Demonic Po*nstar System

Chapter 928: Done

It was still an enormous number, real money that Eclipse would genuinely feel, and nobody on Yuna’s side of the table had blinked at paying it. Mercer initialed where the tabs told him to, fast, wanting the pen out of his hand. Yuna watched him do it and thought of a girl in her best blouse, one floor up, three years ago, initialing pages at exactly that speed. It felt like the books balancing.

They were at the door when Mercer spoke again, and the salesman was gone from the voice.

”Doing what you do... People won’t stand aside and let you keep bullying them forever. Sooner or later, your methods will catch up to you.”

”We’re not in the business of making friends,” Ms. Rook said, unhurried. ”Not with people like you.”

”That’s not how it works. You may grow big, but even giants can be taken down by many little-”

”You may try.” Ms. Rook shrugged and was out of the door, not interested in what he had to say one bit.

”I’ll tell Miss Ashborn that the answer to her question was no.” Doug tipped Mercer a small two-finger salute. ”Provided it stays no, Mr. Mercer. A productive quarter to you.”

The door clicked shut on whatever expression Skyline’s guild leader wore behind it.

In the elevator, Yuna’s composure made it as far as the tenth floor before her knees went loose, and she caught herself with one hand on the mirrored wall and laughed, once, a little wetly, at nothing. Doug studied the floor indicator with great professional interest.

For three years she’d handled the ledger alone, because she was S-tier and no one in that building had it in their job to stand between her and it.

Two people had just done exactly that, in under an hour, without once raising their voices.

The feeling was so unfamiliar it took her the whole ride down to name it. She was in good hands. Professionally, contractually, enthusiastically good hands.

”You were magnificent in there, Miss Park,” Doug said as the doors opened on the lobby.

”I didn’t say anything.”

”Precisely.”

They crossed the lobby past the receptionist, who had given up pretending to be on the phone, and Doug checked his tablet one last time on the way to the car.

”Legal expects the remaining paperwork to clear within the week. I’d begin preparing for your first day.”

A week. Yuna pressed her lips together and looked out at the street so neither of them would see her grinning like an idiot.

A week was nowhere near enough time to pick an outfit for her first day as an official Eclipse member.

...

Yuna came through her front door with her heels in one hand, and her mother appeared in the kitchen doorway, ready to read her daughter’s face in a single glance.

There was nothing complicated to read this time.

”It’s done.” The grin broke through every layer of professional composure she had left. ”Signed, countersigned, ratified before we even left their building. The paperwork clears within the week, and then I’m Eclipse’s. Officially.”

The television went mute mid-sentence.

”Skyline agreed?” Her father set down the remote. ”Just like that?”

”Eclipse didn’t leave them much room to disagree.” Yuna set her heels by the door and searched for a way to explain the afternoon that wouldn’t require explaining the afternoon. ”Their people walked in, took the contract apart line by line, and walked out with me. I just sat there and watched.”

”Hm.” He studied her for a long moment, hunting for the catch in it, and found none, and the last of a three-year-old crease finally left his forehead. ”Good.”

Her mother crossed to her, reached up, and turned Yuna’s chin toward the hallway light with two fingers. The choker got one glance and no comment. The rest of the inspection took longer, and it had nothing to do with her throat.

”There you are,” she said quietly.

The greeting mothers save for a child returning from somewhere far away. Yuna had left this house a thousand times in three years and come home a little heavier every quarter. Her mother had watched the weight accumulate and said nothing, because her daughter was S-tier and professionals handle things. The girl who’d just walked back through the front door had set all of it down somewhere between a conference room and the driveway.

Yuna’s eyes stung. She blinked it back furiously, because she had already almost cried in a tent once today, and there had to be a limit.

”Alright.” Her mother patted her cheek once and returned to the stove. ”Saturday, we shop. You are not picking a first-day outfit out of an old closet.”

”Mom, I have clothes. Way too many of them, in fact...”

”Listen to your mother.” Her father unmuted the television, the matter settled.

Yuna Park, S-tier assassin, soon-to-be member of the most watched guild on the planet, argued with neither of them.

...

Outside Yuna’s house, the black car began moving away just as the line connected. Nobody said hello.

”The transfer closed,” Ms. Rook reported.

”Good. An S-tier assassin is always beneficial to have,” Vespera replied.

”Yes, and she’s going to be very loyal as well. Doug said she hugged Luna right after signing, and she’s also displaying clear fangirlism toward the Guild Leader.”

”I know,” came the reply with zero explanation.

Rook waited for the rest of the questions. There was a fold to report, and it had not been a graceful one: a guild leader tearing his own collar loose and screaming about awakened violence at a room where nothing had moved, at shadows cast by his own ceiling lights. She had typed the incident summary on the drive over, clean, timestamped, structured for maximum utility.

The questions never came. Her employer had asked exactly one thing of this operation, Doug was bringing her that answer in the morning, and everything else that had happened in that conference room evidently interested her as much as last week’s weather.

Rook closed the incident file without sending it.

”One more item, Miss Ashborn.” She watched the quiet street slide past the window. ”On our way out, Mercer said our aggressive expansion would catch up to us. He won’t be the last to think it if we keep taking other guilds’ awakened. Will it become a problem?”

The line stayed silent for five full seconds, long enough that anyone else would have checked the connection.

Then Ms. Rook heard the smile. It arrived ahead of the words, unmistakable even through the encryption, the sound of a woman being handed a long-awaited gift.

”Yes,” Vespera Ashborn said.

A breath crossed the line, quiet and warm, and it was possibly the closest thing to a laugh that Rook’s employer owned.

”I’ll let my son deal with it. I do wonder how he will.”

The line went dead.

She filed her employer under the same classification the rest of the industry already used, and found that the conclusion did not trouble her in the slightest. The salary was excellent. The show was even better now that her old boss was working so closely with her son.

She pocketed the phone and went back to work.