Free Web NovelChapter 25: A Quiet Afternoon
Aidan didn’t raise his voice. He raised his pouch.
"Tier-8 Spirit Stones," he said, setting a small heavy stack on the agent’s desk without ceremony. "More than he offered. More than he’ll offer next. Name the asking price and I’ll double it where I stand."
The agent’s eyes flicked between the two men, doing frantic arithmetic that had nothing to do with money and everything to do with which name could hurt him more.
Barten’s smile didn’t move, but something behind it cooled.
He looked at the stack of Tier-8 stones the way a man looks at a card trick he has already decided is fake.
"Don’t think you can do anything just because you have money," he said, his voice smooth and cold. "Some things can’t be bought."
Then he turned his head, just slightly, toward the manager who had drifted in from the back the instant a famous name reached him.
He didn’t say a word. He didn’t need to.
The manager swallowed, stepped forward, and put on the apologetic smile every rich man learns to recognize and despise.
"My apologies, sir," he said to Aidan, not quite meeting his eyes. "There has been an error in the listing. This property is already under contract. To Young Lord Barten."
Something hot pulsed at the base of Aidan’s skull.
A single vein stood up along his temple, there and then gone, as he reached down into the old familiar place and pressed the heat flat.
’Of course it is,’ he thought. ’Buy the agent, buy the listing, buy the room. Why fight a man for a house when you can simply own the house he is standing in.’
He breathed out slowly. The anger went back on its leash. Mostly.
Barten had already lost interest in the property. He had gotten what he wanted from it, which was the small pleasure of taking it.
His attention slid back to Solenne, slow and proprietary, lingering on the ash-grey hair, the pale amber eyes, the careful stillness she wore like armor.
He licked his lips. fɾēewebnσveℓ.com
"Of course," he said, warm now, generous, the voice of a man offering a treat to a dog, "I could always sell the property to you. If you came to me. I’m sure we could work something out."
The room held its breath.
Solenne turned her head and looked at him. Her deadpan eyes, flat as still water for days on end, flickered once with a small cold light.
"I belong to him," she said.
Two words. No heat in them. Just fact, stated the way you would state the color of the sky.
Barten’s smile finally cracked.
He turned to Aidan, and the glossy charm thinned to show the thing underneath, the spoiled, impatient cruelty of a boy who had never been refused and did not own the equipment to handle it.
"State your price," he said. "For her. Everyone has one." His voice dropped, pleasant and certain. "Or one evening you will be walking home, and your life will simply end, and no one will ever think to ask why. Do you understand the family you are standing in front of?"
Aidan felt the heat climb again, faster this time, the leash creaking.
His hand had already begun to close.
And then, somewhere in the cold back room of his mind where he did his real thinking, a different door opened.
He looked at Barten properly for the first time. At the two Tier-9 auras he could feel idling in the lobby below, bodyguards waiting on a leash of their own. At the family name. At the guild ranked 89th in the world, with all the vaults and veins and stored fortune that came with it.
’He came to me,’ Aidan thought. ’In public. With a threat. In front of a room full of witnesses who will all swear it was the other way around.’
The glint that rose in his eyes was not anger anymore.
It was arithmetic.
"You know what," Aidan said, and the shift in his voice made the agent’s skin crawl without the man understanding why, "you’re right. Some things can’t be bought."
He let that hang for a second.
"Trash." He shook his head slowly, the way a man does at a dog that has soiled a nice rug. "You’re not even worthy of being my threat. Go back to your mommy, or whatever it is that is still cleaning up after you, or..."
He didn’t bother finishing the sentence.
He took Solenne’s hand, turned his back on the heir to the Brimlock Heaven Guild, and walked out of the agency.
Behind him, the silence was total.
No one had ever turned their back on Young Lord Barten. No one had ever called him trash and then simply left, as if a second sentence would have been a waste of breath.
The look on his face curdled from shock into something far uglier.
He left a few minutes later without signing anything.
The property he had seized purely to spite a stranger, he abandoned just as quickly. The manager who had thrown away a real buyer for a famous name watched the contract evaporate with the sick expression of a man who had bet wrong twice in a single afternoon.
Barten did not care about the house. He never had.
In the elevator down, he pressed a contact crystal to his ear.
"Get me two from the guild. Tier-9. The quiet ones." A pause, his voice silk laid over a razor. "And the tracer I planted on the woman in the lobby. Tell me it is still live."
It was.
A thread of energy thin as a single hair clung to the hem of Solenne’s coat, pulsing a location back to its master every few seconds.
’Run, little nobody,’ Barten thought, watching the dot crawl across the crystal in his palm. ’Run somewhere nice and far. I would hate for the city to hear you scream.’
Out on the street, Solenne walked half a step behind Aidan, quiet.
[A Tier-2 tracking thread has attached itself to your companion’s garment, Player Aidan. The concealment is crude. Shall I sever it?]
’Leave it,’ Aidan thought. ’It’s pointing the right way.’
"There’s a thread on my coat," Solenne said. Not a question.
"Hem. Left side. Cheap work." Aidan didn’t slow his pace. "He set it in the lobby. He probably thinks I haven’t noticed."
"You want him to follow."
"I want him alone," Aidan said. "Him, whatever muscle he scrapes together, and no cameras, no city, no witnesses he can pay off afterward." He glanced at her sidelong. "You eat first. You find a home. You handle problems. In that order. Today’s running long, so we’re doing the last one early."
He chose the direction with care.
Not the estate. Not anywhere he might one day want to keep. He walked them out past the commercial towers, past the edge of the residential rings, out to where the city thinned into scrubland and old quarry roads and the kind of empty, unwatched ground where a thing could happen and the world would never hear of it.
The tracer pulsed faithfully the whole way.
They did not wait long. fгee𝑤ebɳoveɭ.cøm
A sleek black craft set down at the mouth of the quarry as the light went orange, and Young Lord Barten stepped out of it with his charm packed away and his cruelty finally off its leash.
Behind him came two men.
They moved without sound and without a wasted motion, carrying the heavy, settled presence of Tier-9 powerhouses who had ended more lives than they could be bothered to count. Brimlock enforcers. The quiet ones, exactly as ordered.
[Threat assessment complete. Two Tier-9 entities. Combined output: negligible.]
Barten smiled across the dead ground at the man in the plain coat and the woman beside him.
"No city now," he said. "No clever mouth to save you out here, nobody."
Aidan rolled his neck once, slow, and the last of the afternoon’s patience went out of him like a tide pulling back from a shore.
’Finally,’ he thought.
’A quiet afternoon.’
