Reborn as the Psycho Villainess Who Ate Her Slave Beasts' Contracts

Then he laughed — the same genuine laugh from the dinner table, the one that was slightly startled by itself. It was quieter this time. Three people were sleeping. But it was real.

"What," she said.

"Nothing," he said. "I just—" He looked at her. "I walked into your room three months ago to do a job I’d already decided not to do. And now I’m in a warehouse in the lower city at dawn with thirteen people who built an entire operational infrastructure in secret and I’m going east to work on a project I don’t fully understand yet." He paused. "It’s a very specific kind of strange."

"You could leave," she said. "The financial arrangement is intact regardless. The documents are yours. You have what you need to make any choice."

"I know," he said. "I’m not going to."

"Why."

He thought about it honestly, which was something she had noticed about him — he didn’t answer questions immediately, he actually thought about them.

"Because I want to see what you build," he said. "And because—" He paused. "Because I’ve spent thirty years being a minor noble with an inconvenient debt and a family history that wasn’t mine. And then I found out none of it was mine. And that should have made things worse and instead it made them—" He stopped. "It made them possible. In a way they weren’t before." Another pause. "I don’t know what I’m going to do with the sealed record yet. But I know I want to be somewhere that gives me the space to decide. And this—" He gestured, briefly, at the room. "This is that place."

Elara looked at him.

Filed it.

"Sleep," she said. "We leave for the second leg at the third bell this afternoon."

"Yes, Your Highness," he said, with the slight tone he used when he was saying something sincerely and with a fractional amount of amusement simultaneously.