Demonic Po*nstar System

Chapter 930: Extreme Preparation

The three coming instead did not operate on money.

One of them had detonated a career because a man’s eyes had gone somewhere they shouldn’t. Somewhere in the Corvant tower, a Chief Brand Officer was cleaning out his desk over two seconds of staring, because the silver-haired one held her own body to be a sacred thing that belonged to exactly one man, and treated a stray look at it as an act of war.

There was no clause in the world Camille could write against a standard like that. You could not counter-offer your way out of a religion.

She would have taken the reasonable disaster over the beautiful one every day of the week. And she did not get to choose.

”Stations, everyone,” she said, and did not permit herself a smile.

At nine sharp, the lobby of Marlowe & Finch experienced the arrival.

They came through the glass doors in step, pink hair, then silver, then gold anklets, and the building’s morning reorganized itself around them.

The receptionist stood up without deciding to. A courier stepped out of their path and held the door for the three of them with his whole arm, eyes locked respectfully forward. Somewhere behind the front desk, an intern hid because he did not trust his willpower not to look.

The fearmongers have arrived.

Bastet’s anklets set the pace, unhurried chimes on marble, and the corridor of employees parted ahead of the trio all the way to the elevators.

One of them was twenty. One of them was nineteen. The third had, until quite recently, not known what a corporation was. They crossed that lobby like they held the deed to it, and forty employees of a heritage fashion house gave them the silence usually reserved for heads of state.

Every eye stayed respectfully above collarbone level, and every voice stayed a mile away from ’sweetheart.’ And when Bastet passed the assembled staff, the nose that had ended a negotiation in a hallway found nothing to punish. Clean skin, mild soap, a whole floor scrubbed of cologne overnight.

In the conference room, Marlowe’s executives rose in unison to greet the three of them, and not one of them had slept well.

The youngest poured the water with both hands to keep the pitcher from chattering against the glasses, and somewhere down the table a senior director ran the banned-word list behind his lips one final time.

Beside the chair intended for Bastet, someone had placed a broad cushion of cream linen, positioned in the window’s warmest light.

The felinid stopped when she saw it. Her ears swiveled toward it, then toward Camille Marlowe, reassessing the woman entirely.

”Your civilization,” Bastet declared, lowering herself onto the cushion with full royal ceremony, ”has finally discovered the cushion. Good.”

”We do our research, Lady Bastet.”

”Hmm... Then show us the rest of it.”

The rest of it was a swatch box.

Camille set it in front of Bastet before any slides went up. Linen, long-staple cotton, raw silk, wool so fine it poured through the fingers. ”Before anything else, the materials. No synthetic fiber will ever touch a product carrying your names. We’d like your approval on the foundations first. Everything else gets built on whatever survives your hands.”

Bastet went through the box fiber by fiber, rubbing each sample between two fingers with a jeweler’s gravity. Three swatches were set aside in quiet disgrace, and Marlowe’s side of the table did not breathe while she worked. The rest earned a slow nod toward the chairwoman.

”Acceptable.”

Nyx, watching from the adjacent chair, felt the whole morning warm by several degrees.

The rest of the pitch matched the opening. Likeness approval sat on page one of the draft, in plain language: nothing bearing any member’s face or figure would exist without that member’s written sign-off. Image rights ran the contract term plus two years, the honest industry standard.

The advance was real money, the split on Eclipse-branded merchandise leaned toward Eclipse, and the calendar committed the girls to exactly four shoot days a season, capped in writing.

”And design concepts?” Nyx asked, turning the last page. ”You’ve shown us none.”

”On purpose.” Camille folded her hands. ”After what happened at House Veyrand, our team decided we would rather start from zero with your people in the room than present you one wrong image. Whatever the Manifestation of Carnage wishes to be on a poster is what goes on the poster.”

Aria set down the swatch she’d been holding.

”No.”

Her voice stayed soft, gentle, the exact register she used to ask Kaiden who wanted breakfast. It made the word worse, not better.

”I won’t accept that reasoning, Miss Marlowe. You want us to sign a merchandising deal, and you would like us to do it without ever seeing what your artists think we are. If you cannot show me a single concept, then everything on these pages is a promise about drawings that do not exist, and a promise like that is worth precisely nothing to me.”

The temperature of the conference room, which had climbed all morning in hope, dropped through the floor, and Marlowe’s side of the table plunged into instant panic.

”We would never want to offend by presenting the wrong-”

”Then present the right one, and let me be the judge.” Aria smiled, and it was warm, and it did not touch the demand underneath it at all.

Two executives looked, on pure reflex, toward Nyx, who was the reasonable one, who read appendices and made notes and might broker a rescue.

Nyx smiled back at them and said nothing, amusedly waiting for their response.

The third executive’s eyes darted to Bastet, and found the felinid queen holding a bolt of raw silk up to the window light, turning it, entirely absorbed, having recused herself from the human matter entirely.

No help was coming from any direction.

It was a junior designer who cracked, rising on unsteady legs and retrieving a garment box from beneath the side table, one they had very much not planned to open today. Someone had labeled its lid, in cheerful marker, SCRAPPED!

He set it in front of Aria with the reverence of a man defusing ordnance, and fled back to his chair.

Aria lifted the lid and drew the pieces out one at a time, sample apparel, each printed front and back with a design the studio had lost its nerve over.

The first was a tee bearing Alexandra as the Hearth Valkyrie in full majesty, golden restoration light pouring from both palms and haloing her blonde hair, the demonic maid dress nowhere to be seen, replaced with proper battle regalia, her expression serene and luminous.

The second was a cropped jacket carrying Luna in full battle-gremlin glory, wreathed in forking purple lightning, dashing off the fabric with both middle fingers up and a grin that promised a war crime.

The third was a hoodie printed with Aria herself, high in a moonlit sky, looking down at whoever wore it with cool, absolute condescension, beautiful and untouchable.

The fourth was a hoodie, and it was Kaiden.

Half-dressed across the whole front panel, muscle catching the light, grinning with easy handsome menace while a black halo hung above his head and his red eyes burned with a promise the artist had rendered a little too well.

”That one, ah.” Camille had located the danger a half-second too late. ”That one was developed before we understood your sensitivities, Miss Levander. It was flagged internally as too suggestive, and we scrapped the whole batch out of respect, so if the tone is inappropriate we can absolutely-”

Aria straightened her spine and delivered her demands in a tender tone. ”Any merchandise bearing my Kaiden is limited edition. Always. He is not a keychain you print by the crate. Any garment bearing him shows him as what he is, handsome and winning, never foolish, never small.”

”And no product carrying his image will feature another woman beside him unless she is family or one of us, and unless I personally approve her presence there.”

Camille was nodding before she had consciously decided to. ”Of course. Of course. That’s, that’s very reasonable.”

”I’m glad you agree.” Aria lifted the Kaiden hoodie free of the box, and then, in front of the entire conference room of Marlowe & Finch, she drew it close, bowed her head, and pressed her face into the fabric, inhaling as though the print might already carry his scent.

Then she hugged it to her chest.

”And one more. Every piece of Kaiden merchandise you produce is sent to me first, to be sampled.” A beat. ”I will not be returning the samples.”

The conference room achieved a silence with a texture to it. Camille Marlowe had war-briefed eleven people that morning on the exact contours of the yandere she was about to host. No briefing survived contact with watching the woman nuzzle a sample hoodie of her own guild leader like a relic. She opened her mouth and produced no sound at all.

An assistant against the wall coughed, hard, jolting his chairwoman back into her own body.

”Yes!” Camille said, a full octave too high. ”Yes, those, those are all completely acceptable terms, we’ll write every one of them in!”

”Wonderful.” Aria beamed, genuinely happy now, the cold gone as if it had never lived in her at all. She pulled the Kaiden hoodie on over her immaculate dress without a single thought for how the two garments fit together, and her beam turned outright radiant as she felt it settle comfortably around her.

”Nyx. Go.”

”...” Nyx uncapped her pen, watching her yandere hug herself in a half-dressed print of their guild leader she hadn’t paid for while ordering her to take care of everything else. ’This psycho... Why do I love her so much?’ Nyx huffed a laugh as she clapped her hands.

”Where do we sign?”

Camille Marlowe had survived the meeting. She would spend the rest of the week boasting to rivals who fell before the fearmongering trio.

But while she did that, Eclipse kept making moves!