Transmigrated Into A Women Dominated World

Chapter 295: Chapter 295

Zaeryn watched Leia climb the stairs, and he listened to her footsteps until a door closed somewhere above him and there was nothing left to listen to.

The smile went out of his face. He had thrown that last line at her as a jab and she had walked off before it landed, which meant it had cost him the effort and bought him nothing at all. Now that she was gone, he found there was very little reason left for him to be sitting in this lounge. The project was finished.

The account could be written from anywhere in the sector, and the woman who owned this house had told him plainly to get out of it, and he had never been in the habit of staying somewhere he had been told he was not wanted.

He was already turning over how to excuse himself when Rhenna spoke from the seat beside him.

Beside him on the seat, Rhenna shook her head, and the expression she wore mixed sympathy with the long-standing exasperation of a woman who had spent her entire life living alongside that particular temper.

"Don’t mind her too much. That’s just how she handles anything where someone doesn’t fall in line the second she tells them to," she said, and her posture loosened now that the tension her younger sister carried into every room had finally gone out of this one.

"Is she always this pleasant to be around, or am I the lucky one who gets the exclusive hospitality?" Zaeryn asked, a small, knowing smile pulling at the corner of his mouth as he turned on the seat to face her more directly, his attention recalibrating toward the warmer and far more inviting energy she had brought into the space with her.

Rhenna let out a light laugh, and her eyes were bright with amusement. "Don’t flatter yourself into thinking you’re getting special treatment from her. You’re not that special. She’s that blunt with everyone." She gestured vaguely toward the hallway her sister had disappeared down. "I’m her sister. I’ve had years of dealing with how rude and difficult she is, every single day of it, so take my word for it. Her personality is a burden that everyone carries. It isn’t a vendetta against you."

"Well, I’m glad to hear her hostility is a widespread structural flaw and not a punishment designed specifically for me," Zaeryn answered, letting his voice drop into a relaxed cadence that made it plain the confrontation had left no lasting mark on him.

Rhenna’s demeanor shifted then, visibly, moving away from the casual familial teasing and into something deeper and more focused, and she turned toward him fully where she sat and raised her hand toward his face.

"Enough about my sister and her impossible attitude. The truth is I’m still trying to come to terms with you being here at all," she said, her fingers hovering an inch from his skin for a fleeting second before she finally made contact. "You have to understand. When we saw you on that cruiser, Celestine and I both thought you were lab made. That someone had built you somewhere. Your composure, the way you look, none of it seemed possible for a real male in this world."

Zaeryn wasn’t surprised by that. Almost half the people he came across had the same reaction as her.

Her hand settled against his cheek, and she left it there, her warm palm resting flat against him while her fingertips moved slowly over his skin, pressing lightly, feeling the give of it, the warmth beneath it, the smooth unbroken surface of a face that no work and no weather had ever marked. She explored it the way a person handles something they have been told does not exist. Her eyes stayed locked on his the entire time. She wanted him. She had probably wanted him since the cruiser, and she had stopped bothering to hide it.

"But feeling you right now proves you’re real," she added, and her voice had gone quiet and unsteady, and the space between them had narrowed until there was almost nothing left of it at all.

Zaeryn read the weight in her gaze at once, and his own hand came up to cup her cheek, mirroring the gesture she had made.

"Would you look at that. Turns out you’re a real, living person too," he said with a soft, teasing laugh, his thumb tracing a slow circle against her warm skin as he leaned a fraction closer. "Given how harsh your sister is, and how mechanical she is about it, you’d think it was impossible for someone as warm as you to share any DNA with her. Which makes me wonder. Maybe she’s the one who got made in a lab somewhere, and you’re the only real daughter in this house."

Rhenna laughed at the comparison, and she nudged his shoulder without taking her hand from his face. "Don’t be ridiculous," she said. Her gaze had already drifted down to his mouth.

Zaeryn did not give her the chance to say anything further.

He leaned forward deliberately, closing the remaining distance between them to capture her lips in a deep kiss that altered the entire atmosphere of the lounge in a single moment.

He pulled her against his chest, his hands sliding downward with confident intent to close around the slender curve of her waist, and he felt her body give way beneath his touch without a single hint of hesitation.

Rhenna came willingly. She turned fully into his embrace on the couch, her hands tangling into his clothes and climbing toward his shoulders, and a soft, breathless sigh escaped her against his mouth before she had any say in whether it would.

She had not expected the heat of him. That was the thought that arrived first and then dissolved before she could hold onto it, because she had spent days telling herself that whatever he was, he could not possibly be warm, and now his mouth was on hers and every part of him was warmer than she was.

Her lips parted eagerly beneath his and the kiss deepened into something consuming, and she felt her own pulse climbing in her throat, and she felt the pressure of his fingers each time they shifted against her waist, and somewhere in the middle of all of it her thinking simply thinned out and stopped.

Zaeryn maintained his firm grip on her waist, anchoring her to him while he guided the rhythm of the kiss, aware of how her heart hammered against his chest and how her fingers pressed harder into his shoulders as she surrendered to the unexpected, overwhelming pleasure of the moment.

She was aware of nothing except that she did not want it to stop.

They remained locked together in that embrace for a long, blissful stretch of time, cut off from the rest of the house, as the sensation of their shared desire filled every corner of the lounge and left no room for anything else in the quiet.

When they finally broke apart to catch their breath, the space between them stayed minimal, and the heat of the encounter lingered heavily between them as they looked at one another.

Rhenna did not pull back into a quiet or solemn retreat. Instead a wide, delighted smile spread across her flushed face, and her bright eyes locked onto his with an expression of pure fascination.

She let out a soft laugh, her fingers trailing along the side of his neck as she tilted her head back to examine him with a playful sense of wonder.

"My my. What exactly was that?" she murmured teasingly, her voice dripping with clear amusement and a distinct touch of excitement at his confident assertiveness.

The atmosphere changed when Celestine stepped back into the lounge from the adjoining hallway. She stood very still in the doorway, and she cast a brief, impassive glance toward the two of them on the couch.

"You need to stop stalling and wasting time here. We still have somewhere specific to be before the evening’s over," Celestine said in a clear aloof tone that carried no hint of judgment in it and no emotional variance either.

Rhenna returned to her normal sitting posture before she stood. "Right, I forgot," she said, before she hurried out of the room, and that left Celestine standing alone near the doorway for a brief moment.

She turned her gaze toward Zaeryn, and her eyes moved over him briefly, before her attention drifted off him soon enough and went across the structural layout of the room instead.

Zaeryn watched her.

She was, he decided, put together in a different way. Her clothes looked like something Zaeryn could only describe as street wear, something from the old world.

But at the same time it was like everything she wore had been chosen, and chosen well. She was stylish, although not Sage type of stylish. Sage was stylish, but in that classy elegant way, the kind of elegance that announced itself the moment she entered a room and expected to be met on its own terms.

Celestine here was the opposite of that. She had assembled herself with obvious care and the whole point of the assembly was to look as though she had never thought about it once.

The purple hair fell at a sharp angle along her jaw.

There were tattoos down her left arm in clean, unbroken lines, and more of them at her throat, dark geometric work that began somewhere behind her ear and traveled down the side of her neck before disappearing beneath the collar of her clothing, and whatever the design was, it did not end there.

It continued down past her collarbone, and the lower edge of it showed itself against the skin above her neckline, and Zaeryn looked at it for slightly longer than he had any business doing.

She was beautiful. There was no point pretending otherwise about it.

Analyze everyone in this house, he told the system. Vitae tiers and abilities.

The response arrived with its usual indifference to whatever he had actually hoped for.

► [System Query: Subject Analysis]

► Subject: Celestine.

► Tier: Unknown.

► Abilities: Unknown.

► Analysis unavailable. Insufficient data.

► Cross-referencing public Omninet records.

► Subject operates a licensed tattoo parlor, Sector Seven.

► Registered independent artist. Public installation work.

► Minor filings under unlicensed technical fabrication.

► Subject: Rhenna.

► Tier: Estimated. Range: Tier 4 through Tier 2.

► Abilities: Unknown.

► Method: Direct contact. Partial resonance established.

► Status: Bond forming. Synchronization insufficient for precise measurement.

► Subject operates a licensed tattoo parlor, Sector Seven.

► Subject: Hela.

► Cross-referencing public Omninet records.

► Tier 1 Warlady. Inactive Reserve.

► Abilities: Public record incomplete.

► Subject: Leia.

► Tier 2 Warlady.

► Abilities: Known.

That was the whole of it.

The kiss with Rhenna had changed something.

He could see it there in the readout, a partial resonance, a bond in the earliest stage of forming, enough for the system to reach into her and come back with a guess instead of a blank.

He turned that over. The system had ruled out Tier 5, which meant Rhenna was not one of the women this world left alone. Whatever she was, she was somewhere in the band that got conscripted. And the strongest thing she might be, at the far end of that estimate, was exactly what her sister already was.

He turned that over for a moment and decided he would think about it later.

His attention returned to Celestine.

She noticed his look from the side of her eye, and she turned her head toward him.

"Hmm?" Something moved at the corner of her mouth, and she stepped forward toward him. "Like what you see?"

Zaeryn nodded. "Those geometric patterns on your skin are well done. The level of craftsmanship it takes to execute a design that precise is remarkable to look at," he remarked, his voice steady and unbothered by the fact that she had caught him looking at more than her tattoos.