense the day throws at me.

  Not today.

  Today, the kitchen hums with the kind of tension

  you get before a final boss fight—if the raid team were half-asleep and nursing

  hangovers. Cinnamon and lemon cleaner wage war for dominance, and the washer

  thumps in the background like an overenthusiastic snare drum. The dryer chimes

  in with a so ominous, I half expect a health bar to materialize

  above it.

  Abuela is mid-routine, moving with the precision

  of a veteran raid leader.

  I drag my half-conscious self to the fridge,

  playing the part of a sandbagging DPS dodging mechanics. Yanking the door open,

  I scan the contents like I’m hoping for loot: half a carton of eggs, spinach on

  life support, and a cheese wheel one bad day away from fossilization. No orange

  juice. Because of course there’s no orange juice.

  Milk it is.

  I grab the carton and shut the fridge a little

  too hard.

  Abuela

  says without looking up.

  I turn, carton in hand. “It’s my fridge.” More

  statement than argument.

  She stands there, arms crossed, all five feet of

  her radiating the absolute authority of a dungeon master deciding my fate. Her

  gaze locks onto me, calculating whether I’m worth the XP to level up into a

  functioning human.

  Before I can make an excuse, she presses a

  steaming mug into my hands. The warmth seeps through the ceramic, carrying the

  scent of cinnamon, vanilla, and masa—comfort incarnate.

  she declares, voice

  final as a system notification. “No coffee. No juice.”

  I squint at her, then at the mug. “Abuela…”

  A finger in my face.

  Her brow lifts—a single devastating movement that could TPK a party. She takes

  in my rumpled Akatsuki pajamas and mismatched socks—Pikachu on one foot,

  Einstein on the other.

  “No wonder it didn’t work out.”

  I frown. “It’s called aesthetics.”

  I sip the atole. Damn, it’s good. Like a warm hug

  in liquid form.

  Abuela doesn’t miss a beat, hands on her hips,

  radiating the energy of a raid leader watching their DPS stand in the fire.

  “You’ve been single too long,” she announces, slicing through my morning haze

  with the precision of a debuff. “It’s not natural. You need balance. Una mujer.

  Someone to argue with you over your crazy ideas and make sure you eat real

  food.”

  “Hot Pockets real food,” I mutter,

  clutching the mug like a shield.

  She snorts—a critical hit to my argument. “Real

  food doesn’t come in a box and definitely won’t give me great-grandchildren.”

  I nearly choke on my atole.

  Across the room, my sisters—Marisol and

  Margarita—lean against the counter, eating churros, sipping coffee, watching

  the show. Marisol grins like she’s about to drop a fatal one-liner. Margarita

  just sips her coffee.

  Abuela steps closer, her sharp edges softening

  into something that feels like a hug disguised as a lecture. “Mijo,” she says,

  quieter now. “I want you to be happy. Not the kind of happy you find in your

  music, locked away in your lab.” Her voice lowers, pulling at something deep in

  my chest. “You can’t find that alone.”

  The kitchen stills. The fridge hums, the leaky

  faucet drips, and for a moment, silence stretches between us like the calm

  before a raid wipe. Then, with a gentleness that somehow hits harder than any

  lecture, Abuela reaches up and pats my cheek.

  “?Así que la pinga tenía un tipo?” she muses.

  “Bueno, pa'lante, pa' la otra.”

  I sigh. The weight of her expectations settles

  onto my shoulders like a main quest I can’t decline. Abuela never wins through

  brute force—it’s the relentlessness of her love that gets you every time.

  “Fine.” I set the mug down in surrender. “But if

  she hates anime or music, I’m out.”

  Marisol and Margarita exchange grins—the kind

  that screams

  “She loves anime,” Marisol says, pulling out a

  laptop with the precision of a rogue revealing a hidden blade.

  I narrow my eyes. “How much?”

  Margarita smirks. “Enough to know

  isn’t overrated.”

  Damn it. They’re good.

  The coffee table becomes my battlefield, and I’m

  losing before the first turn. My atole steams smugly beside me, a

  cinnamon-scented reminder that I’ve already been outplayed. With a dramatic

  slump, I press my forehead to the polished wood, murmuring to whatever ancient

  god of familial chaos oversees moments like this.

  “This is absurd,” I groan into the table.

  “What’s that, mijo?” Abuela’s voice cuts through

  the room like a sharpened debuff.

  “Nothing!” I bolt upright, nearly sloshing atole

  down my Akatsuki pajamas. I clutch the mug like a lifeline. “Just admiring

  your… unparalleled strategic brilliance, Abuela.”

  She squints, the kind of look that could force an

  NPC into skipping dialogue. “Uh-huh.”

  I sip my drink slowly, as if cinnamon and masa

  can drown the creeping sense of doom. My brain, ever the opportunist, leaps to

  distraction.

  Maybe I should make my students watch anime…

  They’d get me. We could debate waifus and plot twists without judgment—

  “?Qué?!” Margarita snaps, already suspicious.

  “Nothing!” I yelp, voice cracking like a guilty

  teenager.

  Marisol shrugs, radiating the calm of someone who

  knows she’s winning. “You need options, Hermanito. Balance. Someone to love

  you, someone to ground you, someone to challenge you. Someone who knows when to

  leave you alone with your beep-boop machines.”

  “Bebop,” I mutter, brain still buffering. “And

  it’s not a beep-boop machine, it’s a gramophone.”

  Margarita waves a dismissive hand. “Whatever.

  Let’s find someone who actually knows what that means.”

  Marisol hums her agreement.

  I gape at them, torn between indignation and

  grudging admiration. “Whatever?”

  Margarita claps her hands. “Abuela, what’s that

  team thingy you and Carlos play?”

  Abuela chuckles. “An adventuring party?”

  “Yes!” Marisol says. “We need to build him a full team—healer, DPS, a

  tank—”

  “Okay, well, I’m the tank,” I cut in, offended on

  principle.

  Abuela shakes her head, the softest kind of

  devastating. “No, mijo.” Her voice gentles, her expression turning

  uncharacteristically tender. She reaches out, patting my cheek with the

  finality of a warlord offering a tired soldier one last piece of wisdom.

  “You’re a support class. Always helping, never letting anyone help you. That

  has to change.”