Rebate King: Every Beauty I Spoil Makes Me a Billionaire

They entered through the gate... The lobby was quiet in the late afternoon.

Stan walked in, and Camilla followed half a step behind him.

She was, once again, very quiet. Her red eyes moved across the lobby with the small unhurried cataloguing attention she had brought to every new interior since Inksea International, the recessed lighting, the soft ambient music laid so low it barely registered as sound, the arrangement of low couches around a slim brass sculpture that served no obvious function beyond looking expensive. She did not comment.

She did, however, tilt her head very slightly at the sculpture.

Stan almost smiled.

The elevator was at the far end of the lobby. Stan tapped his phone against the reader. The doors slid open onto a mirrored interior. He stepped in. Camilla followed.

The doors closed.

The elevator began, silently, to rise. Camilla looked at her own reflection in the mirrored panel opposite. She looked at the small illuminated numbers above the door counting upward. She looked at Stan.

”Human.”

”Yeah.”

”This box is climbing.”

”It is.”

”How.”

”Motors. Cables. Counterweights. Same principles as any lift you would have seen in the old era, just quieter and faster and better balanced.”

”...Ah.”

She was quiet for the rest of the ride. Through her spirit sense, she directly observed the intricate mechanisms hidden within the walls of the elevator and understood their workings almost immediately.

The elevator arrived at the top with the small chime.

The doors opened directly into a small private vestibule, no shared hallway, no other doors, just a single dark wooden entrance framed by two low potted trees and a discreet keypad panel set into the wall beside it.

Stan tapped his phone against the reader. The door unlocked with a soft mechanical click and he pushed it open.

The penthouse opened out in front of them.

Late afternoon light poured in through the tall floor-to-ceiling glass along the far wall, laid across the pale wood of the floor in long warm bars. The main living space stretched out low and wide and quiet, a long sectional sofa arranged around a low stone coffee table, an open kitchen along one side with a marble island and a row of hanging brass pendants, a dining table set for six that had never actually seated six, and beyond all of it the wide sliding glass that opened onto the wraparound terrace and the long unobstructed view of the sea.

Camilla stepped inside. She stopped one pace past the threshold.

She looked at the ceiling. She looked at the floor. She looked at the long soft line of the sofa. She looked at the marble island. She looked at the pendants and then looked at the view...

She was very still as Stan closed the door behind them.

He set his keys in the small tray on the console by the entrance. He toed off his shoes and stepped out of them with the small grateful sigh of a man who had been in the same pair for what was, by any honest measure, days. He padded past her toward the living space.

”Make yourself comfortable. Kitchen’s open. Fridge has whatever’s still edible. Terrace is through the sliders. Guest bathroom is the second door on the left down that hall. There’s more, actually, I’ll show you the rest properly in a minute. I need a shower first.”

Camilla did not answer immediately.

She was still, very quietly, looking at the view.

”... Your place is nice...” she complimented and went quiet for another moment. Then she turned her head slowly toward him, one dark eyebrow arched as she noticed the small corner of his mouth curving with private amusement. He shrugged her compliment off...

”Shower,” he said. ”Ten minutes. Then I’ll show you around properly.”

She inclined her head, the small, precise gesture of a Royal Blood granting permission to a mortal who did not, technically, require it, and turned her attention back to the view.

Stan closed the door to the master bedroom behind him and allowed himself a quiet breath of relief.

Home.

He hadn’t realized just how much he had missed the simple comfort of his own space until now.

The bathroom was, in Stan’s opinion, one of the best rooms in the penthouse. It had been quite some time since he bought the apartment, but its design had never ceased to amaze him.

He had not designed it. He had bought the place fully finished, and whoever had specified the fixtures had done so with the small, expensive care of a person who understood that a bathroom, properly considered, was one of the two rooms in a home where a person spent time alone with themselves and their thoughts, and that both of those rooms deserved to be beautiful.

The room was long and low, done in warm pale stone, with a deep freestanding tub against one wall and, his preferred feature, a walk-in shower behind a single frameless glass panel along the other, with a broad overhead rainhead and a second handheld unit on a sliding rail and a small niche cut into the stone for whatever bottles a person kept in a shower. ... Stan stripped out of his clothes with the slow, tired efficiency of a man whose body had, over the past several days, endured far more than it had ever asked for.

He caught his reflection in the mirror and paused.

The Bone-Tempering Pill and the Jade Purity Elixir had, at some point during the past week, quietly completed their work on his body. The damage he had suffered at the hands of the Werewolves should have left behind a lifetime of reminders, but thanks to the lifesaving pill he had purchased from the System Shop, everything had healed without leaving so much as a scar. He was as good as new.

His gaze slowly lowered to his stomach, and he unconsciously touched the spot where there had once been nothing but torn flesh and blood.

He sighed softly.

”It’s hard to believe there was once a gaping hole in my stomach,” he murmured to himself. ”My skin was practically scraped off too. I was a bloody mess back then.”

He could still remember it vividly. The overwhelming pain. The sensation of his consciousness fading as death slowly reached out for him. The smell of blood that refused to leave his senses for days afterward.

There had been a moment when he genuinely thought he was going to die in Antarctica.

Thankfully, the System Shop had possessed the one thing capable of dragging him back from death’s doorstep.

His expression darkened slightly as memories of the Werewolves surfaced in his mind.

”Those bastard Werewolves...” he muttered coldly. ”It’s only fitting they paid with their lives.”

His eyes narrowed faintly.

”Especially that fucking bastard of a leader.”

He didn’t pity them in the slightest. They had hunted him without hesitation, intending to tear him apart and leave his corpse buried beneath Antarctica’s endless ice. Had their positions been reversed, they wouldn’t have shown him even the slightest mercy.

The only thing he regretted was that he hadn’t been the one to kill every last one of them himself. In the end all he needed was strength, so that if such a scenario was to repeat itself, he wouldn’t be so helpless next time...

Antarctica had taught him many things. Strength was one of them.

Next time, he intended to be strong enough that survival wouldn’t need to depend upon luck or the contents of the System Shop.