My Yandere Tamer System: Every Beast Becomes a Sexy Goddess

Chapter 161: I Took My Whole Pack To The Market and Came Home Poorer In Every Sense

The festival market ran along the south green, stalls and smoke and too many people, and Soren made the second mistake of the day off, which was agreeing to take all of them at once.

Soren knew it was a mistake the moment they hit the first stall.

They scattered.

Maren went straight for the food, obviously, and came back within a minute holding something on a stick that was mostly sugar and entirely on fire.

"It’s supposed to be on fire," she said, before he could ask. "It’s a fire-candy. They light it. It’s a whole thing."

"You could have lit it yourself."

"That’s cheating. Also I did light the second one myself and they asked me to stop." She held the stick out. "Try it. Open."

He opened. She fed it to him off the stick, watching his face, and the sugar was good and the small flame was a stunt and her thumb brushed his lower lip when she pulled the stick back and she absolutely did that on purpose.

"Good?" Maren said.

"You did the lip thing on purpose."

"I have no idea what you mean." She was already grinning. "Eat your fire-candy."

Selah wanted to look at the ice sculptures.

There was a stall of them, elaborate, melting slowly in the spring air, and Selah stood in front of the centerpiece with an expression Soren had learned to read as professional contempt.

"It’s structurally stupid," she said.

"It’s a swan."

"It’s a swan that’s going to snap at the neck in an hour because whoever carved it doesn’t understand load."

She reached out and rested two fingers against the swan’s throat.

Frost bloomed under her touch, and the melting seam refroze, and the neck went from doomed to sound in about a second. "There. Now it’s a swan."

The stall owner stared.

Selah walked on, and Soren caught the small satisfied set of her mouth, and he put his hand on the small of her back for a second as they went, and she leaned into the hand a half-degree before pretending she hadn’t.

Dani had found a stall that sold old data-slates and was haggling with the seller in the flat merciless register she used when she had already won and the seller didn’t know it yet.

"You’re overpaying," Soren said, coming up beside her.

"I’m not overpaying. I’m underpaying. He just hasn’t agreed yet." She didn’t look up. "Give it a minute."

It took forty seconds. The seller folded. Dani handed over a fraction of the asking price and took the slate, and on the walk away she bumped her shoulder into Soren’s arm, once, casual, and left it pressed there a beat longer than casual explained.

"You’re in a good mood," Soren said.

"I won a thing and I’m touching my favorite person. It’s a good afternoon."

She said it flat and kept walking, and Soren decided not to make it weird, which was exactly what she’d counted on.

◆◆◆◆

Soren lost Yara for ten minutes and found her at a stall of hunting knives.

Of course.

She had three of them laid out on the cloth and was testing the balance of a fourth, and the stall owner had the wary look of a man who’d realized his customer knew more about his product than he did.

"You don’t need a knife," Soren said. "You are a knife."

"I want one anyway." She sighted down the blade. "For when I’m the girl and not the wolf. The wolf has teeth. The girl should have something."

He couldn’t argue with that.

She bought the knife. She also, without discussion, bought a second smaller one and pressed it into his hand, closing his fingers over the handle with both of hers.

"For when I’m not near you," Yara said. "Which I try not to be. But sometimes."

She didn’t let go of his hand right away. She turned it over, pressed her thumb into the center of his palm where the tension always sat, and worked it once, slow, until the muscle gave.

"You’re wound up again," she said, quiet, only for him. "On a day off. You don’t even know you’re doing it."

"You’re going to fix it in the middle of a market?"

"I’m going to start." Her red eyes came up to his, close, the crowd moving around them and neither of them moving with it. "I’ll finish it tonight. When there’s no stall between us and I have both hands."

She let his hand go, and stepped back into the crowd, and left him standing at a knife stall with a promise and a pulse.

◆◆◆◆

They regrouped at a cloth-seller’s stall, all of them at once, and it went about how anyone could have predicted.

Maren held a scarf up against Soren’s chest to see the color and declared it his. Selah said the color was wrong for him and held up a different one. Dani said both were overpriced. Yara said nothing and simply took the one she liked off the rack and added it to the pile they were apparently buying.

Soren stood in the middle of it and let four women dress him by committee.

"I have opinions about my own clothes," he said.

"No you don’t," said three of them at once.

Joan, from the edge of the group where she’d appeared without anyone noticing, added, "He really doesn’t," and that settled it.

◆◆◆◆

The sun was going down when they started back.

Maren had sugar on her face. Selah had a small bag of ice-carving tools she’d bought to prove a point. Dani had her slate. Yara had two knives and a hand hooked into the cuff of Soren’s sleeve. Joan had appeared holding a bag of something none of them had seen her buy.

Soren had a scarf he hadn’t chosen, a knife he hadn’t asked for, and no money.

He also had all of them, walking loose and warm around him in the last of the light, arguing about whether fire-candy counted as dinner.

"It doesn’t," Selah said.

"It has calories," Maren said. "Calories are dinner."

"Calories are not dinner. That’s not what dinner is."

"Soren. Back me up. Is fire-candy dinner?"

Soren looked at the four of them waiting for his ruling, and Dani half-smiling into her slate, and Joan pretending not to listen, and he understood that whatever he said would be quoted back at him for weeks.

"Fire-candy is a course," he said. "There will be other courses. I’ll make them. Because apparently I make dinner now."

"You always made dinner," Maren said.

"I made dinner before I had a queue for my bed and a committee for my clothes."

"And now you make dinner and you’re rich in love," Maren said, biting the last of the sugar off the stick. "That’s a good trade. Very efficient. Selah taught me about efficiency."

"I taught you nothing," Selah said.

But she was walking close enough that her cold and Maren’s heat met somewhere around Soren’s shoulders, and he stopped correcting any of it, and they went home in the dark loud and broke and his.