He almost called out one moment through the door, an old reflex from the dormitories. Instead, he just said, "Come in."

Theresa entered quietly, the door clicking shut behind her with barely a sound. She’d changed into a thick, practical robe—the kind inns kept folded in wardrobes, slightly too large, the sleeves rolled once at the wrists. Her dark hair was still damp at the ends, leaving faint spots on the collar.

Without the gold accessories and white garment, she looked different. More settled, like the dungeon had been a performance, and this was just her.

She swept the room with a glance first—a habit, he was starting to understand—then looked at him sitting on the edge of the bed, the space in front of him empty, the system long since closed.

"You weren’t sleeping," she said.

"No, just sorting through my thoughts."

She pulled the chair from the small table, the legs scraping once against the floorboards, and sat across from him. Crossed one leg over the other, completely at ease in a stranger’s inn room at whatever hour this was.

The lamplight from the street below pushed through the window in faint orange lines across the floor and caught the edge of her cheek. She folded her hands in her lap and looked at him with those gold eyes and said nothing.

He waited. 𝚏𝐫𝚎𝗲𝕨𝐞𝐛𝕟𝚘𝐯𝚎𝗹.𝕔𝐨𝗺

She kept saying nothing.

"Did you need something?" he finally asked.

"I need to understand the situation I’m in," she said. "Which means I need to understand your situation. Fully." A pause. "I got the outline earlier. I want the rest."

"The outline, I think, is sufficient."

"Dominic." Just his name. Calm, unhurried, with a weight behind it that was not a threat and not a plea. She had already decided what was going to happen. Now she was waiting for him to catch up. "I am bound to your life. Whatever you walk into, I walk into with you. I prefer to do that with complete information."

He looked at her for a moment. The street outside had gone quiet, just the occasional footstep on cobblestone.

Then he leaned back against the headboard and started talking.

He kept it clean. Strategic. The way he’d always organized it in his head—not as something that had happened to him but as a sequence of events with causes and effects and logical endpoints.

House Harwick. Their advocates fabricated debt records, and the Registry magistrates who had looked the other way or had been paid to do so. His father was in a detention cell for four years while the Kane name bled out in public. The money is gone in a week. Greyfen’s lower city. The scholarship. Caldmore.

Reyes covered in fewer sentences than the rest. The dungeon floor. The betrayal. The death report has already been filed.

Victor Harwick, he saved for last.

"Hector Harwick’s son, Victor, is at this academy," he said. "He was behind what happened today. His father destroyed my family. They both have been a thorn in my side, and I intend to return the favor. Thoroughly."

Theresa was quiet for a moment. "When you say thoroughly, what do you mean?"

"The estate. The nobility. The name." He said it the way he’d been saying it to himself for years, flat and precise. "House Kane had standing before House Harwick buried it. I want it back, and I want them to watch it happen. I want the Registry investigated for what they allowed. I want the truth of what actually happened to my father, the full picture, not the version they put in the documents."

He paused.

"And I want to be the kind of person they can’t touch when I do it. High rank with resources and influence."

"That’s a significant undertaking," Theresa said.

"I know."

"Especially for an F-rank adventurer."

"An F-rank adventurer with a power no one in history has ever seen before." He met her eyes. "And whatever it sends me."

She considered that. Not skeptically—she’d come out of the system herself, she knew what it could do. But her consideration was that of someone carefully mapping new terrain.

"Our contract," she said. "A mature bond will give you access to more power."

"That’s also what the system said."

"Then getting stronger isn’t just a matter of getting more pulls." She said the word without any particular reaction. "It’s a matter of what you build with the ones you have."

"Build in what regard exactly?"

"Trust," she replied.

He hadn’t thought about it in exactly those terms. He didn’t say that. He nodded.

Since he was now aware he needed to be at least a bit more open, he told her about the quest he’d received.

"The thirty-day quest," she said. "Survive. That’s the first step. Sounds easy enough."

"Yes, it does."

"Surviving includes the Academy, which means Victor Harwick. Are you mentally prepared for it?"

"Yes."

She nodded once, slowly, now understanding the full shape of his resolve.

"Then we have our work cut out for us." The corner of her mouth moved, not quite a smile, more like the suggestion of one. "Good. That means I won’t be bored."

He looked at her.

"You aren’t alone anymore," she said,. No weight behind it, no performance. Just a fact she was offering him because it was true, and she thought he should have it.

He didn’t know what to do with that, so he said nothing.

She stood, smoothed the robe, and moved to the door. Paused with her hand on the frame and looked back at him. The lamplight caught the damp ends of her hair.

"Get some sleep, Dominic. We have a whole day ahead of us tomorrow."

She left. The door clicked shut behind her.

He sat in the quiet room for a while longer, listening to her footsteps fade down the hall.

Then he lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling. The lamplight from the street threw a steady orange rectangle across the plaster above him. A cart rumbled past somewhere, then silence again.

You aren’t alone anymore.

He’d been alone since he was eleven years old. He wasn’t sure he remembered how not to be.

But tomorrow he’d wake up, go to the Guild, face whatever the branch manager had waiting, and take the next step. That thought used to sit in his chest like a stone. Now it just felt like a thing that needed doing. Almost manageable.

He let out a slow breath and closed his eyes. The ceiling didn’t feel quite as far away.