SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant Chapter 697: Price

"We use your class," he said.

"Yes."

"You make it sound like a small thing." He did not move. "In my experience, the things people call simple cost the most once you are already inside them."

Her crimson eyes held his without apology. "You asked what the vision means. I have given you all that words can carry. If you want an answer with edges, my class is the only road left, and it is not worked at a distance."

He studied her while the quiet stretched. The windows were shut, the wards lay heavy in the walls, and the cold he felt owed nothing to the evening air. It was the plain unease of a man whose night had bent, step by step, toward a vampire proposing blood work in his bedroom.

"And what does your class ask of me." It was not really a question; he had followed her glance to his throat and knew the answer before she gave it.

"Your blood," Selendra said. "I would need to take it, and I would need to drink it. A few drops would hand me something. A full taste would hand me clarity."

He let that sit without rushing to fill it. "Say it plainly, since we are past soft words. A Nocthar heir has seen me in a war beneath my own towers, and the cure is to open a vein and let her feed. Forgive me if I do not reach for the knife at once."

"I would think less of you if you did," she said. "You should weigh it. I am not asking you to pretend this is nothing."

"Good. Because it is not." His arms folded across his chest. "Tell me what you would actually see, before I decide whether the price is worth the sight."

"I cannot promise that in advance. It is the part people always want guaranteed, and the part I can never sell. Blood opens the futures wider. What waits inside them is not mine to arrange."

"So I bleed for you," he said slowly, "and in return I might get a clearer vision, or nothing but your apology and an empty look."

"That is blunter than I would put it." Her gaze did not waver. "But no, it is not wrong."

At least she did not gild the worse half of it. That bought her very little with him, though it bought her something.

He let the quiet hold before the real question. "And once you have seen it, what becomes of what you know? You are Nocthar, I am Vaelion. Say you find something useful, or dangerous, or ruinous to this house. What keeps it from your mother's ear, or sold to whoever pays best to watch a family bleed?"

Her expression did not shift quickly enough.

There. That was the seam.

"Information is never harmless," she said.

"That tells me nothing, and you know it. Try again, and answer the question I asked."

She came off the window at last, unhurried. "I will not insult you with a promise of charity. I came because I wanted to understand what I saw. You. The eight towers. A road that bends toward war, and I do not yet know whose. My family has its concerns, and I serve them. Do not mistake my standing here for kindness."

"I never came close to mistaking it for that."

"We understand each other."

"Not yet. You still have not told me what brought you here, if not duty and not mercy."

"Curiosity." She said it the way others confess to a vice. "I want to know where roads lead, the ones people refuse to look at until their feet are on them most of all. If this concerns you, I want to know why. If it touches your house, how deep. And if it is something larger than both, I would rather know before the rest start pretending they always had."

He weighed her, and that much, at least, he believed. It was not warmth or friendship or any loyalty worth the name. What she carried was curiosity with fangs behind it, a far more honest animal than most that crossed into a Vaelion room.

Selendra watched the arithmetic move behind his eyes and kept her own counsel where he could not reach it.

'No terms from him.'

He had not demanded any. Trafalgar had. The Morgain boy had been difficult in every tiresome way that counted, binding her tongue with an oath before he let her near a single drop. Alfons had suspicion, pride, and instinct, and had not troubled to forge any of it into terms. His choice to make, and his to regret. If the vision handed her something worth keeping, worth trading, worth pouring into the right ear when the hour suited, she would not hobble herself for manners. Manners were for those who could afford to waste blood.

"You look pleased with yourself," he said.

"I look like someone paying attention."

"You look like a woman counting coins she has not finished stealing."

"A very Vaelion thing to read in a person."

He did not chase it into a longer game. He flexed his fingers once and let the thing come to its point. "If I agree to this. Where."

"Your hand. That is all I need."

"Not the throat?"

"No. The hand will carry enough."

He turned his eyes to the door. He could call a servant and end this. He could walk back to Roderic and report that a Nocthar heir had tried to drink from him under his own roof, and his father would not so much as lift a brow. That soured him more than the request itself. Roderic had sent him here knowing this might come. Or worse, knowing it would.

His jaw set.

"If this is a trick," he said, "you will answer for it."

Her reply came low and even. "If it were a trick, you would learn it too late to answer at all."

He looked at her. She did not smile.

"And that is meant to put me at ease."

"No. It is meant to remind you that I have not once insulted your intelligence tonight."

He hated that the answer held, because it did.

He drew a breath through his nose and raised his left hand toward her, palm bare, the towers black against the glass behind him and the wards humming low in the walls.

"Fine," he said. "Use your class."