Demonic Pornstar System novel Chapter 967

Chapter 967: Problematic News

Kaiden brought the SUV up to the compound checkpoint at half past seven, and Bastet was still purring.

She had not stopped since the highway. The man on the gate was one of theirs now, a C-tier with a decade of logged hours and a clipboard nobody had asked him to carry. He leaned down to wave them through, heard it rolling out of the middle row, and lost his place in his own sentence.

"Evening, sir. Good- good day out?"

"Very good," Kaiden said.

The barrier went up.

The gravel had gone blue, and the headquarters stood over the lot with three stories of dark glass holding the last of the light. Dorm windows ran in rows above it. The mess hall was still lit at the far end, with somebody’s music coming out of it.

Yuna Park was out of the third row before the vehicle finished rocking on its springs.

"Guild leader." She was already walking backward toward the building. "Nothing followed us in. I’ll file tonight."

"That can wait until tomorrow. Great job today, Park."

"...Thank you!" she beamed, bowed to him, and went to file it that night.

Calypso came out of the passenger door with the shopping, which was most of the shopping, because she had appointed herself to it somewhere around the third floor of the mall and had refused all offers since.

Bags hung off both arms to the elbow. She had the smoothie cups stacked inside one of them, empty, because she had decided they were coming home too.

Bastet took considerably longer, on the grounds that she had a system.

The sandals went on first. Then the anklets rose out of the cupholder in one gold handful, and she put them back on her ankles there in the doorway of the vehicle, one at a time, with the caramel cat tucked under her chin the entire time so it did not touch the seat.

The photo strip went into the front of her silks last, where queens put things.

"Master," she said, when she was assembled. "I need the cat washed."

"Ask Alexandra who does it."

"Mm." She thought about that for a moment, and whatever she landed on pleased her, because her ears went up with it. "She’ll want to know about the machine."

Kaiden looked up.

The whole ops floor was lit.

Every panel of it, top to bottom, and the glass wall that faced the lot had one silhouette standing in the middle of it with her arms folded, watching the drive.

Nyx had been standing there long enough to be waiting for headlights, and the moment his came up the drive she turned away from the glass and said something over her shoulder to a room he could not see into.

"There’s a problem," Nyx sighed.

Calypso dropped the bags in the gravel, all of them, in one heap.

"Is it a fight?" she asked, and there was hope all the way through it.

"No. Well... Not yet."

Doug had the list.

That was the first thing Kaiden saw when he came up onto the ops floor, and it told him most of it before anybody opened a mouth. Doug loved a page of numbers. He was holding this one at arm’s length, like it had come up out of a drain.

Ms. Rook stood at the map table with her tablet squared to its edge. Nyx had come off the glass and propped herself against the corner of her own desk.

"Guild leader," Ms. Rook said. "There were fourteen resignations."

Kaiden stopped walking. "What?"

"Resignation. Filed today. The earliest landed at one twenty, the last at four fifty. All of them effective immediately, all of them citing a competing offer." She scrolled once.

"Buyout terms?"

"Paid, where applicable." She looked up. "They spent significant money on this move."

Kaiden had never wanted to run Eclipse like some modern-day slaver. He had not put buyout clauses on anybody he could not afford to buy out himself, so people who came freely could leave freely, with the confidentiality terms still standing and the guild’s gear coming back at the door.

"...Fourteen." He crossed the rest of the way to the table.

"Six of your twenty-six A-tiers," Ms. Rook said. "Eight B-tiers."

"Nothing under B. Not a single name off the low end," Aria murmured, yandere princess mode initiated. She had gone very still, and she was smiling.

The floor fell quiet enough that the building noise rose through it, some pump running away to itself below the stairs.

Kaiden put both hands on the map table, on the battered folding legs Calypso had carried up from the tent, surrounded by all that new glass, and looked at the page in Doug’s hand from six feet away without asking for it yet.

"Competing offers, huh? So they were poached. By whom?"

"Nine of them signed with Crimson Dominion. Five with Radiant Order." Ms. Rook set the tablet down. "The two lists do not overlap anywhere. They did not bid against each other for a single name."

"They coordinated... The two top-tier guilds that always butt heads?"

"Yes," Nyx said. "Just to put us down."

"They’re fucking terrified of us," Luna said.

"Afraid enough to shake hands..." Bastet muttered.

Kaiden had come up those stairs with the whole day still on him, the mall and the sun and two women laughing over smoothies. The people watching his face saw the last of it go.

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