The air inside the grocery store was thick with the scent of aged cedar, dried herbs, and imported goods…...a refined atmosphere that was rapidly evaporating beneath the weight of Draco's frantic social self-preservation.
For the past minute, the grocery section had transformed into a theater of the absurd, starring a deadpan high elf, a mortified half-elf, and a dragon-kin whose penchant for drama was about to bite him squarely in the back.
Draco felt the stares of at least half a dozen civilian shoppers and two lurking clerks pressing into his back like physical barbs.
The unspoken whispers...
"Is that the monster from the Bahamut Familia?" and "Goodness, he's already playing the field with the Loki familia's princess, now he has snatched its queen too" ...were loud enough to rattle the glass of the surrounding display cases.
Panic, sudden and distinct, gripped him.
Suddenly realising that, if word of this supposed tryst filtered back to the cluster of women currently holding unreturned love confessions in his familia estate, his next excursion outside might genuinely be his last.
He dropped the playful, crooked smirk that had caused all the trouble in the first place, squaring his shoulders with uncompromising seriousness.
"Alright, everyone, time out," Draco announced, his voice ringing clearly across the floorboards.
He raised both hands, palms outward, in a gesture of retraction.
"Let's reset. There is no date. There has never been a date. Riveria and I simply collided by pure, coincidence while we were both out running mundane errands for our respective households."
He shot a sharp look at the surrounding crowd, silently threatening them to process the truth of his statement.
"I was joking. Just kidding. A bit of lighthearted banter!" Draco pressed on, his tone growing a fraction too earnest.
"Riveria explained it correctly the first time. We are not an item, just friends. I was merely indulging in a momentary lapse of judgment because Eina's flustered expression was admittedly adorable, and Riveria's troubled look was right there for the taking."
The curious onlookers in the store let out a collective, deeply disappointed deflation of breath, turning back to what they were doing with visible reluctance.
The juicy gossip had been summarily executed by cold reality, well that and a few threatening glares from Draco.
Unfortunately, Draco's bid for total clarity wasn't going to work completely as he intended.
Eina, caught between the embarrassment and the strange, defensive vehemence with which Draco was denying his relationship with Riveria, narrowed her eyes in skepticism.
The speed of his backpedaling made it sound like a guilty man trying to scrub his tracks clean before the executioner arrived.
Opposite her, Riveria brow arched sharply.
As a pillar of the Loki Familia and a high elf of royal lineage, Riveria possessed dignity that brooked little nonsense.
Yet the way Draco was practically shouting his denials...as if the mere suggestion of her company was some harrowing plague to be avoided at all costs…...sent a sudden, unaccustomed prickle of irritation straight to her heart.
Was she truly that undesirable?
It wasn't that Riveria wanted to date the irritating dragon-kin; the very notion was absurd.
But the heavy-handed, almost panicked way he distanced himself from her carried a subtle, unintended sting to her womanly pride.
It was as though being associated with her in a romantic light was an insult to his personal freedom.
Draco, possessing the sudden, chilling realization that he was standing at the bottom of a hole he had dug with a backhoe, abruptly shut his mouth.
A bead of sweat traced the line of his jaw.
He could feel the twin glares of the two women boring into him like twin drill bits.
"Ahem," Draco coughed, a bit flustered as he executed a clumsy pivot.
"Apologies for talking so much. My mouth tends to run faster than my thoughts these days. Maybe it's because half my horn is missing" Draco joked.
But seeing as both women weren't laughing, he changed the topic.
"Anyway, Eina... what are you actually doing here in this part of town?"
Eina, who had been halfway through preparing a withering, reprimand regarding his antics, blinked.
The abrupt shift in trajectory caught her entirely off guard.
"Oh..." she gasped lightly, her thoughts yanked violently as the weight of her original mission slammed back down onto her shoulders.
Glancing between Riveria's composed, statuesque form and Draco's watchful, expectant gaze, Eina felt her knees go remarkably soft.
The pressure of a guild clerk's daily life was nothing compared to standing trial before two of the most influential figures in Orario while hiding an unauthorized personal investigation.
Yet she could not afford to buckle now.
Not when she had come this far.
Taking a slow, shuddering breath, she prepared herself to construct a plausible, surface-level excuse…...anything to keep the conversation safely away from the sensitive, highly illegal topic of the Soma Familia.
She desperately needed to avoid any possibility of rumors leaking that a Guild employee was poking around into the internal affairs of a familia.
Before the syllables could even form on her tongue, however, Draco solved her problem for her.
With a light whistle, he stepped past her, walking casually around to the glass display case set into the back wall.
His eyes locked onto the solitary bottle resting upon the pedestal inside.
"Ahh. This is it. The exact bottle I've been hunting for across three different districts," Draco murmured, his voice softening with relief.
"It's been frustratingly hard to find these days, but it looks like there's only one left in stock."
He paused, sliding a curious look over his shoulder toward the half-elf.
"Were you perhaps planning to buy this very bottle, Eina? I recall seeing you staring intently at it before Riveria and I even walked over. Was this what brought you out here today?"
Eina stared at him, her mind momentarily blanking before she caught the immense, glittering lifeline he had just tossed her.
Without missing a beat, she offered a swift, subconscious nod, grateful that she wouldn't have to invent a tangled web of lies on the spot.
"Ah... yes. Exactly that," Eina managed, adjusting her glasses with a trembling hand.
Riveria stepped closer, her soft footsteps silent against the wood.
She peered through the glass pane at the unassuming liquor bottle, her gaze shifting thoughtfully from the label to Eina, and then to Draco.
"Hmm. This is Soma wine, right?" Riveria asked, her voice carrying a quiet, melodic curiosity. "Many in my own familia hold a fondness for it, though it's hardly a staple."
She gave the bottle a few more seconds of silent evaluation before narrowing her eyes at Draco.
"There is only one bottle left," Riveria noted, her tone dropping into a cool, protective register. "Don't tell me you intend to snatch it out from under her, Draco. Eina was standing right here first."
Draco stopped dead in his tracks, a look of betrayal crossing his features at the elf's immediate assumption of malice.
"Do you really take me for such a savage?" Draco protested, flicking his tail up in mock exasperation.
"I was merely probing to see if she was waiting for a restock or if she had actual dibs on it!"
"I see. Then I offer my apologies for my shallow thinking. It was disrespectful of your character," Riveria replied smoothly, dipping her head in a light, formal bow.
The gesture nearly brought tears to Eina's eyes.
On one hand, she was deeply touched that Riveria was stepping in to defend her; on the other, she felt a fresh wave of panic at watching Draco.
Truth be told, although Eina had come to the shop tracking leads related to the Soma Familia, she hadn't intended to purchase the wine itself...at least not after seeing the ridiculous price tag.
"It's quite alright, Lady Riveria," Eina spoke up quickly, waving her hands in a panic.
"Sir Draco can have the wine if he wishes. To be honest... it's far too expensive for my current budget anyway."
Draco's face lit up like a festival lantern.
"Yes! Thank you, Eina-chan…...truly, you're a lifesaver. I could kiss you right now," Draco cheered, flashing her a bright unabashed wink.
Eina's face instantly caught fire, a violent, crimson blush surging all the way up to the tips of her pointed ears as she averted her gaze.
Behind the playful banter, Draco had a very practical, non-negotiable motivation.
Soma wine…...along with a rare, highly guarded handful of other specialized vintages….was one of the extraordinarily few alcoholic substances that possessed any effect on him.
Even then, it barely scratched the surface, taking the edge off.
Yet those specific brands were infamously difficult to procure.
Because the Bahamut Familia and the Soma Familia maintained a notably frosty, distant relationship, Draco couldn't simply walk up to their hearth and request a crate through official channels.
His only options were third-party distributors, specialty grocery stores like this one, or the murky depths of the black market.
And the timing couldn't have been more critical.
The Bahamut Familia was finally, after weeks of delays and internal squabbling, was holding an official welcome party for him.
Draco had zero intention of sitting through an entire night of heavy revelry while he remained stone-cold sober and everyone else let loose.
It simply wasn't festive.
"I... I... it's really no problem at all," Eina stammered out, her eyes darting frantically across the floorboards, incapable of meeting his bright, teasing gaze.
Riveria watched the exchange, let out a long, long-suffering sigh, and shook her head.
Men like Draco were a headache she usually preferred to avoid, but fate seemed intent on tangling their paths today.
Without further ado, Riveria flagged down a nearby store clerk with a subtle flick of her fingers. Draco eagerly seized the moment, stepping up to the counter to finalize his purchase of the Soma wine alongside a handful of other items.
As the clerk busied himself wrapping the glass bottle in layers of protective padding and stout twine, Eina seized the quiet moment.
She dragged in a deep breath, marshaling her scattered composure, and turned her attention back to the high elf standing beside her.
"Um... if I might ask you a question, Lady Riveria?" Eina began, her voice dropping to a cautious murmur.
"Does... does anyone who regularly consume that particular brand of wine exhibit unusual symptoms? Signs of dependency, perhaps? Or alterations in their typical behavior?"
Riveria blinked, her gaze drifting back to the younger elf.
"To my eyes, everyone who drinks alcohol looks ridiculous," Riveria replied dryly, though her expression softened.
"However, within my familia, no one has ever displayed anything I would consider dangerously out of the ordinary after drinking it. Why do you ask, Eina?"
"Well... a friend of mine recently recommended it to me," Eina lied smoothly, though the falsehood tasted like ash on her tongue.
"But given some of the darker rumors circulating about the Soma Familia and their peculiar internal dynamics..."
She trailed off, leaving the implication hanging in the air.
There was truth to her words.
Even though she hated the slimy feeling of deliberately manipulating Riveria's vast store of knowledge, the opportunity to extract insider perspective from a pillar of Orario was simply too golden to let slip through her fingers.
"I see," Riveria murmured, her tone turning contemplative.
"I, too, have heard occasional whispers concerning members of that specific familia. They are frequently described as... distant. Almost chillingly detached from the usual camaraderie found in other familias."
Eina's heart gave a hopeful, dangerous little leap.
"Lady Riveria," Eina pressed, leaning in just a fraction closer, her voice cracking slightly with involuntary excitement.
"Do you happen to know anything more specific about them? Any operational details?"
She had blown it.
The moment the words left her mouth, Eina realized the error in her cadence.
Her mask had slipped entirely, revealing the frantic, investigator beneath.
Riveria closed one eye, tilting her head as she fixed Eina with a long, unblinking stare.
'Oh, no' Eina thought, her blood instantly running cold.
She froze completely.
It was as though she had been thrust backward in time, back to their childhood days when Riveria had possessed an uncanny, almost supernatural knack for seeing right through every clumsy white lie Eina had ever attempted to weave.
Riveria was far too sharp; she possessed an emotional intelligence that could slice through deception like a well-forged blade.
Without a doubt, Riveria had just pieced together the entire puzzle: Eina was running an unauthorized, off-the-books investigation into the inner workings of the Soma Familia.
A heavy, freezing bead of sweat tracked slowly down the back of Eina's neck as she braced herself for the inevitable, stern reprimand, or worse….
"...Whatever," Riveria finally said, her voice completely neutral, giving away nothing.
"I am sorry to disappoint you, Eina, but I possess no intelligence concerning that particular Familia. Truthfully, I likely know no more than you do…..and quite possibly less."
True to her nature, Riveria had no interest in sticking her nose into the internal politics or shadowy machinations of minor, volatile factions like the Soma Familia.
She offered the deflection as a subtle act of mercy, throwing Eina a clean rope to climb back out of the hole she had just tumbled into.
"Oh... is that so?" Eina muttered, a transparent mix of deep disappointment and crushing relief washing over her frame.
Riveria had clearly looked right through her flimsy pretext, yet she was gracefully choosing not to call her out or demand an explanation for why a Guild employee was playing detective.
The high elf stood in silence for a few heartbeats, her eyes studying Eina's pale, taut expression before she parted her lips once more.
"While I personally know nothing of their inner workings..." Riveria began, her voice dropping into a low register that made Eina's breath catch all over again.
"...I do happen to know someone who is familiar with their current state of affairs."
Eina's head snapped up, her green eyes widening in shock.
"Really...?" she whispered, the excitement bleeding right back into her tone.
"Hmm," Riveria nodded softly, confirming the thread.
She shifted her gaze toward the checkout counter where Draco was busy paying for his wrapped merchandise, then back to the half-elf.
"Would you," Riveria asked quietly, offering a rare, knowing smile, "care to accompany me back to my familia's home?"
"Eh"