100x Rebate Sharing System: Retired Incubus Wants to Marry & Have Kids-Chapter 378 - 377- Setting the Boundaries

Something crossed Viktor’s face. Brief. A slight adjustment in his expression — not quite offense, not quite amusement, the particular response of a word landing wrongly.

"I don’t think we have that kind of relationship," he said.

Celestia went still.

The words were quiet. Not angry. Not wounded. Simply precise — the surgical removal of an assumption she’d made without examining it. She’d walked in here carrying ’nephew’ as a given, the familial shorthand of a category that implied mutual warmth and shared history and the kind of obligation that ran both directions.

He was telling her it didn’t run both directions.

He was telling her, without drama, without accusation, without the satisfaction of watching her feel bad about it — just telling her, cleanly, as a fact about the current geography between them.

’A nephew whom we abandoned for twenty-plus years.’

She heard her own voice from the receiving room, saying that to her knights. Thought she’d already faced it. Found, sitting here in the light of the tree he’d grown from soil this morning, that she hadn’t fully absorbed what she’d said.

She breathed.

"How can I help you?" she said. The honest version. Stripped of the assumption.

Viktor looked at her.

"I don’t need your help," he said.

Celestia’s jaw tightened. "You wrote the letter—"

"The letter was for Count Redwood," Viktor said. "He needed your intervention. The antidote, the account with Hartfield — that was for him." He paused. "I was the mechanism. The count was the beneficiary." He looked at her steadily. "I am more than enough for myself."

Celestia looked at the hall around them. At the living wood of it, the gold-lit grain, the door through which she’d walked that had appeared from nothing.

"You," she said, carefully, "are being arrogant."

Viktor stood.

Celestia rose automatically — the reflex of sixteen years, you match the movement, you don’t let the other person be vertical while you’re seated.

He moved toward the wall, the unhurried pace of someone who has already decided the direction of the conversation and is simply waiting for the other participant to arrive there.

"Are you genuinely here," he said, without turning, "to ask if I need help? Or are you here because House Ktorian has finally realized the kingdom is fracturing and they don’t know what to do about it, and someone remembered there’s a Redwood heir with access to information they don’t have, and you were sent to determine the shape of whatever agreement might be possible?" He paused. "And you’re leading with ’do you need help’ because that framing feels more comfortable than what it actually is, which is that you need ’mine.’"

The silence in the hall was the silence of the living wood — absorptive, warm, not empty.

Celestia stood with her jaw tight and her hands still at her sides and the particular feeling of someone who has had their internal monologue read back to them accurately.

"Fine," she said. The word came through her teeth like a decision made against preference. "I need your help. Specifically — I need to understand what you meant in the letter. About the kingdom’s division."

Viktor turned.

He looked at her for a moment.

Then he said: "The king will die."

Celestia’s breath stopped.

"He will not recover from his current state," Viktor continued. His voice was the same even quality as everything else he’d said. Not dramatic. Not uncertain. "The healers will say he’s improving. He isn’t. Within the year, the throne is empty."

The hall held the silence of something that has weight.

This was not public information. The king’s illness was known, distantly, to the upper nobility — whispered about, handled with the careful language of ’temporary difficulty’ and ’the healers are confident.’ It was not discussed openly because discussing it openly meant discussing succession, and succession meant the names and the alignments and the three or four houses with enough claim to make things catastrophically complicated.

Celestia knew the king was ill.

The healers had told her personally, three months ago, that he would be fine.

She stared at Viktor.

He was not performing certainty. He was not projecting it. He was the same as he’d been since he’d opened his eyes by the tree root and said ’greetings, how are you’ — simply present, simply level, the quality of someone whose relationship with what-happens-next was different from everyone else’s and had been for long enough that he’d stopped finding it remarkable.

She opened her mouth to speak.

Viktor turned toward Olivia. "Let’s go," he said.

Olivia nodded. A small bow toward Celestia — the genuinely respectful kind, unhurried, not apologetic.

Celestia said, "Wait—"

The light in the hall shifted.

Viktor and Olivia were standing there, and then they were not standing there. Not a dramatic departure — not a flash, not a sound, not a displacement of air. One moment the two of them occupied the hall and the next moment the hall had only Celestia and the living light of the wood and the warm quiet of a space that had just had two people removed from it instantaneously.

She stared at the empty air where they’d been.

"What," she said.

The word was just — ’what.’ The total-reset kind. The kind that indicates everything you thought you’d accounted for has been unaccounted for simultaneously.

She looked at the door.

She looked back at the empty space.

Then she turned and walked out through the door of the World Tree into the morning, and her knights were there, and Ren had his hand on his sword, and the people of Millbrook were still gathering at the tree’s edges, and Viktor and Olivia were nowhere in any direction she could see.

"Did they just—" Ren started.

"Yes," Celestia said. "They left."

"They—" 𝙛𝒓𝒆𝙚𝒘𝒆𝓫𝙣𝓸𝙫𝓮𝒍.𝒄𝒐𝓶

"They teleported." She picked up her helmet from where she’d dropped it. Stood with it in both hands for a moment, looking at the tree. "They just — left." She paused. "He told me the king is going to die. Then he left."

The knights were very quiet.

Mard, carefully: "Commander. What do we—"

"We wait," Celestia said. She had arrived at this conclusion through the only available logic: if Viktor had wanted this conversation to be finished, he would not have left them standing in his tree. He’d left them here the way you leave something on a table that you intend to come back to. "We ’wait.’ And we don’t touch anything."

# The Tower Garden

The arrival point was the garden.

Viktor and Olivia stepped out of the spatial fold into the clean air of the tower’s inner grounds — the first floor’s nature domain had bled through into the courtyard in the months since Helena had made it her own, flowers growing along every available surface, vines thick with small white blooms climbing the tower’s interior walls, the smell of growing things dense and sweet in the enclosed space.

Viktor scanned the garden in the same automatic way he scanned every space he entered.

And there.

At the far end, near the low stone bench where the climbing roses were trained, a figure. Silver-blonde hair loose at her back, the green of her dress moved by the breeze.

She was crouching — not sitting, crouching, the weight on her heels, both hands extended toward a cluster of small flowers growing at the base of the wall.