SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant Chapter 715: The Lowest Seat

Rivena did not flinch under the question. If anything, she wore the faint boredom of a woman asked to account for something beneath her.

"I was handling a private affair that could not be abandoned halfway through," she said, her voice smooth and unhurried, offering the hall nothing it could take hold of. "Once it was finished, I came straight back."

"And you did not think to send word." Valttair did not phrase it as a question.

"A message would have put the whole thing at risk," she answered without hesitation. "Some work only holds together as long as no one knows it is being done. I judged it safer to keep quiet."

There was a grain of truth in it, enough to give the lie a little honest cover to hide behind. Trafalgar did not buy a word of the rest, and plainly, neither did the man at the head of the table.

Valttair let her excuse hang a while before he took it apart.

"You disappeared for six months, answered to no one, and walked into my hall expecting your place to remain untouched. The lateness is nothing. A missed hour I could overlook. What I will not overlook is a daughter of this house who vanishes at her own pleasure, ignores the authority of her patriarch, tells no one where she has gone, and strolls back in the day it suits her as though the family is owed no explanation for any of it."

Rivena had the sense to let him finish.

She inclined her head, unbothered, and moved toward the high-backed chair that had always been hers, up among the heirs where a woman of her rank expected to be received.

"Not there."

Two words, and she stopped mid-step.

Valttair let his attention drift to the far foot of the table, where the youngest of the family kept their places, well away from Maeron, from Helgar, from anything near the center of the room's weight. The nearest empty chair down there had been Sylvar's, and not even Valttair would stoop to parking her in a dead boy's seat. A servant read the pause correctly and carried a plain chair to the very end of the table.

"Today you are worth no more than the youngest at this table," Valttair said. "Sit accordingly."

The smile Rivena had carried through the doors was gone. It had not survived the distance between her old seat and the one now waiting at the bottom of the room.

She understood precisely what was being done to her, and in front of whom. She had been one of the most important heirs at this table. Now she was being sent to the foot of it, past a bastard brother who had spent his whole life beneath her and today occupied a chair near the center. Her six months in the dark had raised him without her lifting a finger, and lowered her by the very same stroke. There was no reading it any other way.

She let her attention rest on Trafalgar for a breath as she passed him. Whatever moved behind those cyan eyes, she kept it well off her face.

"Do you have something to say about my decision?" Valttair asked.

She reached the plain chair and turned. "Nothing, Father."

The words came out level and controlled, and without a scrap of obedience in them. It was the voice of a woman swallowing something whole rather than choke on it where everyone could watch.

Trafalgar let his eyes move over the rest of the table while it read the scene, and it told him plenty.

Verena had gone rigid with fury, her scarred hands pale where they gripped the arms of her chair, and yet she held her tongue. Even she would not challenge the patriarch on the day he walked back in carrying that much power.

Helgar watched his sister with an expression stranded between disgust and a flicker of real worry, as though her fall reflected on him and he had not decided how much of it to wear.

Lysandra, at Trafalgar's side, had already caught the deeper current. This was no father simply disciplining a tardy daughter. Valttair suspected something. The seat was a message, and the message was that he did not believe the private affair for a heartbeat either.

Seraphine kept her satisfaction quiet and well buried, but it lived there behind her eyes, the pleasure of a woman watching a rival branch surrender ground she had only just clawed back for her own.

Maeron, though, stayed calm. Too calm for a man whose sister had just been marched to the foot of the family table. He of all people had cause to speak for Rivena, and he offered nothing. That much was the clever play, of course. Any defense would have knotted the two of them together in front of a father who missed nothing.

What snagged on Trafalgar was quieter. Since she walked in, Maeron had not once turned toward his sister, not while she spun her excuse and not while Valttair took her seat away. And she, in turn, had not once looked for him. Two heirs of the same blood, one of them falling in front of the whole family, and neither would spend a single glance on the other.

A brother watches a sister fall, even a brother who cannot stand her. These two moved around each other like strangers who had agreed beforehand to play at being strangers. That was far more suspicious than concern would ever have been.

He turned her earlier smile over in his mind. Rivena had come through those doors certain the day would break her way. She had lost that wager, or so the room believed. Trafalgar did not believe it for an instant.

A chair at the bottom of the table changed where she would spend the evening. It changed nothing about whatever she had spent six months building out there in the dark. The punishment bruised her pride, and pride was the cheapest thing she owned. That smile had not been arrogance. It had been the look of someone holding a card no one else in the room had seen.

'She is hiding something,' he thought. 'What she just fed this room is a lie so thin a child would see through it. And I doubt Valttair means to let it lie. He has been digging into this on his own already. I would put money on it.'

Rivena reached the plain chair at the foot of the table and lowered herself into it without another word.

Valttair waited until she had, letting the whole room watch her take the lowest place in it. Only then did he raise his gaze and send it down the length of the table, from the heirs at his right hand, to the bastard son near the center, to the daughter he had just cast down to the end.

"Good," he said. "Now that everyone has remembered where they stand, we can begin."