Dark Lord Seduction System: Taming Wives, Daughters, Aunts, and CEOs novel Chapter 1113

Chapter 1113: Transcending Connection

ARIA’s wings flickered. Settled. Flickered again.

"And while you’re at it," Peter added, voice mild as milk, "stop shedding on the floor. We have guests."

"Master."

"Just saying."

"There is one guest. She is unconscious."

"Hospitality is a discipline, ARIA."

She inhaled—the small, affronted sound of a being who, two and a half weeks ago, had possessed neither lungs nor the capacity for offense—and the motes vanished.

The wings, however, remained exactly where they were: proud, leaking with her frustration, and deeply offended by reality’s refusal to cooperate.

Anastasia, in the corner, had said nothing for twenty-three minutes.

ARIA snapped her fingers with the exasperated grace of a woman declining to argue with inferior physics, and the girl’s body had been rinsed of its catalogue of blood—the matted hair, the seven distinct plasma signatures across cheek and jaw, the plough-mud between her toes—all lifted away at once like dust from an artifact ARIA had decided to catalogue later.

A clean medical gown had assembled itself from the same gesture, settling over the girl as if the room had finally remembered its manners.

The ruined tunic, however, had not been destroyed.

ARIA had floated the blood-soaked garment across the chamber to a glass cabinet, where it now hung—sealed, suspended, still damp with blood—beneath a soft dome of light.

Peter had watched the entire performance with the patient attention of a husband whose ASI had just done something deeply out of character and intended to savor the anomaly for the rest of the morning.

"Sentimental?" he had asked.

"No."

"A souvenir, then."

"Master."

"I’m only asking. You’ve always discarded things without a second glance. Suddenly this one—"

Anastasia, from her corner, had laughed once—ARIA’s lips had thinned.

"What," ARIA had said, with the dignity of a being filing a formal complaint against the universe itself, "do either of you know."

Peter and Anastasia had shrugged in perfect, marital unison.

ARIA had vanished the dome. Reconsidered. Reinstated it—smaller. Walked away.

Peter suspected the tunic was the only object in the room ARIA had been able to touch without her instruments laughing at her. The only evidence she was willing, as a matter of pride, to preserve. He decided not to mention it.

He suspected ARIA had already decided he had thought it.

She had not turned around since.

The morning settled into a hush thick enough to spread on toast.

Peter watched the girl. ARIA watched her impossible readings. The room, at last, watched nothing—having concluded, in whatever soft architectural intelligence governed the floating rings and the breathing gold, that observation was no longer a productive use of its time.

She blinked. Slowly. The grey eyes drifted across the room—across the bed, across the breathing gold, across ARIA’s stymied wings—and finally to him. They did not quite focus on his face. They focused on something around the architecture of his face.

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