Free Web NovelChapter 26: A Date With My Stepsister in Another World
Once the last crystal had been mined — or rather, once my spears had finished mining it for me — we took the road back.
Running, as always, the town taking shape on the horizon in the fading light. The one we’d set out from. We got there after nightfall, worn to the bone, and collapsed into an inn without even taking the time to talk.
I slept a dreamless sleep, for once. No corridor, no blood. Just the dark, and rest.
The next morning, Elsa was waiting for us downstairs, already up, a steaming cup in her hands.
"Right." She sized us both up over the rim of her cup. "You did good work. Better than I’d hoped, even. So I’m giving you a breather."
I blinked. "Sorry?"
"We’ve got a day left before we hit the road again. You’re going to make the most of it." She set a purse on the table that clinked heavily — our share of the crystals. "I’ve got errands of my own. Things to settle. I’ll meet you back here tomorrow at dawn. Until then, the town’s yours."
She stood, adjusted the coat on her shoulders, and headed for the door. Then she stopped, half-turned.
"Actually rest. That’s an order."
And she left.
I stayed there a moment, staring at the shut door, the purse in my hand. Something was off.
Elsa, leaving us alone for a whole day, unsupervised, no training, with money on top of it — the Elsa who’d treated rest as a weakness and the road as a calling since day one. That wasn’t her. There had to be a reason behind it. A calculation.
"Kuro." Alice’s hand settled over mine. "You’re thinking so hard you’re going to hurt yourself."
I looked at her. Maybe she was right. Maybe I’d just become incapable of trusting anything that looked like a gift, after the palace, the smiles, the traps. One simple day of respite, and I was already hunting for the knife hidden under it.
I decided, for once, to let go.
"You’re right." I closed my hand around the purse. "We’ve got a day that’s ours alone. We might as well enjoy it."
The smile that rose to her face was worth all the gold in those crystals.
Outside, the town was nothing like the place we’d charged through on our way in. The sun was high, the streets humming with people, and for the first time since we’d set foot in this world, no one was looking at us like a hero or a Saint.
We were just two faces in the crowd. Anonymous. Free.
Alice drew in a deep breath, her nose lifted to the sky, and when she opened her eyes again they were sparkling.
"Where do we start?"
"You decide. It’s your day."
"Our day," she corrected.
And she grabbed my hand and pulled me toward the first stall.
She set the pace, and I followed with a pleasure I couldn’t quite explain to myself. She stopped at every storefront, touched every fabric, marveled at trinkets, haggled over a ribbon with the ferocity she’d have brought to negotiating a treaty.
At a candied-fruit stall, she popped one into her mouth without warning, went wide-eyed, and immediately shoved one between my lips with her fingertips before I could protest.
"Wait — it’s too sweet, but try it anyway."
I nearly choked, she burst out laughing, and the vendor looked at us like we were two children escaped from who knows where. Maybe we were, that day.
Then she spotted a clothing shop, and her eyes lit up with a gleam I learned to dread very quickly.
"Oh. Come on."
That was where it started.
She’d vanish behind a curtain, come back out in an outfit, turn on the spot. The first was a simple dress, pretty, almost demure. The second, far less so.
A skirt that stopped so high on her thighs that the slightest step threatened to reveal the curve of her backside; and a bustier that pushed up and squeezed her generous chest until it spilled over the fabric, the cleft between her breasts deep, offered right at eye level. She planted herself in front of me, one hand on her hip, the other lazily lifting her white hair off the nape of her neck — which only deepened the neckline further. frёewebnoѵel.ƈo๓
"So? How do I look?"
My mouth went dry. I had to make a conscious effort to bring my eyes back up to hers, and I knew, from her little smile, that she’d followed the entire path of my gaze.
"Very beautiful," I said, and my voice came out a notch lower than I’d meant it to.
She went off, came back in another, bolder still. A dress slit high up the thigh, the back bared all the way down to the small of it, the pale skin smooth the whole length.
Then another — something whose fabric seemed to stay on her by some miracle, hugging every curve, clinging to the swell of her hips and her chest so closely you could make out everything beneath. She moved in front of me, arched her back, turned slowly, and I lost the thread of my thoughts with every rotation.
"And this one?" She threw a glance over her bare shoulder, watching for my reaction.
"Gorgeous."
"You said that about the last one."
"They’re all gorgeous," I managed to get out. "The problem is what’s inside them."
It slipped out of her — a delighted little laugh — and she bit her lip as she disappeared behind the curtain, plainly thrilled to have dragged that out of me.
Because I’d understood by now. She couldn’t have cared less about my opinion on the clothes.
Each outfit showed a little more than the last, each pose was calculated, each "how do I look" thrown out to watch me lose my footing a little further. And it was working. I was no longer the polite guy keeping his eyes at a respectable height — I was simply a man, in front of a stunning woman who knew exactly what she was doing, and who took obvious pleasure in letting me know she knew.
The heat climbed up my collar, my gaze lingered despite me on the line of her thighs, the curve of her chest, the small of her back. And every time she caught me at it, her smile widened another notch.
She came out in a last one, an outfit barely decent, and made a show of stretching in front of me, arms raised over her head, which lifted the hem and pulled the fabric taut across her chest.
"You really are looking now," she observed, her voice low, playful, a triumphant gleam in her red eyes. "That’s new."
"Hard not to," I admitted, throat dry, "when you’re doing everything to make me."
"Me?" She laid an innocent hand against her chest — which did not help. "I’m just looking for something to wear."
"Of course."
She finally chose one — one of the more modest ones, to my immense relief. With any of the others on her all day, pressed against me the way she was, I wasn’t sure I’d have lasted long before giving in to exactly what she was so openly trying to provoke.
She made me carry the bag, which I accepted with the dignity of a man who’d lost the battle long ago, and we stepped back out into the street, her on my arm, radiant, me still trying to recover some semblance of composure.
Around noon, she spotted a café-patisserie on the corner of a square, and stopped dead in front of the window.
"There. We’re stopping there."
We settled at a little table by the window. She ordered two golden pastries, glazed with a pale cream, pushed one in front of me and jealously kept the other on her side.
"Try that one first."
I tried it. Sweet, light, melting. She watched me with an almost comical intensity, waiting on my verdict as if the future of the world hung on it.
"It’s good," I admitted.
"Isn’t it?" She took a bite of hers, closed her eyes in pleasure — a genuine sigh of contentment — then opened them again and held out her fork across the table. "Here, mine’s different. Try it."
I leaned in and took the bite she offered me, straight from her fork. A perfectly ordinary gesture. And yet I saw something pass through her eyes — a sudden softness, almost emotion, as she watched me eat.
"You know," she said, slowly setting the fork back down, "I dreamed about doing this with you."
"Poisoning me with sugar?"
"Idiot." She laughed, but her smile softened. "This. All of this. Going out, wandering around, sitting in a café and making you taste my dessert. Tiny things. Normal ones."
She traced a circle on the rim of her cup with one finger.
"On Earth, we couldn’t. Not really, not like this. There was always what people would have thought. What you were supposed to be to me. What I wasn’t allowed to be to you." She looked up. "But here, no one knows us. No one knows anything. Here, we’re just us. And I can finally do everything I wanted for years without ever daring to."
I stayed quiet a moment, the fork between my fingers, weighing what she’d just opened up to me.
"It’s true that it feels good," I said at last. "Letting go. Thinking about nothing, for once." I laid my hand over hers, on the table. "I’m glad you’re here with me, Alice. Really."
She dropped her eyes to our hands. And the red that rose to her cheeks, this time, had nothing calculated about it. She gently turned her hand under mine to hold it, without a word, and we stayed like that a moment, the warm café between us and the hum of the square behind the glass.
The afternoon stretched on, sweet and aimless. We wandered.
We bought grilled skewers from a street vendor and ate them as we walked, burning our fingers and half-fighting over them. She dragged me into the fine quarters — the cobbled squares, the fountains, the alleys where wisteria climbed, a little stone bridge over a canal where boats slid past.
We laughed at everything and nothing.
At a ginger cat that looked down on us from atop a low wall like a lord we’d disturbed, and that Alice tried to win over for a solid minute before it deigned to move off, looking offended. At a hawker who swore his vials cured baldness, love, and gout. At my attempts to haggle, which doubled her over with laughter at every failure — because after three weeks I was still just as terrible at it, and she reveled in it.
"You’re the worst negotiator this world has ever seen," she told me, wiping her eyes, after I’d paid double for a bracelet. "A legendary hero, and you get fleeced by a trinket seller."
"He was convincing."
"He was twelve, Kuro."
At some point, without my really noticing, her hand found mine and slipped into it, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. She didn’t let go.
I said nothing. I left it there, her fingers between mine, and I realized I couldn’t remember the last time I’d held someone’s hand just for the pleasure of holding it.
It was, I think, the first day since I’d arrived in this world that I didn’t think even once about the war, the demons, Alexia, the weight of everything I carried. A day stolen from the rest. A bubble.
And Alice, beside me, glowed the way I’d never seen her glow — not the Saint’s front, not the court’s mask, just her, luminous, happy, marveling at nothing because that nothing, she was living it with me.
Evening fell, and we found a warm restaurant, all dark wood and low light, where they served us a real meal — dishes that were nothing like dungeon rations. We ordered wine. Then a second pitcher.
And the evening changed color.
The wine loosened tongues, softened gestures, drew our two chairs closer without our noticing. Alice, cheeks pink, grew bolder with every glass. Her hand found my arm, my knee, lingered there. She leaned in to talk, far closer than she needed to, her voice dropped a tone, warmer.
"You know you’re a lot more relaxed when you’ve had a drink?" she murmured, chin resting in her hand, red eyes fixed on mine. "I like this Kuro. At least this one looks at me."
"I always look at you."
"No." A slow smile. "Usually you look away at the last second. Right now, you’re not."
She was right. And for once, I had no desire to look away.
The dishes came one after another, the glasses too, and I let myself go — completely, for the first time since the beginning. After all those fights, all those dead weighing on my conscience, all those nights waking with my heart pounding, I granted myself, that evening at last, the simple right to enjoy. Her. The moment. This respite we’d paid for so dearly.
We left late, into the biting cold of the night. She pressed against me at once, her shoulder under mine, both arms wound around my arm, her head resting there.
Our breath fogged in the frozen air. The streets had emptied, and the town was nothing now but a play of shadows and magic lamps, their golden light trembling on the cobbles.
"We look like a couple, Kuro," she said against my shoulder, very softly.
"That’s not wrong."
A silence. Then, lower still:
"Would it bother you, if it actually became true?"
I didn’t answer right away.
I thought back over everything. The wine still turned in my veins, loosening my thoughts, linking things I usually kept carefully apart.
I thought of all those years on Earth, all those weeks here. Of the one person, across two worlds, I’d always been able to count on. The one who showed up at midnight to make me eat, the one who’d emptied herself a hundred times to stitch me back together, the one who had never, not once, stopped being there when everything else was falling apart.
Here, in this world, stepbrother and stepsister meant nothing anymore. We’d never shared a drop of blood. Those words were just a label from another life, another world, that no longer bound us to anything.
And she was beautiful. Truly beautiful, I thought, looking at her, her face lifted toward mine in the cold light, her red eyes, her lips, her warmth against my side, and her body that —
I stopped there. Before I skidded too far.
"No," I said at last. "Not really."
A sincere smile traced itself across her lips. She said nothing more. She simply tightened her hold on my arm and rested her head on my shoulder, content with the moment, the cool air, the silence between us.
We walked like that for a few minutes, without a word, savoring the sleeping town and that soft, new thing floating between us. Then she let go of my arm and stepped a few paces ahead of me.
She turned around, cheeks flushed, and there was something in her eyes I’d never seen there before — nervousness, anticipation, an almost childish case of nerves.
"I’ve prepared a surprise for you." She held out her hand to me, and a whole, dazzling smile lit up her face. "So come with me."
And, flustered, walking fast as if to give herself courage, she pulled me by the hand through the silent streets. To a fancy place — a hotel, its lit facade looming over the square.
We went in. She gave her name at the desk, her voice a touch too high. We rode up in a kind of elevator driven by magic, gliding soundlessly to the top floor.
We arrived in a magnificent suite. High ceilings, wide bays open onto the whole glittering town below, an enormous bed, soft lights floating in the air with no visible source. The luxury of another world.
But it wasn’t the suite that filled my mind.
It was her.
So I walked toward her, with a decided step — toward Alice, who was already devouring me with her eyes. freeweɓnovel.cøm
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Author’s Note:
Quick heads-up: the next Chapter is an R18 Chapter (explicit scene between Kuro and Alice). It’s there for those who want to see how the night unfolds, but it’s completely skippable — nothing important to the plot happens in it. Those who aren’t into that can head straight to Chapter 28; you won’t miss anything of the story. See you there!
