100x Rebate Sharing System: Retired Incubus Wants to Marry & Have Kids

Chapter 569 - 568 - A Mother’s Eventual Breaking Point

The Office — One Floor BelowThe adventurer found the guild master at his desk.

Young kid — the youngest in the current roster, still carrying the slightly-anxious energy of someone who had not yet been on enough missions to replace anxiety with resignation.

"Guild master." He shifted his pack. "We’re ready to depart. If we don’t move now we’ll miss the northern checkpoint before it closes for the night."

Santora sat with his hands flat on the desk.

"I know," he said.

He did not move.

The adventurer waited.

"Guild master."

Santora exhaled.

The long, slow exhale of a man releasing something he had been holding for a very long time. Not all of it. Just enough to stand.

He stood.

Took his sword from the rack.

Buckled it.

Looked at the ceiling.

At the floor above him, where his wife was being treated by a method he had not asked about in sufficient detail because some part of him had decided that not asking in sufficient detail was the right approach to this particular situation.

’I hope you’ll be alright,’ he thought. At the ceiling. At his wife on the other side of it.

He turned toward the door.

The door opened.

Helviana.

Her maid dress composed. Her face carrying its warm glow. She gave a full, correct bow as she entered — the skirted bow of a woman in service — and straightened.

"Before you depart," she said. Her voice the voice of a woman delivering a message from a position of service, warm and clear and entirely calm. "The master suggests you might wish to see signs of recovery before you leave."

The adventurer looked at her.

Looked at the guild master.

Remus Santora looked at Helviana.

At the glow on her face.

At the composed certainty in her eyes.

He was already moving before she had finished the sentence — the long, fast stride of a large man crossing a floor and a staircase and a corridor with the single-minded urgency of a man who had been told his wife was showing signs and had received this as the only relevant information.

The Chamber

The guild mistress was on her back.

This was the thing.

When Santora came through the door — still moving fast, the door swinging wide, his eyes finding the bed immediately — she was on her back, her skirt arranged, her blouse present, her hands at her sides with the small, present, alive quality of hands that were where they were by choice rather than by paralysis.

Her eyes were open.

Looking at the ceiling.

The blue — gone. Every trace of it. The skin of her hands, her neck, her face: warm. The natural, living warmth of a woman who was breathing deeply and whose color had returned in full.

The dark circles were shadows now. Nothing more.

Santora crossed the room in four steps.

He went to his knees at the bedside.

His large hands finding her hands — both of them, his palms covering hers entirely — and the sound he made was not a sound he had made in front of anyone in thirty years.

"Tina," he said. His voice had lost all its register. "You’re—"

She looked at him.

Her eyes — and they were aware, they were fully, completely, furiously aware — found his face.

"Husband."

Her voice.

Barely above a breath. The returned voice of a woman who had not spoken in weeks, thin and rough and genuine and carrying everything it carried.

"Where were you," she said.

"I’m here," he said. "I’m here now."

"Why did you—" She stopped.

"Tina."

"Why did you leave me—"

"I didn’t leave you. I’m here. I’m—" His voice cracking along a line that had been under stress for months. "You’re warm. Your hands are—" He turned them over. The pink fingertips. "You’re warm."

She looked at his face.

At the tears on it.

She had seen this man cry twice in eleven years.

She looked at the ceiling.

’Don’t you dare cry,’ she told herself. ’Don’t you dare. Not in front of—’

A tear ran down her temple anyway.

Santora saw it.

He pressed her hands to his face.

She let him.

The guild mistress, lying on her back in a chamber that smelled of things she was going to think about later when she was alone and had the strength to be furious properly, let her husband hold her hands to his face and breathed the deep, full, recovered breath of a woman whose body had been given back to her.

In the corner.

Viktor stood at the window.

Not looking at the couple at the bedside. Looking out — at the street below, where two horses were being walked to the stable, where the night was doing its ordinary business, where the capital’s glow on the southern horizon indicated ten miles and a morning and a gate and everything that came after.

He had his hands in his pockets.

The particular, settled quality of a man who has completed a step and is noting the completion.

Behind him, Santora was speaking — the low, careful, fractured voice of a man reassembling himself in front of his wife.

"—you’re going to be fine. He said you’d be fine. I’ll stay—"

"Go." The guild mistress’s voice. Still thin but carrying something underneath the thinness — the flat, definitive quality of a woman who was returning to herself from a long distance and finding that herself had opinions. "You made a promise. Go fulfill it."

"Tina—"

"If you break a promise because of me I will never forgive you."

Santora’s silence.

The particular silence of a man who knows the sentence he just heard was true.

"I’ll be back," he said. "Before the winter."

"Go."

He stood.

Looked at his wife.

At the warm color of her. At the depth of her breathing. At the alive, present, furious intelligence in her eyes that had been absent for weeks.

He looked at Viktor.

At Viktor’s back at the window.

He gave a bow.

The bow of a man who had promised something and was keeping the promise and was not yet at peace with everything that had preceded the keeping.

He left.

The door closed.

His footsteps in the corridor.

The staircase.

The front door of the guild, below, opening and closing.

Viktor turned from the window.

He looked at the guild mistress.

She looked at him.

She was on her back. Her skirt arranged. Her hands at her sides. Her full, recovered, milk-warm body lying in the candlelit chamber with the breathing of a woman who had been given back her lungs.

Her face was the face of a woman who knew exactly what had happened to her and was holding every piece of that knowledge behind the clearness of her eyes and the stillness of her expression.

Her husband’s footsteps were audible below.

Then: outside.

Then: the sound of horses being urged to the road.

Then: nothing.

Viktor looked at her.

At the tears that were still running from the outer corners of her eyes — not from grief or recovery, now. From the very specific, very clear, very controlled fury of a woman who was choosing not to move until she understood the full dimensions of what she was dealing with.

The tear ran down her temple.

Into her hair.

He looked at it.

His mouth curved.

"So," he said. The voice of a man who was not in a hurry. The voice of a man who had sent a guild master on a two-week adventure and had a chamber to himself and a recovered woman with an operational voice and two maids with specific educations.

He took one step toward the bed.

"Should we begin your treatment, my lady."

The guild mistress looked at him.

Her jaw was set.

Her eyes were clear.

Her hands, at her sides, curled slowly into fists.

Her mouth opened.

"I am going to—"

"Yes," Viktor said. "You probably will."

He sat on the edge of the bed.

"Eventually but don’t you think, you need to know your lost son’s location first."

"!?!"