"Are you shocked by a mere five hundred royal gold coins, Ser?"
Avoinese was smirking. She sat back on her velvet couch with the teacup balanced on her fingertips, and her purple eyes glittered with quiet delight. She loved watching him squirm. To her, the look on Max's face was the best entertainment she had been offered all week.
Max and Sylan gulped at the same time.
Neither of them could find a way to answer. The number was still ringing in their skulls like a gong that someone had struck and then run away from. Max's mouth opened and closed once, then twice. Behind his eyes, in the dark space where two minds shared one body, there was a long, stunned silence.
Then Sylan's voice came crashing through it.
'Accept it.'
'What, Syl?'
'Goddamnit, just accept it!' Sylan was shouting, as loudly as a ghost could shout. 'I don't care if you have to share every secret of our entire household! Share our secrets, too! Just accept it, so we can get that fucking five hundred royal gold coins!!!'
Max did not move a muscle on the outside. He kept his polite smile in place and his hands folded on his knees, but inside, his thoughts were racing.
'Hey, even if we accept it,' he thought, 'what happens if we die while gathering that intel? We'd be acting as her little spy and her eyes, running around the palace. What if we die doing it? We'd go right back to the start again, and then what? Poof. No more royal gold coins, Syl.'
He was right, and he knew it. He wanted to accept as badly as Sylan did. But he also had a bad feeling in the pit of his stomach. If he said yes now and died halfway through the job, he would wake up in his next round with empty pockets and no memory of a single coin.
'We could just save it,' Sylan said.
'Save what?'
'The progress. You know, like when you're playing Skyrim or GTA. If we die and regress, I can save our progression, and boom, we keep the money. We can keep acting as her spy, as many times as we want.'
Max's eyes widened. He hid it quickly behind a small cough.
'Motherfucker,' he thought. His whole body went rigid. 'We have a power like that, and you didn't fucking tell me?!'
'You didn't ask.'
'Fucker!' Max would have stood up if it had not been for the woman across from him. 'That would have been so useful! We could have outsmarted every assassin who tried to kill your cousin's ass, and then killed them with our own hands! What was the point of all those past fifteen regressions, where I saved both of your cousins and then died and died and died again?! I swear I'm going to kill you someday, Syl!'
'The reason I didn't tell you,' Sylan said, in a very small voice, 'is that it eats much of our emotions, Max.'
'Who gives a fuck about our emotions!'
Max was fuming now. Part of him knew he sounded irrational, and part of him did not care. 'I would rather burn every last one of my emotions to use that goddamn passive! You should have said so earlier, Syl!'
The silence that followed was long and heavy.
'Sorry,' Sylan said at last.
His voice was thin, and it carried a sorrow that made Max's anger drain away all at once. It was not the kind of sorry that a man gives when he is caught. It was the kind a person gives when they have been carrying a weight alone for a long time, and have only just been told that the weight was a mistake.
Max let out a long internal sigh.
'Look,' he thought, more gently. 'I'm sorry, all right? I know I acted like an asshole again, and I'm sorry for that. You couldn't blame me for being angry, but I can't blame you either. You didn't tell me because you were worried that I might lose all my emotions. Not just mine. Both of ours. You were afraid we'd turn into living corpses with nothing left inside.'
Sylan did not reply.
Max had expected that. He did not push. He only repeated it softly, the way you repeat a word to a child who has not quite heard.
'Sorry, Syl. I really am.'
In the back of his mind, something small and golden flickered, like a clock hand ticking forward by one notch. It was not forgiveness yet, but it was close.
Max filed the passive away in a locked corner of his mind. He might use it soon, but not now. He was frightened of losing his emotions early, before he had even finished learning what they were for. And he had made himself a promise. This time, he was not going to die and regress because of a foolish death.
He drew a breath, lifted his head, and opened his mouth.
"Forgive me for being rude, but..."
"Whatever you wish to say, Ser, it will not be rude to me," Avoinese said, cutting him off.
She said it so smoothly that he blinked. She did not even raise her voice.
"This is only an offer. If you do not accept it, I will understand. Even I would be suspicious if someone offered me five hundred royal gold coins for a favor. Wouldn't you?"
Max shut his mouth.
'Goddamnit,' he thought. 'She just cut me off, and answered my question before I even asked it!'
'Told you she was smart, Max,' Sylan said. There was a trace of dry satisfaction in his voice.
"Yes, Your Highness," Max said, recovering. "It does feel suspicious. I mean, money is money, and I truly want to accept it. But that is a very large price for a few pieces of information. It seems excessive."
Avoinese tilted her head. Her silver hair slid over her shoulder like a curtain of moonlight. "Then do you want me to cut the offer? I can propose a lower amount, if that makes you more comfortable." She lifted her cup and took a small sip.
"No, no," Max said at once. "I do want to accept it. I only want to understand why you're offering such an excessive amount, Your Highness."
-SIP!
The sitting room was very still. The fire popped in the hearth, and a thin ribbon of steam rose from the teacup and vanished.
Avoinese lowered the cup to her saucer and looked down at it.
"The thing is, Ser," she said quietly, "the Crown Prince and I have always been destined to be married."
Her voice had changed. It had lost its razor edge and become soft, almost wistful. She traced the rim of the cup with one finger.
"I know he has no feelings for me. I accepted that long ago. But at the very least, I thought he would show me some decency. I thought he would treat me as his fiancée, the way I treat him as my fiancé. It is only a duty, after all, a duty to the crown and to the throne. But his empty, thoughtless mind cannot even acknowledge me as that."
She sniffed once, and lifted her hand to her eye.
"And that saddens me deeply."
The room was silent.
'Hey, at least offer her your handkerchief, Max,' Sylan whispered.
'Fool. Can't you see?' Max thought. 'She wants me to pity her.'
'Oh, so you're smart, after all. Here I thought you'd fallen into her trap and were about to start feeling sorry for her.'
'I admit I feel a little sad about how the Crown Prince treats her,' Max thought. 'But I'm not going to pity her. She's a cunning snake, Syl.'
'Yeah. I know.'
Max cleared his throat. He lifted his chin and kept his voice as respectful as he could.
"Then I will accept your offer, Your Highness. As long as you pay me the same amount as you promised. Then we have a deal."
The sniffling stopped.
Avoinese lowered her hand. She turned her head slowly, and her purple eyes met his. There was no trace of sadness in them. There never had been.
"Hah," she said. "How harsh of you."
She leaned forward.
"Do you not trust me?"
The air in the room changed.
It happened all at once. A pressure descended on Max like a mountain pressing on a matchbox. His jaw locked. His breath caught in his chest. His whole body curled in on itself, as if an invisible hand had grabbed him by the spine and squeezed. He could not scream. He could not even blink.
His body dropped to the floor.
His knees hit the white marble with a crack. His palms slapped down beside them, and his vision swam. Then, slowly, the room around him began to melt.
The walls stretched. The ceiling darkened. And out of the shadows that gathered behind the velvet couch, shapes began to rise. They were tall and thin and wrong. There was one, then two, then a dozen of them, a crowd of demons standing shoulder to shoulder behind the silver-haired woman. They all had purple eyes. They all had wide, slow, horrifying smiles that stretched too far across their faces. And every one of them was looking straight at him.
Max shook. His teeth rattled in his skull.
'MAX!' Sylan screamed. 'This bitch! I swear I'm going to kill her!'
'ARRRGGGHHHH!!!' Max screamed inside his own head. 'DAMNIT!'
"I-I'm sorry!" he choked out loud. His voice cracked in the middle. "I'm sorry for being rude, Your Highness! I'm sorry that I didn't have a single ounce of trust in you! So please, please stop exuding your killing intent!"
For a moment, nothing happened.
Then Avoinese laughed.
It was a light, delighted, silvery laugh, the kind that a girl makes at a garden party. The pressure vanished. The demons dissolved. The walls snapped back into their proper shape, and the sunlight poured through the tall windows as if nothing had happened.
"Hahahaha! It was a joke, Ser Sylan!"
She waved her hand and wiped a tear of laughter from the corner of her eye.
"It was only a joke. I'm sorry, please do not take it seriously. Hahahaha! Oh, I love your reaction. Here I thought that everyone I met was boring. But you, at least, are someone who makes my life interesting, when I tease you. Hahahaha!"
Max was still on his hands and knees, gasping for air. A cold sweat ran down the back of his neck.
'Teasing us?!' Sylan was nearly incoherent with rage. 'That was fucking teasing?! Oh, I swear I'm going to fucking kill her, Max!'
'I'm not going to lie, I agree with you, Syl,' Max thought grimly, as he pushed himself up on shaking arms. 'Goddamnit, I want to kill her for that. That wasn't even a joke! What sane person does that to someone, exuding their killing intent like that, and calls it teasing?! Even if she's my crush, that went too fucking far.'
He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
'And if I didn't know how capable she is when it comes to people who threaten her, I would have tried to kill her right here. And then I would have ended up dead in the process. No. I would have been tortured so much that I would have begged for death before I got it.'
He knew very well what she was capable of. He knew it better than anyone.
In the game, Avoinese had been so cruel to the heroine that fans had given her a nickname that could not be repeated in polite company. In one of the bad ending routes, she had Emiliana tortured, and then fed to her hounds. In another, she staged a public execution in the Solanian capital. Before it, she subjected the heroine to a humiliation so vile that the game hid it behind a double warning screen. And after that, she cut her head off, in front of a cheering crowd, as if she were finishing a show.
Max's hand curled into a fist against the floor. He wanted to punch her. He wanted it so badly that his arm trembled.
But he held back. He closed his eyes, took a slow breath, and began to chant silently in his head.
'INNER PEACE. INNER PEACE. INNER PEACE.'
He exhaled. He opened his eyes. He pulled himself back up onto the velvet couch and put on a smile, a smile that was a little too stiff at the corners.
"I-I see, Your Highness," he said. "Then please, don't do that again next time, all right? I thought you were really going to kill me, right here, right now."
"Very well," Avoinese said. She took up her teacup again and waved a hand carelessly. "I will stop jesting. Then go and do your job already."
Max blinked. "W-what?"
"Wut wut duhhh?" Avoinese mimicked him, with a perfectly straight face. She raised an eyebrow. "Are you daft?! Go, before I change my mind, and have my hounds tear you apart, Ser."
"Y-yes!" Max shot to his feet and bowed so deeply that his forehead nearly touched his knees. "Thank you for your generosity!"
He smiled as he said it. It was a very bright smile, and there was a vein pulsing in his temple.
One of the butlers, who had been standing beside the door without making a sound, stepped forward and opened it. He did not look at Max. He simply held it wide and gestured toward the corridor with a white-gloved hand.
Max walked out of the room with his back very straight. He kept his steps even. He did not look back.
He followed the butler through the long, sunlit hallways of the manor, past the polished suits of armor and the portraits of silver-haired ancestors, past a line of silent maids who bowed as he passed. He stepped through the front doors and onto the gravel drive, and then through the iron gates and onto the road. Only then did he let out a breath that he felt he had been holding since the day he was born.
'I need a drink,' he thought.
'You need a priest,' Sylan said.
Up in her sitting room, Avoinese had risen from the couch and walked to the tall window. She stood there with her teacup in her hands and her silver hair spilling down her back, watching the small figure on the road grow smaller and smaller. The afternoon light fell across her face, and the little mole under her right eye looked like a tiny black star.
She took a slow, thoughtful sip of her tea.
"Haah," she said softly, to the empty room. "This will be interesting."
***
On the terrace, Bell had gone completely rigid.
She was kneeling on the fake grass with her hands clenched on her knees, her silver-grey eyes narrowed to slits and her blond hair standing slightly on end, as though it had been electrified. She had listened to every word of the story without interrupting, which was a record for her tonight. But now the silence had run out.
"She's a goddamn bitch, Max!" Bell exploded.
Max jumped. A few pigeons on the rooftop across the street took off in a panic.
"I swear, if I ever met her, I would throw a whole gallon of corrosive acid in her face!" Bell went on, shaking her fist at the sky as if Avoinese were hiding somewhere behind the moon. "A whole gallon! I'd make her feel what it's like to be toyed with! I'd pour it slowly, and I'd take notes!"
"Bell..."
"She teased you? By trying to suffocate you with her aura? That's not teasing! That's attempted murder with a smile!" Her voice cracked on the last word, and she threw up her arms. "Who does that?! And you wanted to marry her?!"
"I never wanted to marry her!" Max said. "I wanted to... admire her. From a safe distance. A very safe distance."
"That's worse!"
"That's why I'm telling you the story."
Bell glared at him. Then she glared at the moon, and then at the lights of the city, as if all of them were suspects. She was breathing hard, and her cheeks were pink from fury. A small tremor ran through her hands. It was strange, but she felt the anger as if it had happened to her. It was hot and personal, a rage that belonged to an old coat she had not known she owned.
Max watched her for a moment. A slow, tired smile pulled at the corner of his mouth.
He had seen that expression before, in another world and another life. It was the same fire that had once burned in the eyes of a muddy girl on a stone courtyard. It was the one thing about Laurentina that had never changed.
"I agree," he said quietly. "Even to this day, I still hate her. I hate her, and her goddamn personality."