100x Rebate Sharing System: Retired Incubus Wants to Marry & Have Kids

Chapter 379: Chapter 378- Trapping the Elf

Her attention was entirely on them.

The particular focused quality of someone giving their hands something very specific to do so the rest of them can be somewhere else.

Viktor looked at her for a moment.

”Olivia,” he said.

She was beside him. ”Yes?”

”Helena needs someone to check her. The pregnancy — the third trimester vitals should be logged.”

Olivia’s eyes went briefly to Vivian at the garden wall. Back to Viktor. The golden-amber of them carried a quiet that said she’d understood what he’d said and also what he hadn’t.

”Of course,” she said.

She left.

The sound of her robes moving through the grass, the gentle creak of the tower’s interior door, and then quiet.

Viktor walked toward the garden wall.

His footsteps on the grass were not loud. But Vivian heard them.

Her shoulders moved — a single small upward shift, the reflex of a body that had been waiting to hear exactly this and had not decided what to do about it.

She straightened. Stood.

Turned to face him.

She’d fixed her hair at some point — it was properly pinned now, the loose strands from the morning tucked back, the dress straight. She’d done everything that could be done to reconstruct the surface of the person who’d existed before this morning, and from three feet away, in the clean light of the garden, the effort was visible in exactly the wrong way.

Her eyes were still slightly swollen. The flush on her cheeks wasn’t the warm kind.

She looked at him.

”What are you doing here?” she said. Her voice had the careful quality of something assembled. ”What’s happened? What—”

”Are you all right?” Viktor said.

The question stopped her.

She stared at him.

”’Am I—’” The assembled voice came apart briefly before she caught it. Her jaw worked. She looked at the flowers she’d been crouching over, then back at him. ”You know what you did. You ’know.’ I am a ’mother.’ My daughter was in that room.” Her hands pressed flat against her thighs — the gesture of someone holding themselves still through the effort of pressing against a surface. ”I told you—” She stopped. ”I was the fool. I was the fool who—” She stopped again.

She turned to leave.

Viktor raised his hand.

He snapped his fingers.

The sound of it was quiet.

The effect was not.

The ground at the center of the garden shifted — a single tremor, subtle, the kind of thing you felt in your soles before you saw anything. Then the soil broke, not violently but with the unhurried inevitability of something that had been asked to do this and was complying.

A sapling pushed up.

Then, faster.

Not as large as the one outside — the World Tree in the east grounds was its own thing, a territory anchor, a structure. This was smaller, shaped differently, the kind of tree that grew with the proportions of a companion rather than a monument. The bark was the same silver-green, the same faint luminescence in the grain, the same warmth in the leaves as they opened — but the scale of it was intimate. Its canopy, fully open, reached perhaps ten feet above its crown, casting a circle of dappled moving shadow that covered the stone bench, the rose bed, the patch of grass between them.

The fragrance came immediately. Greener and sweeter than the garden had been, something underneath it that was not a smell exactly but had a quality that arrived the same way — the vitality emanation, close and warm, the purifying presence of the world tree in concentrated form.

Vivian had stopped moving.

She was standing with her back still partially turned, one hand raised toward where the door had been, frozen in the specific stillness of a body that has received information through means other than the eyes. Her elf bloodline — dormant, compressed by decades of movement and exile and the constant suppression of everything she was in favor of everything she needed to be — responded to the tree the way a compass responds to north.

Not her choice.

Just — ’toward.’

Her eyes moved to the tree. Slowly. Against what appeared to be significant internal resistance.

The light through its leaves fell on her face.

Her expression, which had been assembled and careful and defended, came undone.

Not dramatically. The way things come undone when the thing holding them together finally has somewhere to put itself. Her eyes filled and didn’t overflow. The lines around her mouth softened. Her shoulders dropped half an inch, the release of a tension she’d been carrying for — from the look of it — longer than this morning.

Viktor walked to her.

His hand closed around her wrist.

”Follow me,” he said.

”I—” Her voice came out rough. She looked at him, and then at the tree, and then back at him with the expression of someone who has two competing compulsions and has to choose between them. ”You can’t just—”

He was already moving.

She followed. Not entirely voluntarily — the pull of his hand on her wrist, and the pull of the tree in the other direction, and her feet deciding for her that forward was the available option.

The door in this tree’s trunk was smaller. Proportional. It opened the same way — like it had always been there.

Viktor went through.

He drew Vivian through behind him.

Inside.

The interior of this tree was not a cathedral hall. It was a room. One room, the walls living wood, the same amber-lit grain, a window of sorts — an oval opening in the trunk wall, glazed over by a thin membrane of compressed resin that let the garden light through in a warm diffuse wash. The floor was smooth root-wood, slightly curved.

And the bed.

Grown from the floor, the way the chairs in the hall outside had been grown — not carved, not placed, simply ’shaped,’ the tree having arranged a section of its roots and interior wood into something horizontal and broad and supported.

The wood of it was smooth as old oak. It was covered in a natural mat of compressed moss, soft and dense, that had grown there on its own.

Viktor turned.

He let go of her wrist.

Vivian had approximately three seconds in which to take in the room, the bed, and his expression.

Then he pushed her.

Not hard. The particular push of a man who has made a decision and is executing it with economy — a hand at her shoulder, a direction applied.

Vivian sat down on the bed.

Then, with the continuation of the motion, tipped backward.

The moss received her with a softness she hadn’t anticipated, the entire broad surface of it yielding to her weight with the generosity of something that had been made for exactly this purpose.

Her hair spilled across it. Her dress had ridden up at the hip.

She scrambled upright onto her elbows immediately, chest rising and falling, breasts shifting with the motion — the full weight of them pressing against her dress, the slight swing of them as she pulled herself upright, the deep generous curve of them settling.

Her cheeks were flushed.

”What are you—”

The vines moved.

From the walls.