Harem Training System: Every Girl I Train Makes Me Stronger!

Chapter 55: 55. I Left the Coat Behind. Found Something I Wasn’t Supposed to See.

They settled on the small porch at the back of the house rather than inside, Catherine returning a few minutes later with two steaming cups and a plate of something simple, and for a while they simply sat in comfortable quiet, watching the last of the daylight fade over the low garden wall.

"About this morning..." Catherine said eventually, breaking the silence herself, which surprised William enough that he simply waited rather than filling the space with anything of his own. "And this afternoon, in my office..."

"You don’t have to explain anything."

"I know, but still... I want to, just a little." She wrapped both hands around her teacup, staring into it rather than at him, the way people often did when approaching something they’d spent years avoiding. "It’s not that... I don’t trust you."

"I think, honestly, you’ve earned considerably more trust than I’ve been willing to give you credit for."

"It’s just that the version of me from before is someone I stopped being a long time ago, and most days I’d rather she just stayed buried..."

"You don’t have to dig her up tonight," William said gently. "I won’t force anything about that."

"I know." Catherine’s fingers tightened slightly around the cup. "But you need to hear me out on this one..."

"There was a unit..."

"A long time ago... I was young, talented, faster than anyone expected an elf my age to be, and I believed... genuinely believed that speed and skill were enough to protect the people who mattered to me."

She stopped there, the sentence hanging unfinished in the cooling evening air, and William watched something pass behind her eyes, old and heavy and clearly still sharp enough to cut.

"There was someone," she said, so quietly William almost missed it entirely. "Someone I couldn’t protect, no matter how fast I was..."

"That’s... that’s most of what I’m willing to say tonight."

William didn’t push. He simply nodded, letting the silence stretch comfortably rather than filling it with questions he already knew she wasn’t ready to answer, and after a moment Catherine seemed to relax slightly, grateful for the restraint even if she didn’t say so directly.

"Thank you, William..." she said instead. "For not pushing."

"I’m good at knowing when to stop pushing." William takes a sip of his tea. "It’s a skill you pick up eventually."

"From your experience, I assume."

"From my experience, indeed," William agreed, not elaborating further, and Catherine, perhaps recognizing the shape of her own reticence reflected back at her, didn’t press either.

They sat together a while longer, conversation drifting toward safer, lighter subjects, Catherine eventually working up the nerve to ask, with visible reluctance, exactly what she’d said about punching being a valid sword technique the night before, and William’s retelling of the story, embellished only slightly for dramatic effect, pulled another genuine laugh out of her that seemed to ease the last of the evening’s earlier heaviness.

"I refuse to believe I pointed at you with the glass," she said, still half laughing. "That’s not something I would do sober or otherwise."

"You did it twice... Very seriously too. Like you were making an important tactical point."

"I was mortified this morning... I am now additionally mortified retroactively for something I don’t even remember doing."

"That seems like an inefficient use of mortification."

"Most of my emotional responses this week have been inefficient." Catherine shook her head, but the corner of her mouth stayed curved upward, some of the day’s earlier weight visibly lifted. "Thank you for that, by the way."

"For not holding it over me constantly... Kaela would have found a way to bring it up in front of the entire training ground by now."

"Kaela would have made it into a nickname."

"She absolutely would have."

They lapsed into a comfortable quiet again, the kind that no longer felt like it needed filling, and William found himself watching the last of the lamplight catch in Catherine’s hair, thinking, not for the first time, that she looked considerably more at ease out here on her own porch than she ever did behind her desk buried under paperwork.

He didn’t say that out loud. Some observations were better left where they were.

"Can I ask you something...?" Catherine said eventually, turning her teacup slowly in her hands. "Not about tonight, but about before... Your experience or maybe your past before you’ve come to this academy."

William kept his expression carefully even. "Well, you can ask, but I might not answer everything."

"That’s fair, I suppose... given how well I’ve modeled that particular behavior myself today." She studied him for a moment. "You said this morning that you’d already died once, and that it takes the edge off being afraid of dying again..."

’What...? When the fuck did I say that?!’ William tried to remember it. ’DON’T TELL ME I STARTED SPITTING EVERYTHING WHEN I WAS DRUNK AND HAVING SEX WITH HER?!’

Catherine continued. "You’ve said things like that more than once, actually, small things dropped in and moved past quickly, like you expect me not to notice."

"I noticed you noticing... but oh well..." William sighed. "My past and experience do in fact have some kind of connection to dying."

"I’m observant... It’s mostly what I have left, these days." There was no real bitterness in it, just a plain, tired honesty. "I’m not asking you to explain everything."

"I know what it’s like to have a version of yourself you’d rather keep in a room nobody else walks into..."

"I just wanted you to know that if you ever did want to open that door, I wouldn’t run from whatever was on the other side of it."

William turned that over for a long moment, the offer landing somewhere deeper than he’d expected it to. "That goes both ways, you know."

"I know," Catherine said quietly. "But I’m just not there yet."

"That’s alright... I’m not in a hurry."

She looked at him then, something unguarded in her expression that hadn’t been there earlier in the evening, and for a moment neither of them said anything at all, the silence carrying more weight and more warmth than most conversations William could remember having in either of his lives.

Somewhere in the middle of it, quiet and unobtrusive, a familiar chime sounded in the back of William’s mind.

[Affection Progress: Catherine Blackwood. Fourteen percent.]

William allowed himself a small, private smile into his teacup, and said nothing at all.

...

It was well past dark by the time William finally rose to leave, Catherine walking him as far as the front door with the loose, unhurried ease of someone who’d genuinely enjoyed the evening rather than merely endured it.

He said his goodnights, stepped out into the cool night air, and had made it almost to the garden gate before he realized he’d left his coat draped over the back of the porch chair.

He circled back around the side of the house rather than knocking again, intending to grab the coat simply and go without disturbing whatever routine Catherine had settled into for the rest of her evening, and it was through a gap in the curtains of a room he hadn’t noticed before, tucked at the back of the house near the kitchen, that he saw her.

The room was small, clearly some kind of converted study or storage space, and every wall of it was lined with swords.

These were not decorative pieces or the kind of ceremonial display William might have expected from someone with a title like the one Olivia had uncovered. These were real weapons, well-maintained despite an obvious layer of disuse, with blades of varying lengths and styles mounted with the kind of careful, deliberate spacing that suggested each one had been placed exactly where it belonged and never moved since.

A soft layer of dust coated the shelves beneath them, but the blades themselves gleamed, clearly cleaned and oiled on some kind of regular schedule despite never once being drawn.

Catherine stood in the center of the room, still in her plain robe, one hand raised toward a particular sword mounted near the center of the far wall, a slim, elegant blade with a hilt wrapped in white leather gone slightly grey with age.

She wasn’t touching it. Her fingers hovered just beneath it, close enough to feel the cold radiating off the metal but not close enough to make contact, and her expression, visible even through the gap in the curtains, carried a depth of grief that made something in William’s chest ache in immediate, sympathetic recognition.

He had seen that expression before. He’d worn it himself, more than once, standing over the graves of soldiers he hadn’t managed to save quickly enough, staring at empty bunks that used to belong to people who trusted him to bring them home.

Catherine stood like that for a long moment, silent, unmoving, her hand hovering beneath the white-hilted sword like she was afraid that touching it would either shatter something fragile or wake something better left sleeping.

Then, slowly, she lowered her hand back to her side, and William watched her shoulders curve inward, the posture of someone carrying a weight they’d been carrying so long they’d forgotten what standing up straight without it felt like.

He didn’t go in. He didn’t knock, didn’t call her name, didn’t do anything at all except stand very still in the darkness outside her window, watching a woman grieve something he didn’t yet understand, in a room full of swords she clearly hadn’t been able to make herself throw away, no matter how long she’d gone without picking one of them up.

After a while, quietly, he retreated the way he’d come, coat forgotten, leaving Catherine alone with whatever ghost lived in that room and whatever name belonged to the white-hilted sword she couldn’t quite bring herself to touch.

He walked back toward the academy under a sky thick with unfamiliar stars, hands in his pockets, turning the evening over in his mind with the same slow, careful patience he brought to every problem worth solving properly.

Whatever had happened to end the career of the White Sword of Astoria, it had left a wound deep enough that eight years hadn’t come close to closing it.

It had left her hand shaking around a practice sword, her voice going brittle at the mention of a title she used to hold, and an entire room of blades kept clean and mounted and untouched, a private museum built around a grief she’d never once let anyone else see.

William thought of Olivia’s redacted parchment, of the whispered instructors in the lounge, of the careful, deliberate way Catherine had built her entire life around never having to face that room again except alone, in the dark, when she thought no one was watching.

Whatever it was, he decided, walking beneath a sky full of stars from a world that still didn’t quite feel like his own, he was going to find out. Not to force her hand, not to drag old pain into the light before she was ready for it.

But because somewhere in that room full of swords was the reason a woman who’d once been fast enough to be a legend now stood in her own backyard shaking at the memory of a fight she hadn’t even been part of, and William had spent two lifetimes now believing that the people worth protecting deserved better than being left alone with wounds like that.

The White Sword of Astoria, he thought, had a story that hadn’t finished yet.

He intended to be there when the rest of it finally came out.