My Yandere Tamer System: Every Beast Becomes a Sexy Goddess

Chapter 149: I Kept The Warning To Myself and We Had The Last Quiet Night We Were Going To Get

Soren walked back from the service hall with Cassidy’s last line still in his ears and did not tell any of them.

He walked into the shared room and Maren looked up from a recipe at the same time that Dani looked up from the terminal.

Selah’s eyes tracked him from the floor where she was still drilling the trace on her fingers.

Grimm’s shut eyes twitched toward him from the rug.

Joan looked up from the book she’d been reading and did not say anything.

Mona was in the fruit bowl again.

"Long walk?" Maren Asked.

"Long walk," Soren agreed.

That was how he told them nothing.

He put the same word Maren had used back on the plate, and Maren watched him do it, and she chose not to ask a second thing.

Maren was going to ask him tomorrow.

He knew that.

He was going to answer it tomorrow.

He wasn’t going to answer it tonight.

◆◆◆◆

He took the seat next to Selah on the floor, back to the couch.

Selah tilted her head against his knee half a beat later.

She did not say anything about the fact that his back was in the same posture it had been in when he’d left.

She could feel the posture.

She always could.

She let it sit and went back to her drill.

◆◆◆◆

He ran his internal map that wasn’t literal.

It was the thing he did every night now, and had done every night since the winter, and it was a piece of habit he’d built out of the perception channel and the bond wire and the felt shape of each of them in the room.

Grimm on the rug.

A warm, low steady thread, wolf-thick, present.

Selah against his knee.

Cold at the edges, a bright hard current, at the level she held to keep the balance.

Maren at the counter.

Humming without knowing she was humming, a running warmth that spiked when she was pleased with what she was making and went smooth when it was going right.

Dani at the terminal.

Thin and precise and always slightly further away than the others because Dani was not a bonded animal but a chosen human, and the wire she stood on ran on trust instead of thread.

Joan on the corner chair.

Elective, unlogged, no DING to source her from. Joan was a decision he could feel, since it took her choosing to be there for the thread to run at all, and decisions were a different frequency from bonds.

Mona in the fruit bowl.

Small, sleeping, the cold patch on her back reading no direction tonight.

That was the reading that let him breathe.

◆◆◆◆

All threads accounted for.

He worked through the shelf he’d been keeping in his head since the fall, one entry at a time, and put Cassidy’s new items on top of it.

The office running past her.

The name he did not have yet.

The word "recovery" and what it implied.

He put them on the shelf and did not put them on the plate at the counter.

That was his own curation.

He’d read the same choice off Yara last night and clocked it without naming it, and here he was, twenty-four hours later, doing the same thing to the same pack for the same reason.

Two hands on the cage now.

He was going to have to name that eventually.

◆◆◆◆

Dinner was small.

Maren had made something without ceremony.

Bread with the crust cut off Dani’s slice, because Dani did not eat the crust and Maren had stopped pretending she didn’t know that.

A soup that had begun the day as leftover something and had ended as itself.

Nobody talked much.

That was the pre-event quiet.

The whole pack knew the festival’s opening was tomorrow and none of them wanted to spend the last calm hours talking about the calm.

Soren watched Selah drill.

She had reduced the endurance ramp to something she could do in her sleep now, which was the point of a ramp.

You drilled it until it stopped being a drill and became a floor.

He put his hand on top of her head again and left it there.

The frost trace ran up into his palm the same as it always did, cold at the roots warm at the ends.

Selah leaned into it.

She let out a small sound in the back of her throat that was not a sigh but was the closest thing to one she gave him in front of the others.

Nobody looked, and Soren collected the small sound off her and put it away somewhere for later.

◆◆◆◆

Maren refilled Dani’s bowl without asking.

Dani did not object, which was its own kind of admission.

Joan looked up from her book once, at nothing in particular.

Grimm’s ears rotated toward whatever Joan had looked at, and both of them settled again a second later.

Nothing was wrong.

That was the reading Soren kept getting off the room.

Nothing was wrong in a way that had substance to it, and Soren clocked how much substance it had.

A thing had to have substance before you could feel it start to leak.

◆◆◆◆

Dani looked up from the terminal.

"Traffic on the shell went dark two hours ago."

"Dark meaning?"

"Meaning the buyer stopped buying. Not that the account was closed. That the account went quiet in the middle of a pattern where it should have kept moving."

Soren clocked that.

"You brought it fast," he said.

Dani did not add anything to the sentence, the pattern she’d built for herself now was to bring things fast on purpose, and that she was aware he was aware of the pattern.

He nodded once.

Dani went back to the terminal.

Maren watched the exchange and did not ask, since Maren was the one member of the pack who understood that a thing not said in front of her was going to be said to her later if it needed to be, and pushing for it before the later would have cost her the trust that got her the later at all.

Maren returned to the stove.

Soren put Dani’s item on the shelf next to the others and did not name it either.

◆◆◆◆

Joan closed her book at the same page she’d been on for an hour.

"You didn’t get past that page," Soren said.

"I read it four times."

"Any good on the fourth?"

"Better than the first."

Joan set the book down on the arm of the chair and folded her hands over it.

She was still not going to say the thing that had made her read a page four times. That was Joan. She held her cards down at the level of the elbow and put them down only when the game asked her to. She did not stop being there. She did not tell you what she was carrying either.

Soren clocked her posture and did not push.

She let him not push.

That was the two of them.

◆◆◆◆

They went to bed late.

Selah took the couch, closer to him than she needed to be, folded on her side under a blanket with the trace at her nails glowing thin in the dark.

Maren and Dani took the other room.

Maren had made a rule about it in the fall that Soren still did not fully understand, and Dani had accepted the rule without argument, and the two of them slept in the same room now.

Joan slept elsewhere.

She always did.

Grimm went under his bed.

That was her spot.

She’d had it since the summer, and she’d chosen it herself the first night he’d been in this dorm, and she’d never used another one.

He turned off the lamp.

The dark settled.

Selah’s breathing on the couch got long and slow.

Grimm’s breathing under the bed matched Selah’s without either of them planning it.

The trace at Selah’s nails put a small glow on the ceiling.

Soren closed his eyes.

◆◆◆◆

He was almost asleep when Grimm went taut.

Her whole wolf body under the bed pulled tight in the small way she did when a threat had entered the room.

Only there was no threat that Soren could feel on the map, and none of the threads he was reading were showing a signature that would have caused her to pull.

He opened his eyes.

He ran the map again.

Selah on the couch. Warm-and-cold, steady.

Maren and Dani in the next room, low and steady both.

Joan elsewhere, felt only as a decision.

Mona on the cabinet, sleeping.

Nothing pulled at him.

Nobody was reaching for him.

And Grimm was tight enough under the bed that Soren could hear her heartbeat through the floorboard.

Her shut eyes had not opened.

She was pointing.

At what?

He didn’t know as nothing had entered the room.

Grimm held her taut and Soren lay in the dark and watched the trace on the ceiling and did not sleep.