SSS Talent: From Trash to Tyrant

Chapter 690: The Family Waiting

- Alfons POV -Alfons followed the servant through the corridors of the Eightfold Hold.

The man kept two steps ahead, quiet the way every Vaelion servant was drilled into being quiet. No wasted movement, no curious glance, nothing on his face to suggest that walking the fifth heir through the inner halls meant a thing beyond one more line written into his day.

Alfons hated that more than he had any right to.

His mind had not stopped turning since he climbed out of the carriage. His father had called him home under the excuse of family affairs, and because the summons carried the Vaelion seal, the Academy waved him off without a single question. A few days away from his work, a few days back inside this place, and either one alone was enough to sour a week.

'What does the old man want?'

The thought kept circling, never closing, never giving him room to breathe.

'I have heard nothing serious enough to drag me all the way back here. Either something happened, or he simply decided it was time to remind me where I stand and who I am.'

His face looked like a jigsaw puzzle that just had been dumped onto the table. Fear pulled at one corner. Curiosity at another. Irritation wedged itself between them, and since none of the three would win, he wore all of them at once, badly, like a portrait someone had given up on halfway through.

Roderic au Vaelion was not a man you approached on a whim.

That was the part outsiders never grasped. They saw the refinement, the polished voice, the gold hair and red eyes, the elegance noble houses loved to mistake for virtue, a man who could smile across a banquet table and leave every guest convinced he had been singled out for the honor. Alfons knew the other version. His father never had to raise his voice. Raising your voice was for men who had run out of better tools.

The halls widened as they climbed toward the central keep. Through the tall windows the eight towers stood in their ring, white stone and red-veined marble cut against a darkening sky. Every line in the place had been measured, corrected, and beaten into obedience. A proper Vaelion home. Beautiful enough to admire, and rigid enough to choke on.

Alfons trailed the servant in silence until his patience gave out.

"Hey." He did not slow. "Do you actually know why my father called me back?"

The servant stopped and turned, bowing to the exact depth a Vaelion heir was owed, not a hair more, not a hair less. "I do not know the answer to that, Young Master Alfons. I only follow the orders I am given."

Alfons looked at him for a beat, then away.

Of course. What else was the man going to say.

"Forget it," he muttered. "I don't know why I bothered asking. None of you ever know anything."

The corner of the servant's mouth tightened, just slightly. He had heard it, and let it pass. What was there to say? A servant inside one of the Eight Great Families did not get to own his pride. One wrong word in front of the wrong face and his head could leave his shoulders before the evening meal. He had no such luxury. Alfons did, and most days even his cost more than it was worth.

They walked on.

The deeper they went, the thinner the servants grew on the ground. The halls by the family wing fell quiet, hung with crimson banners and lined with pale stone ancestors, every one of them carved with the same red eyes and the same arrogance, an arrogance that made dying look like a minor scheduling problem.

Alfons had grown up under those eyes. He had learned young what this house did with its children. It did not raise them. It refined them, scraped the hesitation off them, and taught them to lose without flinching and win without looking grateful for it. Or it tried to. The results varied.

The doors at the corridor's end were huge, whitewood banded with red-gold metal, the Vaelion sigil spread across both panels: eight thin lines closing an octagon around a single burning eye.

Alfons slowed.

The servant stepped aside and bowed once more, his voice careful now. "Young Master. Your father and your family are waiting inside."

Alfons's hand stopped a breath from the wood. "Family?"

"Yes, young master."

That was new. His father was not alone in there.

'All of them?' His fingers curled, and he forced them loose. 'The wives. The heirs. What is worth dragging the whole house into one room?'

The question came with an answer already fixed beneath it, and he did not like the look of it. If the entire family had been summoned, this was not only about him. Somehow that made it worse.

He pushed the doors open.

The room was not laid out like a council chamber. The Vaelion never crowded around a single table like merchants splitting a purse. They preferred space. Distance. Position. Every chair in the room said something, and every person in it knew exactly how to read the seating.

Roderic au Vaelion held the central chair at the far end.

Seated, he read as tall all the same, broad through the shoulders, spine like a drawn line, robed in noble white and deep crimson shot through with gold. His blond hair was swept back without a strand out of place, a shade darker than Alfons's own. His red eyes had found the door before Alfons was fully through it, and they were cold enough to pull the warmth out of the room. No smile or any worthy welcoming words. Not even anger, which was Roderic at his worst, because anger would at least have made him a man instead of a verdict.

The three wives were arranged to his right.

Aurelia, the first wife, nearest to him, ash-blond hair pinned high on gold needles, pale gold eyes that did not leave Alfons from the moment he crossed the threshold. The crimson at her sleeves was cut fine enough to hide how little softness lived under it.

Celiane, the second, rested beside her, blue-black hair smooth as poured ink over one shoulder, red eyes lighter than her husband's and almost glassy, a smile that only looked gentle to anyone who had never seen a knife wrapped in silk.

Marielle, the third, sat farther back, light brown hair in a neat braid, red eyes carrying a warmth the room had never quite known what to do with. Even her warmth had a floor under it. She was Vaelion. No one lived long in this house by being harmless.

The heirs were scattered around the rest of it.

Adrien, the first, stood by a window with his hands clasped behind his back, tall and blond and red-eyed in formal white, their father's posture worn on a lighter frame.

Elysette had folded onto a pale sofa, one leg over the other, silver hair down her back, studying Alfons the way she might a report she had already skimmed and filed under poorly organized.

Lucard draped himself over the arm of another sofa, black hair streaked with silver, red eyes lit with the amusement that always made Alfons want to hit him on principle, like a man holding a joke no one else had been cleared to hear.

Elowen had taken the seat by the fire, gray-dark hair pinned low, pale red eyes catching the light, thin fingers resting on a crystal cup she had not bothered to lift.

Noelia stood close to Marielle, the youngest of them, blond-brown hair tied off with a small ribbon, red eyes bright with questions she had not yet learned to bury. She looked as thrown by the gathering as Alfons felt.

And there he was, last of all. The fifth heir. The bastard.

His mother had no chair in this room. No seat among the wives, no sigil, no shadow on the wall. Alfons did not bother looking for one. He had stopped looking a long time ago.

The doors swung shut behind him. Every set of eyes in the room fixed onto him at once.

Roderic spoke first.

"You are late, Alfons." Smooth, unhurried, and worse than any drawn blade. "Would you care to explain what kept you so occupied that the rest of this family had to sit here waiting on you?"

Alfons lowered his head. A small movement, but the correct one. Respect first. Pride later, assuming he walked out of the room with any left.

"Forgive me, Father." He kept his voice level. "The Academy is hardly next door."

Roderic said nothing for a breath, and the nothing weighed more than the question had.

From the nearer sofa, Lucard's voice slid in, light and entertained. "He does have a point, Father. Long road, for a man who already knew he was in trouble before he set out."

"No one asked you, Lucard." Aurelia did not so much as turn her head, and there was no heat in it, which was somehow worse than if there had been.

Lucard raised one hand in lazy surrender and let it drop.

Roderic had not pulled his eyes off Alfons through any of it. When he spoke again, the cold in the room sank another degree.

"Sit." Not an invitation. "I did not call this family into one room to hear about the state of the roads from the gate." His gaze drifted, slow, across the wives and the gathered heirs, and came back to rest on Alfons, and stayed there. "There is something we need to discuss. You, in particular, will want to be sitting down for it."

And Alfons, reading the weight behind those red eyes, knew with a cold drop in his stomach that whatever was coming had his name buried somewhere inside it.