My Yandere Tamer System: Every Beast Becomes a Sexy Goddess

Chapter 151: Selah Watched My Shadow Goddess In My Shirt and Something In The Kitchen Went Colder

Morning came and Yara was in his shirt.

That part wasn’t new.

She’d worn his shirt before, casually, and the borrowing had never counted as an event.

What was new was that she’d chosen it this morning, after a night she had chosen to spend with him, and neither of them was pretending she hadn’t made those choices.

They were pretending something else. They were pretending the count had not moved.

◆◆◆◆

She was at the counter cutting bread, one slow push of the knife then another, the slowness of the whole task.

Soren watched her from the table and did not look away.

That was one of the things he’d decided in the night.

He wasn’t going to look away from her while he still had eyes to look with, and if the thing under the yard wanted to take degrees from him, it could take them off a man watching his wolf make breakfast.

She knew he was watching.

She was choosing not to turn around, and that was the two of them right now, him watching and her letting him, neither of them going to name it before Selah came in.

Selah came in.

She walked in quiet, still under-slept, the trace on her fingers down to a whisper.

One step inside the doorway she stopped.

The cold was wrong.

A room Selah stood in was a room full of Selah’s cold.

It ran to her and off her and back, and she read the whole space off it in the second she crossed the threshold.

This morning the cold read heavy on one side. Not by much. Enough.

She didn’t turn her head toward the counter.

She sat across from Soren, took the slice that had been cut for her, and started to eat, and she read the room while she did it without letting either of them see her do it.

That was how Selah cared.

She paid attention and told you nothing until she’d worked out what she was paying attention to.

◆◆◆◆

The cold on Yara’s side of the kitchen was doing something Selah had not felt cold do before.

It wasn’t pooling.

Cold pooled around a bonded body the same as heat pooled around a warm one.

That was the small physical fact Selah had carried in her hands, the one she’d built the whole ration around.

A bond that had been used pooled thick.

And the cold around Yara was running thin, which was wrong, wrong in a way Selah didn’t have a word for, a wrongness in how the cold sat rather than where it pointed.

She kept her face flat and reached for the soup.

"You reheated this," she said.

"It was going to waste." Yara didn’t turn from the counter. "Maren left it on the stove."

"You were up early."

"I don’t sleep much the night before a festival. You know that."

Selah did know that. S

he also knew Yara had been dressed and moving when she’d walked in, and the knowing sat next to the thin cold and did not settle.

◆◆◆◆

Yara set a plate in front of Soren.

Bread, cheese, the last of the soup.

She didn’t touch him when she put it down, which was deliberate, and then she sat beside him with her shoulder against his and ate, and she was not tired.

Then she touched him.

Just her hand on his forearm, brief, no pressure, the pass a person makes reaching across the table for salt they don’t need.

Her fingers closed on his sleeve for half a second and let go.

Soren didn’t react.

That was the two of them, still pretending.

Selah caught the pass and kept her face still and filed it under whatever she’d been building since she walked in.

"You two are quiet," Maren said from the doorway, coming in with Dani a step behind her.

"It’s early," Soren said.

"It’s early every morning. You’re not usually this quiet." Maren went past them to the burner without waiting for an answer.

She asked questions she didn’t need answered.

It was a thing she did with her hands busy, a noise to fill a room.

Selah watched Yara over the rim of her cup and finally let herself see the thing she’d been circling.

Yara looked fed.

She knew the shape a bonded partner carried the morning after the wire had been used, and

Yara was carrying it now.

A little slow to eat, because a body already given what it usually spent breakfast asking for doesn’t reach for the plate the same way.

Selah’s own body had never once carried that shape after such a night. She rationed.

She spread the cost across the whole week so it never spiked.

She’d built that discipline for the pack when none of the others would, and until this second she’d assumed the discipline covered all of them.

Yara had not paid.

Yara had taken, and the balance had come from somewhere, and either she’d found a way to eat without paying or someone else was paying it for her.

The someone else was sitting between them with a plate he wasn’t touching.

"Selah." Dani had slid into the seat two down, mug in hand, and she was looking at her. "You’re not eating."

"I’m eating."

"You’ve had two bites and you’re holding the third like it owes you money."

"Long day ahead." Selah made herself take the bite. "I’m pacing."

Dani let it go, but she logged it.

Selah could see her log it, the small recalculation behind the eyes that Dani ran on everyone, and she filed Dani’s future report under the same open file she’d opened on Yara at the door.

◆◆◆◆

She wasn’t going to say any of it here.

The finding was too big to set on a breakfast table.

It was the size of a whole rewrite of the ration system she’d run for two seasons, and you did not tell a pack you’d been carrying them wrong until you knew the right shape to carry them in.

Selah had one piece of the right shape.

She needed the rest before she opened her mouth, and the rest wasn’t coming in the next three hours, because in three hours she had a hall to fill with ice in front of foreign delegates and Council monitors.

She could do that.

She’d built the discipline for exactly this kind of morning.

Yara spoke before she could stand.

"You’re reading me."

Selah’s cup stopped halfway to the table.

Around them Maren was banging a pan and Dani was pretending to drink, and neither of them had heard it, because Yara had pitched it low, under the noise, for the one person at the table it was meant for.

"I read every room I’m in," Selah said. "You know that."

"I know what you read. I’m asking what you found."

"Nothing that won’t keep."

"That’s not a no."

"No," Selah agreed. "It isn’t."

They looked at each other.

Soren was between them and out of it at once, watching Yara the same as he’d watched her all morning, missing the second conversation happening across his plate.

That was almost the worst piece of it for Selah.

He was sitting right there and he could not feel what she’d felt at the door.

"When you want to ask me the real question," Yara said, "ask it when the room’s empty."

"I will."

"I’ll answer it."

"I know you will." Selah set the cup down. "That’s not the part that worries me."

◆◆◆◆

She stood.

"I’m going down early," she said, to the table, to no one.

"You’ve got hours," Maren said.

"I want the room cold before anyone’s in it."

Nobody stopped her.

Soren watched her go, and so did Yara, and the two of them did not look at each other after the door closed.

"She’s off," Maren said, to the room.

"She’s focused," Soren said.

"Same face on her, either way." Maren went back to the stove, and the kitchen got louder around the quiet the two of them were keeping.

Selah walked down the corridor with the trace already climbing at her nails and a book she couldn’t balance yet held shut in her head.

The festival opened in three hours.