The S class Guide belongs to the Duke

~Chapter 10~

Gold light flooded the Free Hall, and every voice in it died at once.

It spilled from the dark crystal beneath Elewisa's palm, climbing the walls and turning the paper lanterns pale. A woman near the board dropped her cup. Somewhere behind her a chair scraped back.

"What in the five hells is that?"

"It's gold," someone whispered.

“Doesn't gold mean an S-Class?”

“But they don't exist."

"My grandmother said they were extinct. Gone for decades."

"Extinct," a man repeated, as if the word tasted wrong.

The whispers swelled, rolling across the hall like wind through dry grass. Elewisa drew her hand back so fast her knuckles cracked against the table. The clerk behind the grate had gone gray. His ink-stained fingers fumbled with the ledger, and he squinted at the stone, then at her, then at the stone again.

"Malfunction," he stammered. "It must be malfunctioning. The mana stone’s probably drained. Forgive me, miss, this has never happened." He snapped his fingers at a younger clerk. "Bring the second device. The good one."

"I didn't do anything," Elewisa said, barely above a whisper.

"No, no, of course not. It's definitely the device." He bowed twice, sweat shining at his temples. "A thousand apologies."

The second device was smaller and brighter, kept in a locked drawer. The younger clerk set it down with trembling hands. Elewisa laid her palm over it because everyone was staring and refusing would be worse.

It blazed gold, brighter than the first.

The hall made a sound like a single breath drawn by two hundred people. The clerk's mouth opened and closed. "Do not move," he said hoarsely. "Not one step.I'll go fetch the master." He bolted through the door at the back, scattering papers behind him.

Elewisa stood frozen. Her heart hammered against her ribs, and the voices pressed in on every side. Run. The word beat through her head. Run now, before they close in. This was a mistake, she had walked straight into the one place where being seen was fatal.

She turned toward the door, and the broad man with the scarred jaw was standing in front of it.

He did not raise a hand or draw the sword across his back. He simply stood with his arms folded and his shoulders filling the frame, and the look he gave her was almost mild. He was not blocking the way out. He was guarding it, from everyone else.

Elewisa swallowed hard. She could not leave now even if she wanted to.

Two floors above a quiet tavern at the edge of the manor road, Nevan stopped in front of a door and cleared his throat.

"This is it, Captain." He held up a folded sheet, reading as he spoke. "Lady Selene Vance. B-Class Guide, born of noble blood, eight years of service. Glowing letters from every Esper she has guided. Very discreet. Very experienced."

Cedric said nothing. He knew how this would end. Whatever the Emperor had sent, it would hurt, and he would endure it, and then he would send it home.

He knocked once and went in.

The room was warm and low-lit, a single lamp on the sideboard turning the air the color of honey. Candles had been set out on the sill and lit, and the shutters drawn against the wet night. Someone had taken trouble over this room. He noted it the way he noted everything — briefly, and with suspicion.

The woman standing in the middle of it turned when the door closed.

She was tall for a noblewoman, dark-haired, composed, dressed in court fashion cut for travel — high collar, narrow waist, deep plum silk that caught the candlelight when she moved. Her eyes were a pale gray, and they had already found his face and settled there before he had taken two steps into the room, like a woman who had been waiting a long while and had rehearsed exactly how she intended to look when the waiting ended.

"My lady." Cedric inclined his head. "My name is Cedric. I will be—"

"There is no need for introductions."

Her voice was low and warm. "I know exactly who you are. Everyone in the capital knows of the famous Captain Cedric Voss of the Ravenguard."

"Then we can begin."

“Ah." A small, private smile, as if he had just confirmed something she had heard about him. "Not yet. I have known it since I was sixteen."

Cedric paused.

"Your coming-of-age ceremony," she went on, softer now, moving half a step nearer. "I was presented that same season. Third row, second column, in blue. You walked past the third pillar and did not look at a single one of us, and I remember thinking that a man who looks at nobody must be very interesting to look at."

"You remember where you stood."

"Of course I do." Her head tilted. "I have remembered it for eleven years."

Cedric blinked once. Then, flatly, because he had learned long ago that nothing good ever came of letting a Guide warm up to him: "Shall we begin?"

Her smile held. Whatever she had expected, she did not show the disappointment.

"Of course," she said.

She turned and walked to the far side of the room, and it was only then that he noticed the robes. Thin, pale silk, cut loose at the shoulders and waist, the kind Guides wore for sessions — nothing like the buttoned court dress she had arrived in. She must have changed before he came up. She must have planned it.

And the silk was thin.

He noticed it the moment she crossed between the candles — noticed the way the light came through the fabric instead of simply falling on it, turning the robe translucent where it hugged her body. The candle on the sill sat behind her, and when she stepped past it the whole length of her legs showed through the silk in soft, warm shadow, the line of each thigh, the small dimple above one knee. The fabric caught between her shoulder blades and she did not adjust it. She let it cling.

She stopped at the foot of the bed. She turned. She held his eyes, and did not look away, and her hands came up to the small silver clasp at her throat.

Then she let the robe fall.

"What are you doing?" His voice came out flat and dangerous

It slid off her shoulders in one long whisper of silk and pooled at her feet, and she stood there in nothing but candlelight, chin lifted, without a scrap of shyness. The light caught the long line from her shoulder to her hip, the shadow between her breasts, the pale slope of her stomach. Her hands stayed loose at her sides. She was not posing. She was presenting— the way a woman presents something she has decided to give.

Cedric looked.

"I was briefed on your condition," she said. Her voice had dropped half an octave, close enough now that he felt it against his mouth as much as heard it. "The pain. The instability. The way conventional guiding fails you." Her finger slid slowly away from his lip, down his chin, and did not stop. "Conventional guiding," she murmured, "will not do you a scrap of good."

Her palm flattened against his chest.

"So. This is the only way."

Warmth rolled off her in a slow, deliberate wave.

Cedric's chest seized.

She pressed one finger against his lips. "So hush. Let me take care of you."

Warmth poured from her skin into his, and the effect was instant and terrible. It did not soothe him. It scraped. Every nerve in his body went white-hot, as if someone were dragging a blade along the inside of his veins. His hand shot up and caught her wrist, trying to push her back.

Selene felt it. A flicker crossed her face, and then the smile returned, firmer than before. Her grip tightened on his arm.

"Stop resisting your Grace," she whispered. "You'll feel better soon. Bear with it."

She kissed him there once, slow, deliberate, an open press of lips and the barest graze of teeth. Then again, a fraction lower, and again, working her way down the side of his neck while her hands stayed flat on his chest and her warmth pushed into him in steady pulses that made the blade under his ribs twist a little further each time.

He made a sound. Low, involuntary, somewhere between a groan and a grunt.

Selene heard it. Her lips curved against his skin.

"See, there's no other guide like myself," she said.

"it feels better than any guiding you've ever had, right?"

She did not stop. That was the thing. Any other Guide he had ever sat across from had adjusted the moment his face changed — pulled back, softened the flow, or even stopped the session. Selene did none of that. She kept her palms flat on his chest and kept pushing, kept the warmth rolling into him in that same steady, relentless rhythm, and his aura kept fighting it, and the two of them ground against each other under his own sternum like a key turning in a lock filed one tooth off true.

"You need to stop this now," he managed.

"Why?" She lifted her head, and there was something in her gray eyes now that had not been there when he walked in — a kind of hunger she had been hiding behind good manners. "Your file says every Guide before me stopped; they gave up. They failed. So perhaps it is not the guiding that is wrong." She leaned in again, close enough that her breath stirred the hair at his temple. "Perhaps it is the method."

“Or the person.”

Her fingers found the top buttons of his shirt and started working them loose, unhurried, one at a time, and each time her knuckles brushed the hollow of his throat his breathing hitched a little more. She pushed the linen aside and pressed her palm flat over his bare sternum, right over the ache, skin on skin, and her guiding pushed harder.

gods, he thought. Not like this.

He shut his eyes and dragged his mind away from the heat, from her mouth, from the fire in his chest. He found one cold thing to hold onto, the stillness of a river at night, and he reached for it with everything he had.

His hand closed around her throat.

Selene's eyes flew open. His fingers were not tight enough to choke her, but they were tight enough to tell her he could.

"Get off me," Cedric said, each word quiet and level, "or I will kill you."

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