He almost said one moment through the door.
Instead he just said "Come in."
Theresa entered quietly, the way she did most things. She'd changed into a robe, thick, and practical, the kind inns kept for guests, and her dark hair was still slightly damp at the ends. Without the gold accessories and the white garment she looked different. More settled into herself somehow, like the dungeon had been a performance and this was just her.
She looked around the room first, a force of habit, he was starting to understand. Then she looked at him sitting on the edge of the bed with the system interface long since closed.
"You weren't sleeping," she said.
"No, just sorting through my thoughts."
She pulled the chair from the small table and sat down across from him, crossing one leg over the other, completely at ease in a stranger's inn room at whatever hour this was. She folded her hands in her lap and looked at him with those gold eyes and said nothing.
He waited.
She kept saying nothing.
"Did you need something?" he finally asked.
"I need to understand the situation I'm in," she said. "Which means I need to understand your situation. Fully." A pause. "I got the outline earlier. I'd like the rest."
"The outline I think is sufficient."
"Dominic." Just his name. Calm, unhurried, with a weight behind it that was not a threat and not a plea. She had already decided on what was going to happen. Now she was simply waiting for him to catch up. "I am bound to your life. Whatever you walk into, I walk into with you. I would prefer to do that with complete information."
He looked at her for a moment.
Then he leaned back and started talking.
He kept it clean. Strategic. The way he'd always organized it in his head, not as something that had happened to him but as a sequence of events with causes and effects and logical endpoints.
House Harwick. Their advocates and their fabricated debt records and the Registry magistrates who had looked the other way or been paid to. His father in a detention cell for four years while the Kane name bled out in public. The money gone in a week. Greyfen's lower city. The scholarship. Caldmore.
Reyes he covered in less sentences than the rest. The dungeon floor. The betrayal. The death report already filed.
Victor Harwick he saved for last.
"Hector Harwick's son is at this academy," he said. "He was behind what happened today. His father destroyed my family. They both have been a thorn in my side and I intend to return the favor. Thoroughly."
Theresa was quiet for a moment. "When you say thoroughly, what do you mean?."
"The estate. The nobility. The name." He said it the way he'd been saying it to himself for years, flat and precise. "House Kane had standing before House Harwick buried it. I want it back and I want them to watch it happen. I want the Registry investigated for what they allowed. I want the truth of what actually happened to my father, the full picture, not the version they put in the documents."
He paused.
"And I want to be the kind of person they can't touch when I do it. High rank with resources and Influence."
"That's a significant undertaking," Theresa said.
"I know."
"Especially For an F-rank adventurer."
"An F-rank adventurer with a power no one in history has ever seen before." He met her eyes. "And whatever it sends me."
She considered that. Not skeptically as she was aware of the systems potential capabilities, she'd had even come out of it herself. But her consideration was that of someone carefully mapping out her new terrain.
"Our contract," she said. "A mature bond will give you access to more power."
"That's also what the system said."
"Then getting stronger isn't just a matter of getting more pulls." She said the word without any particular reaction to it. "It's a matter of what you build with the ones you have."
"Build in what regard exactly."
"Trust." She replied.
He hadn't thought about it in exactly those terms. He didn't say that. He simply nodded in acknowledgement.
Since Dominic was now aware he need to be at least a bit more open, he then told her about the quest he'd received.
"The thirty day quest," she said. "Survive. That's the first step. Sounds easy enough."
"Yes, it does."
"Surviving means returning to Caldmore. Which means Victor Harwick. Are you mentally prepared for it?"
"Yes."
She nodded once, slowly, now understanding and getting a full picture of his resolve for the plan ahead.
"Then we have our work cut out for us." The corner of her mouth moved, not quite a smile, more like a suggestion of one. "Good. That means I won't be bored."
He looked at her.
"You aren't alone anymore," she said, simply. No weight behind it, no performance. Just a fact she was offering him because it was true and she thought he should have it.
He didn't know what to do with that so he said nothing.
She stood, smoothed the robe, and moved to the door. Paused with her hand on the frame and looked back at him.
"Get some sleep, Dominic. We have a whole day ahead of us tomorrow."
She left. The door clicked shut behind her.
He sat in the quiet room for a while longer.
Then he lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling and thought about what she'd said.
"You aren't alone anymore."
He'd been alone since he was eleven years old. He wasn't sure he remembered how not to be. But he was going to have to try.
But for the first time in a long time, the ceiling didn't feel quite as far away. He could take a deep breath and look forward to the next day with a sliver of confidence in his chest.