Chương 205: Chapter 184: That Box Was Never Meant to Hold Rings

[Time]: Summer Break, Day 49 — 1: 30 PM [Location]: White City · Royal Rosas Club · The Revolving Restaurant The confirmation landed in the Revolving Restaurant with the quiet, irrevocable finality of a system patch committing to the registry. Rhode's features twisted through successive waves of physiological revulsion, terminal disbelief, and outraged ancestral pride, and the dark sunglasses slipped from her nose. She looked at Hathaway, squeezed her eyes shut, snapped them open, and squeezed them shut again.

The crimson irises began to glitch like a dying neon tube: spiking to a blinding 200 lumens, plunging to a dim 20, strobing erratically. Beside her, Bella stood completely petrified, a trembling finger raised directly at Hathaway's nose. She opened her mouth to launch a grandiose, sweeping monologue, but the syllables piled up and compressed in her throat, escaping only as a sharp, strangled wheeze.

For the first time in her professional theatrical career, Bella Ludwig was standing center-stage with absolutely no script loaded. Across the table, Heidi Lucent slowly placed her empty teacup back onto its porcelain saucer with a soft, definitive click. Rhode dragged a ragged breath into her lungs.

"You... Victoria—" She threw both hands into the air, her syntax completely abandoning her.

"Is it that Victoria? The one who looks like a walking corporate audit—" She slammed the emergency brakes on her own sentence, recalibrating.

"The youngest daughter of the Wellington main line? That Victoria Wellington?!" Hathaway looked at her cousin.

"It is exactly the Victoria Wellington you are thinking of." The last remaining high-light in Rhode's red eyes instantly short-circuited. Her shoulders dropped. She stared at the tablecloth with the vacant expression of a marionette whose strings had been severed. Bella finally completed her reboot cycle. She clutched both hands over her heart, staggered backward a full dramatic step, and drew a massive breath.

"Heavens weep!" she wailed, her single uncovered eye blazing with manufactured despair.

"O Eclipse! Has the abyssal miasma breached your cognitive wards?! To bind your fate to the harbinger of the Abyssal Bats is to invite the void into our sanctuary! I, Bella the Cursed, categorically refuse to bear witness to this forbidden convergence! The very stars recoil!"

Of all the emergency backup personas available for loading after a total system crash, Hathaway's developer brain noted with detached fascination, the first role your subconscious retrieved from cache was the wicked relative devoted to physically tearing Romeo and Juliet apart. The narrative implications are genuinely alarming. Bella's melodrama, however, acted as a defibrillator on Rhode. Rhode's spine snapped straight. Her palm slammed flat against the linen tablecloth, rattling the silverware.

She located her voice with the force of someone pulling a weapon from a holster.

"Exactly! I also object! She is a Wellington!" The words came in a rotary-cannon burst.

"The Wellingtons. You were there last night — you saw it yourself! Every single woman produced by that bloodline is structurally unhinged! They are precisely like the sigil on their carriage door: an entire parliament of gloomy, damp, scheming bats!"

"That is a statistical generalization based on a single data point," Hathaway said, her defensive protocols engaging automatically.

"Victoria is not Evangeline—" Rhode let out a sharp, serrated sneer.

"That is her sister! She was cultivated in the exact same swamp! Do you genuinely believe she grew up in that swamp and walked out with clean boots?!" Hathaway opened her mouth. Her memory returned one specific visual file, uninvited: Victoria's expression in the moment Cecilia had asked the room to prepare a specimen. Hathaway closed her mouth. Rhode absorbed the sudden silence with a vanguard's instincts, scanning for a gap in the defense line. She swept one arm in a grand, rallying gesture.

"The women of that dynasty do not have the word 'breakup' compiled anywhere in their vocabulary! They only have possession and burial!" She leaned over the table, her tone dropping into the urgent, earnest register of a veteran trying to pull a rookie back from the edge of a tactical disaster.

"Are you really going to hang your entire life from one tree? That particular tree? You are eighteen years old, Hattie! An entire century of prime demographic real estate stretches ahead of you!" Hathaway looked at her cousin. Rhode's well-documented history as a fixture in the White City's most exclusive nightlife circuits, and her loudly sustained refusal to so much as conceptualize settling down, gave the argument a terrifying amount of empirical weight. Bella seized the baton immediately.

She swept her arms wide and delivered a comprehensive proposal: a hundred-person elite matching convention, assembled before the moon rose, its sole objective to locate a vessel truly worthy of Hathaway's soul's resonance. Heidi watched the performance for a long, quiet moment. She set her hands in her lap.

"Among any hundred Witches willing to volunteer for such a convention," Heidi said, her voice dropping into the ambient noise without effort, "there will be precisely zero with an objective baseline profile superior to Victoria Wellington." Rhode snapped her head toward the Grand Witch. She grabbed Hathaway by the shoulder, hauled her forward, and presented her to Heidi like a prize exhibit in an active legal dispute.

"What do you mean, no one superior?!" Rhode demanded. Her free hand chopped the air to punctuate each metric.

"Look at my cousin! Eighteen years old and already running an Arch-Witch baseline mana pool! She inherited the Ludwig bloodline's reflex nerves at their absolute peak! She cleared the A1 Certification in under thirty days, missing a perfect score by exactly two points! She holds a registered, globally circulated arcane engineering patent! And setting all the technical specs entirely aside—" Rhode grabbed Hathaway's cheeks with both hands and pulled.

"Look at this face! Alright, it is not the variety of beauty that paralyzes a city block, but with the correct wardrobe adjustments, she possesses a highly specific and undeniable premium flavor!" Hathaway's expression went perfectly wooden. She made no attempt to remove the hands from her face. Rhode let go of her first. The silence that dropped over the table was heavy, mathematical, and ruthless.

Because once the specifications were laid out in organized columns, the comparative analysis completed itself without any assistance. Arch-Witch mana density. A globally distributed patent. The ceiling of Ludwig reflexes. When stacked against the youngest Wellington daughter, who matched each metric and added twin A2 certificates, generational wealth of indeterminate and terrifying depth, and a face that in fact did constitute a public safety concern, the resulting equation was not merely symmetrical.

In the cold, unfeeling arithmetic of the matching market, Hathaway was technically the one reaching upward. The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation. Bella let out a high, pathetic whimper of defeat. The silence held for several more seconds. Rhode reached up and pressed her dark sunglasses firmly back onto the bridge of her nose with a single, deliberate finger.

Her gaze fixed on an unremarkable point on the stained-glass window across the room, and her voice dropped a full octave, stripped entirely of bombast.

"You know exactly what I am worried about." Hathaway looked at her cousin's profile.

"I know," Hathaway said. Rhode muttered into her collar.

"If the day comes when you want to walk away and she won't let you go... we will help you run. The whole family will." Is it structurally advisable, Hathaway's developer brain queried, to finalize the emergency extraction protocols before the first week of the relationship has even cleared?

Above that, if Hathaway actually attempted a server migration, Victoria would simply hand the problem to Cecilia: the entire Greed Umbrella roster would gleefully deploy as a search-and-retrieval task force, and Evangeline would volunteer for the pursuit grid purely for the entertainment value of hunting her sister's ex. Exactly which coordinate in any plane of existence could comfortably host Hathaway's offline mode against five world champions and an enslaved calamity?

"Figure it out yourself," Rhode grumbled. She turned and walked away without looking back. Bella lingered exactly one beat. She stared at Hathaway, her single uncovered eye entirely free of theatrical pretense, her mouth opening and closing as if searching for a final prophecy. A deep sigh escaped her. Then she stepped backward three times, maintaining unbroken eye contact, and disappeared through the restaurant doors.

Hathaway had the distinct, clinical sensation of someone who had just survived a formal reading of her own terminal medical diagnosis. Heidi's lips curved into a faint, knowing smile.

"It appears your kinship network does not project a high survival margin for your romantic endeavor."

"Your evaluation," Hathaway noted, "seems to fall outside their consensus."

"Because," Heidi said, rising from her chair with quiet, unhurried grace, "you do not look like someone who has any intention of running away." Hathaway watched the Grand Witch exit the dining hall, the slow cascade of colored light from the stained glass tracing a path across her shoulders before the corridor shadows absorbed her. The ambient noise of the restaurant rushed back in. Hathaway sat completely alone at the table.

A waiter materialized at her elbow, holding a leather-bound menu with professional patience.

"May I take your order, Miss Ludwig?" Her processor buffered for a full second. She had originally entered the Revolving Restaurant to eat lunch. She had survived a synchronized geopolitical assault from both cousins and had not once opened the menu. She ordered the daily special without reading it, consumed her meal in mechanical silence.

[Time]: Summer Break, Day 49 — 2: 15 PM [Location]: White City · Royal Rosas Club · Courtyard Stepping out of the restaurant into the afternoon sun, Hathaway wandered the club grounds. The crushing operational weight of the past several weeks had evaporated overnight, leaving a sudden, unfamiliar surplus of processing power and nothing earmarked for it.

She was actively calculating whether the club's hydrotherapy spa was a justifiable allocation of the afternoon when the mechanical thunk of a vending machine dispensing a can broke the courtyard quiet. Standing beside the humming machine, a half-empty can of cold soda resting loosely against her knuckles, was Liandra von Milan'thirskaya. What is the regional spawn rate today, Hathaway thought, stopping in her tracks. I have now intersected with two named high-tier characters within a ninety-minute window.

She immediately amended the observation: technically, this was only two people. The sample size was not statistically significant. Liandra looked up. She raised one hand in a brief greeting.

"Hi," Liandra said.

"Victoria's girlfriend." Hathaway's boots welded to the pavement. How. She had delivered the disclosure to Rhode and Bella less than an hour ago, inside a soundproofed restaurant. There was no statistical plausibility for rumor transmission at fiber-optic speeds. Her cousins were loud in general, but not about family matters. Liandra watched the logic engine stall on Hathaway's face. She tilted her head.

"Did I guess wrong?" She inserted a coin into the machine and pressed a button, waiting for the second can to drop.

"When the sky was literally falling two nights ago, the first and only coordinate Victoria reached for was you. I assumed."

"You guessed right." Liandra leaned down, retrieved the second can, walked over, and tossed it across the short distance.

"Good." Hathaway caught it and popped the tab. The cold, sharp fizz of the first sip hit her system like a restart. Sharp footsteps struck the courtyard stone behind them. Alucard rounded the corner of the hedgerow, her dark jacket unbuttoned at the collar, her hair in a state that accurately mirrored the absolute ruin of her professional sanity. She registered Hathaway with an exhausted nod, then turned the full weight of her dead-eyed gaze onto Liandra.

"You still have not come up to help me process the post-lockdown administrative audit," Alucard said. Her voice carried the specific, bone-deep grievance of someone working through the third consecutive uncovered shift.

"The log files are spilling off the console." Liandra didn't blink. She took a slow, deliberate sip.

"You should submit that to Tasia. My contract covers field deployment." Alucard's shoulders dropped three full inches.

"Every single one of you does this to me..." She turned and marched back toward the administrative spire, her boots striking the marble with the furious cadence of a soldier returning to a trench under active fire. Because the paperwork still had to be filed. Hathaway watched her disappear around the archway, her mouth twitching.

"Is it really okay to leave her like that?"

"If you demonstrate a moment of softness during a crunch," Liandra replied, her expression entirely undisturbed, "you become a permanent hostage of other people's administrative disasters. What would you choose?" Hathaway took another sip of her drink and chose silence. The courtyard settled into a quiet rhythm, the afternoon breeze moving through the trimmed hedges. Liandra turned her can slowly between her palms, watching the condensation lines trace down the metal.

"When Cecilia signed the contract yesterday," Liandra said, her voice dropping out of the casual register entirely, "did her hand waver? Even once?" Hathaway's memory rolled back to the hotel suite. The heavy parchment spread across the coffee table. The silver ink catching the light. The unblinking stillness of the Wellington heir as the quill descended.

"No," Hathaway said.

"Not for a single microsecond." Liandra nodded once. A razor-thin smile touched the corner of her mouth.

"Then she got exactly what she wanted." Hathaway's can stopped halfway to her lips. A cold friction moved through her cognitive layers. Something in the premise is wrong. She had spent weeks building the dependency tree for this crisis based on Alice's manuscript. Her core assumption had been that Cecilia wanted an answer: she believed the second Wellington was standing at the edge of a void, demanding that Evangeline turn around, acknowledge the wreckage, prove the past was not hollow.

Under that logic, the moment Evangeline delivered her cold, empty response, Cecilia should have fractured. But Cecilia hadn't fractured. She had issued an execution order. The answer and the result, the realization clicked into place with the clean, terrifying precision of a patched bug compiling correctly, were never the same pipeline. Cecilia had asked the question, received the expected and uninteresting output, and closed the emotional ledger.

Then she had deployed the contract to secure the result: permanent, legally binding containment of the subject within her personal geography. Hathaway looked at Liandra standing beside the vending machine. Six years ago, at the Babylon Wedding, Liandra had stood at the same coordinate as a different person.

"Back then," Hathaway said quietly.

"At the Babylon Wedding. If Ash had actually come back, exactly as you hoped... what were you going to do?" The silence that followed filled the entire courtyard. Liandra didn't turn her head. But the fingers wrapped around her aluminum can tightened, and the metal groaned, a small, sharp crinkle echoing across the empty courtyard. When she finally spoke, her usual clinical distance was completely gone. The voice that came out was so light it barely disturbed the air.

"I don't know," Liandra whispered. Her expression fractured. What remained was the face of a child standing alone in a very large, very empty room.

"I wanted to scold her," Liandra said, her eyes fixed somewhere past the courtyard stones.

"I wanted to ask her why she didn't come back sooner. I wanted to bury my face in her coat and cry until I had nothing left..." A soft, broken breath.

"I just wanted her to come back. So we could go to the amusement park together. She promised we would." Hathaway stood completely still. She raised her can to take a drink and found she had already emptied it. They stood in the courtyard for a long time. Slowly, the temperature changed. The vulnerability bled out of the air. Liandra pulled herself back from that shuttered place with the practiced efficiency of someone engaging security protocols one by one, locking the doors on the past.

She looked down at her half-empty can.

"Cecilia is different," Liandra said, her voice returning to its level cadence.

"She always knew exactly what she was building toward."

"That year, at the Babylon Wedding." She paused.

"That box at the altar was never meant to hold rings."