Chapter 58: Class Option
"Smells like strawberries."
The words arrived low and unhurried, close enough that he felt them before he fully processed them, a feminine voice breathing them directly against the side of his neck from behind.
Hands moved across his chest, the touch deliberate in its presentation, fingers tracing a slow path that was designed to communicate something specific.
Ethan stood very still by the door.
His expression settled into something that sat closer to amusement than anything else, the look of someone watching a performance they had already identified as a performance and were content to let run its course.
Ella was, in truth, considerably more restrained than her sister. That much had been apparent from the first night. But she liked to project otherwise, to build a version of herself in conversation and gesture that sat several steps ahead of where she actually was. It was a particular kind of confidence, the kind that announced itself loudly precisely because the quieter version hadn’t fully arrived yet.
Even now, underneath the deliberate movement of her hands across his chest, he could feel it.
A subtle tremor. Small enough that most people wouldn’t have registered it at all.
’Of course you are.’
He kept the thought contained, his face giving nothing away beyond the mild amusement already sitting there.
’I can feel it no matter how small you make it.’
She had been to the brothel once, on a night that neither of them had discussed directly since. The girl who had stood in that room, who had asked him to be gentle, who hadn’t been able to meet his eyes when he held her close, was still present underneath whatever she was doing right now.
The White Tower had taken her nativity in the technical sense, the organizational requirement that cleared the path to full membership. But what lived in the body and what lived in the paperwork were different things, and the tremor in her hands told him everything about which one was sitting at the surface right now.
He said nothing about it.
"What do you want?"
His voice came out even, the smile on his face sitting slightly sideways, not quite reaching the warmth a genuine smile would have carried.
Ella hadn’t come here on her own recognizance. That much he was certain of without needing to think through it carefully. She didn’t carry that kind of intent naturally, and even in her habit of using Ethan to generate a reaction from her sister, she understood the limits of how far to push it.
Whatever had brought her to his rented room in Tona Town had an origin point elsewhere.
"So cold."
She leaned further into his back, her voice carrying the particular quality of someone who had decided the script called for wounded before it called for anything else.
"You’ve so easily forgotten that we once shared a special time together."
She held the lean for a moment.
Then pulled back abruptly, the contact ending as cleanly as it had arrived, and crossed the room to the desk where she took a seat and looked up at him with an expression that had shifted entirely into something more direct.
Her fingers moved idly against each other in her lap.
"My High Regent mother has requested you return to White Tower. There’s an opportunity attached to it."
Ethan turned from the door and looked at her.
"What kind of opportunity?"
"I’m not entirely sure of the details." She paused, her eyes moving briefly to the middle distance before coming back to him. "But from the brief I saw, there’s a reward attached that might interest you."
Another pause.
"It’s a class ritual option."
Ethan held that for a moment.
Most summoners operated within a single class across their entire career. That was simply the structure of it, the natural boundary of what a person’s energy and cultivation base could sustain. Dual class existed, but it was rare in the way that things were rare when the conditions required to produce them were genuinely difficult to meet rather than merely expensive.
White Tower had methods for forcing it to happen. Special ritual processes that sat outside what was available through normal channels, requiring a concentration of resources that only an organization operating at White Tower’s level could reasonably assemble and distribute.
Only a handful of summoners in any given generation accessed it.
The main reason Hela could engage summons and beasts in direct physical combat, could stand in front of a tier 8 creature and answer it with her own body rather than working through a contracted beast, was the Black Reaper class running alongside her summoner foundation. Two classes operating simultaneously, each one reinforcing what the other lacked.
If Ethan could access something equivalent, the implications for where his ceiling sat moved considerably.
"Ohh."
His eyes shifted, the glow behind them carrying a quality that didn’t appear often.
"Okay."
He walked to the bed and lowered himself onto it, the weight of the bag he’d been carrying finally releasing as he settled back.
"I haven’t been paid my salary yet. We can go tomorrow."
He wanted the month’s payment processed before anything else moved forward. The exchange haul was already submitted. The stipend would follow on schedule. Going anywhere before that cleared would leave an uncomfortable loose end, and loose ends had a way of compounding when new commitments were added on top of them.
"It’s fine." Ella stood, her shoulders lifting in a small shrug. "We aren’t the only ones going, so I’ll need to speak with the others first anyway."
She moved toward the door, her hand finding the frame as she reached it.
Then she stopped.
She turned back just enough to look at him over her shoulder, one finger resting lightly against her lower lip, her expression rearranging itself back into the version she had walked in wearing.
"Don’t close the door, by the way."
Her voice dropped back into the register it had been in when she first breathed against his neck.
"I might pay you a visit sometime in the night."
She held it for exactly long enough, then turned and walked out, her figure moving through the door frame with a deliberateness that said she was aware of every inch of the exit she was making.
The door stayed open behind her.
Ethan looked at the ceiling.
’I’m surrounded by too many temptresses.’
The thought arrived plainly and without drama.
For a brief moment he was aroused, something warmer than his usual detachment moved through him in a turrent of heat as he watched her behind in his mind.
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