Transmigrated As The Villainess' Boyfriend With A... SSS Harem System?

You see, there are three ways a powerful man can look at you, and they resemble each other closely enough that mixing them up can cost you your head.

There's the look of the man who despises you. That one's simple: it takes you in from your boots to your collar, decides you aren't worth the air you're using up, and moves on. Ardwyn looked at me that way.

There's the look of the man who's studying you. Worse, because it means you interest him and he doesn't yet know what for.

And there's the third, which I hadn't met until that night.

As it turned out, the real reason my father had come down to the kitchen was to bring me to the king.

After putting away three full bowls of stew and thanking my mother with a kiss, he stayed in the doorway. His diamond-shaped shield always at his back. He didn't say my name; he waited for me to look up at him.

"The king wants to see you," he said at last.

My mother stopped scrubbing the pot. She always stayed behind to scrub when the other cooks went out to serve.

"At this hour, Darlan?"

My father nodded.

"At this hour."

Garchi meowed at my feet. I handed him to my mother, who took him with wet hands and her lips pressed thin.

"Eat something when you get back," she said, and that was her goodbye.

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We went up.

We Elcronnes don't use the main staircase of castle D'Tariel. We never have. Everything above the kitchen exists for us the way weather exists: it's there, it affects you, you don't touch it.

I climbed a hundred and twelve steps. I counted them because I didn't know what else to do with my head.

My father changed on the fortieth.

He didn't quicken his pace or say anything different. Something in his shoulders simply straightened, and the man who half an hour earlier had been asking whether I was eating well disappeared, and in his place Zaleador D'Tariel's sworn guard climbed the stairs.

I wanted to ask him whether that happened to him too. Whether he could choose when.

Instead my mouth just hung open, the question stuck in it.

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It was cold, the kind that goes through your clothes without asking and settles in the bone. It was the cold Lianza left in the corridors of Mayorka when she was furious, but craftier, older. Settled in. It had been there thirty years and nobody argued with it anymore.

His Empero, like Lianza's, was the kind that made ice, though his brought more than ice: it brought winter itself into the world.

Which is why everyone whispered that Winter's Cold had come whenever Zaleador D'Tariel walked past them.

My father knocked twice on the door with his knuckles.

"Come in."

The room was a study, located in one of the castle's towers. It had a couple of windows that let in enough light for the king to read without resorting to so many candles. Due to being at such a height, surrounded by stone and with no hearth to bring warmth, the cold seeped into your very bones; my chin didn't take long to start trembling.

Zaleador D'Tariel didn't look up.

He stood at a long table covered in papers and not one book. Border maps. Lists of names. Three candles lit and a fourth burned down.

He had the same black hair as his daughter and the same garnet eyes, and nothing on him to say what he was. His Empero was held in so tightly that I had to go looking for it, and when I found it I realized it had been brushing my ankles for a while.

"Elcronne."

I bowed. The noble bow. Right hand open over the chest, the left sliding outward slowly, drawing back a curtain that wasn't there.

It came out perfect. She had taught it to me.

Zaleador looked up for the first time.

And there was the third way.

It wasn't contempt; I saw nothing of that in the way he looked at me. It wasn't study either, because he already knew exactly what he was going to use me for. He looked at me the way a man looks at a tool he is about to use knowing it will break in his hands.

"Sit."

"I'd rather stand, my lord."

"It wasn't a question."

I sat.

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For a few minutes he said nothing at all, somewhere else entirely. He moved two papers from one stack to another. He dipped the pen and wrote nothing.

"My guard tells me you asked him questions about the blood seal."

When did he tell him, if he was at my side the whole time? Oh — so the two of them had planned to talk to me about this from the start. What are these two up to?

"Yes, my lord," I answered.

"Why?"

"Because I didn't understand it."

"And now you do?"

"Now I understand its price."

He set the pen down.

"You understand what it costs the Elcronnes. That's a different thing." He ran a hand down his face, and for a second he looked like exactly what he was: a man who hadn't slept in days. "What has my daughter told you? Are her marks still as excellent as ever?"

The question had come without warning, cutting straight through the middle.

"About what, my lord?"

"About the wedding."

I had two answers. The one that protected Lianza and the one that was true. Almost always they're the same.

That night they weren't.

"That it's her duty," I said. "That House D'Tariel needs it." I swallowed. "And that you wanted this union too."

Zaleador D'Tariel went still.

There are silences that fill themselves — with breathing, with wax dripping while Empero rippled calm around its owners. This one stayed exactly where it was until the cold of the room reached my chest.

"She told you that?"

"Yes, my lord."

The king of the north shifted in his seat, leading with the weight of his bones, and rested his fingers on the edge of the table.

"I asked her to refuse."