Chapter 369: Chapter 369: Let the Game Begin
She wasn’t convinced in the slightest. “Did you have sex with her?”
“Absolutely not,” Jax said, not wasting a single second on it. “I told you, she wasn’t in her senses, but I was. So there was no way I’d ever do something that wicked to her. And if you want proof, should I go take a test?”
Astrid considered that. “It’s fine. For now, at least. Instead, how about you swear on the sacred flames that you’ll never do something as vicious as that with her in the future either.”
She pointed off into the distance, to a flame burning on the first floor.
“It’s a magic relic,” she said. “It’s been burning for the last fifteen years without any fuel or anything at all. And Father says that if you swear in front of it, then no matter how hard you try to defy your oath afterward, you’ll always end up bound to that fate of your own words.”
Jax nearly laughed in her face. To him it sounded like one of those tidy little lies parents cook up to keep their children in line, dressed up with a fancy relic and a story. And of course his lovely idiot still swallowed the lie and the decor whole.
But he wanted this over and done with quickly, so he turned to the fire and laid it on thick. “I, Jax, do solemnly swear, upon these very dramatic flames, that I shall never, in this life or any life after it, have sex with that drunkard Roxana.” He paused. “No, make that any other girl, except my lovely Astrid. Oh, wait, let me add Adelina to the list as well. Then Beatrix. And lastly Nerith. May this ugly little flame burn me to ash if I ever dare to get up to any dirty deeds with anyone but these girls of mine.”
He swung his head back toward Astrid. “There. Satisfied now? But are we good? Did it take? Because I don’t feel a thing. It didn’t flicker, it didn’t glow, nothing.”
“It doesn’t react that way,” Astrid said. “But it did lighten my burden, at least a little. Now there’ll be someone working right alongside me to clear the path ahead.”
Jax bit down on his lip to keep the giggle from slipping loose. ‘Not even a child would fall for a trap this stupid,’ he thought. ‘If that flame actually did anything, I’d have sworn to shave the heads of every last dwarf on this entire continent and put them to work mopping the streets with their own precious beards. And boom, this convenient little campfire would’ve made my dream e true.’
He stood there snickering at the flames behind Astrid, fully lost in the racist masterpiece he would have wrought. Two utterly bald dwarves, the living picture of absurdity, with Jax lounging beside them, his arm propped up on one glistening, freshly polished scalp like it was the armrest of his favorite chair.
Then he crash-landed back into reality, and the very first thing he clocked was the flame. Well, the thing that had been a flame about ten seconds ago. The fire had simply vanished the instant he came back to his senses, gone without a flicker or a single wisp of smoke, leaving behind nothing but the hollow vessel that had supposedly held it burning for fifteen whole years.
‘The fuck just happened?’ he thought.
That was when he spotted the maid, panicking near the relic, before she slowly and oh-so-innocently sidestepped away from it and strolled off as though she’d never stood within a mile of the thing.
The guard posted at the flame watched her make her clean little getaway, and she shot him a small, apologetic, sorry-for-you sort of face on her way past. She knew full well the poor man was about to inherit a mountain of questions, and very possibly a great deal of danger besides.
Unlike her, he couldn’t simply wander off. He was nailed to that exact spot, and bolting now would only dig his grave that much deeper.
‘Wait. Was this flame actually that important?’ Jax thought. ‘So then what made it disappear? Was it my absolute oath?’
Catching the confusion working across his face, Astrid started to turn toward whatever he was staring at. But before her eyes could land on the dead flame, Jax caught her gently by the jaw and steered her face right back to his.
‘I can’t let her watch her precious little panion die the very moment we struck our deal,’ he thought. ‘That dangerous mind of hers will cook up a dozen ridiculous reasons in a single heartbeat. And since it won’t stay hidden forever anyway, the moment she does find out, I’ll simply pin the whole thing on Loki. Tell her the woman’s mere arrival must’ve shorted out this ever-burning fire of theirs.’
Now Astrid was the one panicking. Her eyes went darting across the hall, finding Seris first, then Elira, then Seraphina, then the rest of the academy girls, a handful of nobles she knew by name, and finally the hand still tilting her head by the jaw.
One look at Seris’s face and it hit her square in the chest. Between her own behavior tonight and Jax’s, she’d backed herself into a corner she would now have to crawl out of one impossible question at a time, every single one of them aimed straight at her relationship with him.
She dropped her voice and laid the blame squarely where she felt it belonged. “You’ve put me in the worst possible spot. How exactly am I supposed to answer the flood of questions ing after all this? How do I even face Seris, who looks absolutely petrified over there, after she watched me first interrupt your dance and then turn right around and dance with my enemy?”
“You brought this one on yourself,” Jax said. “And now you’re left with only one move. Stop fighting it, and just tell everyone the truth about us.”
He held her gaze. “Think about it. It’s the cleanest way out there is. Make it official, and all of a sudden none of tonight looks the least bit suspicious. It just looks obvious. No more sneaking, no more covering your tracks, no more inventing reasons on the spot. You’d get to live with me right out in the open, the questions answer themselves, and that jealousy you keep choking on loses half its teeth overnight, because there wouldn’t be a misunderstanding left to have. Isn’t that the better deal?”
Astrid disagreed flatly. “No. I can’t do that, not right now. I need the perfect time and the perfect plan to explain all of it, or the whole thing collapses into a disaster.”
“Relax. I was only joking.” Jax’s tone eased back down. “Besides, I need a bit of time of my own to settle a few things before I go announcing to the world that you’re mine. And as for right now, the questions? Don’t waste a single ounce of worry on them. The very people you’re so terrified of are working overtime on our behalf as we speak. They’re answering every last question for us, just with their own wonderfully twisted, pletely misdirected versions of events. All you have to do is listen to the whispers, pick out whichever one suits you best, and play along.”
Astrid closed her eyes and let the murmurs behind her back drift in.
“…just look at how terrible that girl is, sister. She couldn’t stand the thought of anyone else stealing her spotlight, not even for a single moment. The mean little thing practically threatened those two lovely professors over their graceful little dance, all because it pulled every eye in the room off of her. Did you see how furious she was? If that handsome professor hadn’t stepped in when he did, who knows what she’d have done to that poor boy, or to the two professors themselves. His quick thinking is the only reason this whole party wasn’t ruined. And look at her now, perfectly satisfied, after stealing that poor man away from his women and snatching the limelight right back.”
The other girl scoffed. “Are you truly wasting your breath on that rude thing, Sasha? And what’s all this ‘lovely’ and ‘handsome professor’ nonsense? Don’t let that man fool you, not if you haven’t heard the talk going around. He’s a playboy. The kind who can charm any woman he so much as sets his eyes on. That’s the exact reason so many girls keep circling him like moths.”
“They say he’s in a relationship with Professor Roxana and Professor Zharina both,” she added in a hush. “And it took him all of one month to grab the pair of them.”
From another corner entirely, a noble grumbled into his cup, “Curse that professor. I had my heart set on my son claiming her first dance, and that little brat went and torched the entire plan in one move, Don’t tell me that this was the bastard’s scheme from the very start? Seize the limelight, then snare Lady Astrid in whatever web he’s spinning?”
Astrid laughed under her breath at all of it. “A playboy.” A giggle slipped out. “Looks like your reputation is even worse than I thought. But, hm, wait. That girl wasn’t entirely wrong either.”
“Says who?” Jax shot right back. “The rude, attention-seeking Astrid?”
She clenched her fist, but held the anger down where it was.
Jax pressed on. “You and I are clearly a match made in heaven. Look at the sheer size of our fan following, in terms of negative popularity.”
Astrid pouted at him. “Shut up. This is the very first time in my life I’ve ever heard remarks like these about myself, and I am not going to let it slide so easily.”
Jax pulled a sorry little face. “Astrid. I really am sorry for ruining your mood and the whole celebration along with it, by my actions from before or the ones still ing.”
“You’d better be.” She slid the dimensional pocket ring off her finger and pressed it into his hand, then added, “Besides, I don’t actually like these kinds of boring parties anyway. They feel so plain without a little chaos in them. So you’d better go and put some spice into it, and…”
She paused, then finished it. “And remember, you are not allowed to let yourself get hurt without my permission.”
Jax gave her a smile that said, plain as day, that’s my girl. And then those very same eyes began to drift, sliding from one person to the next across the crowded hall. Or rather, from one tool to the next, every face he weighed by a single measure: who among them would fight for him if all of this turned ugly.
The senior professors. Astrid’s Order. The other powerhouses scattered through the room.
He grinned, and one thought rolled through his head.
‘Let the game begin.’
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A/N: Leo_Muhammad, Kevin_Sheets, Black_Sunshine_21, Outsxder and Stephen_Viala_0592 golden ticket gang right here, thank you 🙏🔥
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