Demonic Pornstar System novel Chapter 956

Chapter 956: Supportive Family

"Luna," Kaiden said. "Something wrong?"

She looked up at him.

She could lie to every person in that room and be believed.

Or she could tell them the truth.

"..."

But she didn’t, because these were her people and she had never once made them guess.

"...Yes," she nodded weakly.

The room did not take it the way a room takes news. It took it the way a room takes weather coming. Doug set his pen down. The humor went out of Nyx’s face and did not come back, and Vespera turned her head.

"He wants to talk," Luna said. "He..."

Then she stopped, because that was the end of what she knew.

Luna stood in the middle of her family with her brother’s name in front of her, thirty middle fingers already sent and the block sitting right there underneath his message.

She did not tell anybody in that room what she was going to do about it.

Including herself.

The quiet went unfilled, which was a first for this particular room.

Luna stood in the middle of it with the thread still open in her vision, and she was not looking at any of them. She was looking at Kaiden, and she did not stop looking at Kaiden, because he was the only one in that room she was actually talking to.

Ms. Rook read it first, and moved.

She squared her pages against the table, slid them into her folio, and stood. "We will resume at nine," she announced to the table at large, which was generous of her, considering that nine o’clock was now less than eight hours away.

Doug gathered his forms into both arms and, for once in his documented career, walked out without finishing a sentence. The two staffers who had been keeping minutes at the far end followed him out with their tablets hugged to their chests, and the last one through eased the door shut the way people close doors in hospitals.

Then it was family, and nobody else.

"I already answered him," Luna said. "Thirty middle fingers. It was therapeutic."

A few of them smiled at that, carefully. Nobody laughed.

"That part was easy." Her thumb worked against the side of her finger, back and forth. "But there’s a block option under his name too. One press and he’s out of my life, permanently. No more chances, no more ambushes at midnight, nothing, ever." The thumb stopped. "I’ve been trying to press it since before Rook stood up. I just... can’t."

"Then give it here." Alice didn’t even sit up in her chair. "I’ll press it for you, and we can all go to sleep."

She meant it completely, which was the most Alice thing about it.

"...You can’t take over someone else’s private messages in the awakened interface," Aria informed the little sister.

"You also shouldn’t be able to fuse with your big brother and become a higher existence. This sounds more likely to work." She wasn’t an easy one to shake.

"Or we take the meeting," Calypso offered, and her grin spread slow and happy. "All of us together. If the boy truly wants to talk, we sit him down and we listen. And if it’s a trap..."

"We can’t do that."

Aria said it quietly, and everyone heard the difference in her voice before they understood the words. She had her hands folded in her lap, and she was looking at Luna with open sorrow.

"And we can’t ignore what he’s living in, either. You remember what he said when we met him? He had to bring you over or he’d be in trouble... And somehow he’s escaped jail since? All of this is so strange..."

"..." Luna’s fists tightened, but she said nothing as Aria continued.

"People in such circumstances rarely send messages their..." She selected the next word very carefully, very gently, "Superiors haven’t approved first. So that message is theirs as much as his, I fear, and we should be honest about who they are."

Bastet was quick to join, fully in agreement with the Moon Valkyrie. "The annoying answer is that we know almost nothing. They have no official standing, no faces, no records, and they are invisible in a world where everything is carefully recorded. And the one time they touched you people, they made a brother try to kidnap his own little sister."

No one interrupted her. Even Calypso’s grin had folded itself away.

Aria nodded. "That was when you were a rookie nobody had heard of. Look at what you are now. Look at what we all are. There isn’t a guild or a government on this planet that isn’t hungry to own us, and these people have already shown us how they collect."

Her hands tightened in her lap.

"Whatever you were worth to them back then, you are worth a million times more tonight. If we walk you into a meeting they arranged, we might be delivering the exact prize they sent him to fetch."

None of it came out of her easily. Aria had spent her whole life being a big sister, and every sentence sounded like it was costing her.

"Aria is right." Bastet’s tail had gone still along the arm of her chair, which in its own language was a shout. "Patient creatures are the dangerous ones. When something has waited this long before extending a hand, the invitation is part of the hunt. I am sorry, Luna."

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