Lucas eventually got tired of talking about all the things he had to do for the good of everyone else and spent an hour or two making the conversation all about him. It only seemed right after he told the man that Adin’s wife was dead and he said, “Given the fate her husband, that seems to be for the best.”

  Lucas should have felt good about Adin’s death, but he couldn’t feel good about anything when he remembered what Arissa had looked like there, smoldering on the wn. Though he rejected the Prince’s drugged wine, he eventually demanded a decanter of whiskey and spent the rest of the evening getting drunker and drunker as he made more extravagant demands of the Prince. He didn’t really want anything, but acting like a pain in the ass made him feel better, and it was certainly the way that someone would behave if they’d just lost the woman they loved. So, he went with it.

  Though the man didn’t give in to all of Lucas’s demands, he did agree to fairly extravagant payments for the dead, as well as compensation for the manor and the boratory that burned down. However, other than a small raft of funds to help him rebuild, the thousands of dragons that they agreed on were to be paid for by absolving Lucas of his current and future debts to the crown once he started business back up by pleading poverty.

  “Do you know how many people had to be bought off tonight when they saw her climb to the top of the west tower and transform,” he compined. “That's dozens of servants and guards that will need to have accidents and more than a few nobles who will need to be convinced by me personally that they didn’t see a thing. You are not the only injured party here!”

  That was hardly what he and Kar’gandin wanted, but the man wouldn’t budge. However, by the end of the conversation, he was in no real position to advocate for anything. By that point, Lucas had gone from merely theatrically intoxicated to sloppy drunk, so he let himself be dragged away before letting something important slip.

  “Rest assured, you will be well taken care of,” the Prince told him. “I’ll even grant you the use of one of my vils until you’re back on your feet!”

  Lucas just waved that off and let him be dragged off to a waiting carriage sometime after dawn. He would have preferred to sleep in the cider house, no matter how singed it was, if that wouldn’t have raised questions that he didn’t feel like answering.

  Still, he slept on the way, despite the rough roads, and woke when they stopped somewhere in the nobles district. He thought that he was going to be taken to a country house, so that confused him, but it wasn’t like crashing for a night or two in the garden district would kill him, so he staggered out of the carriage and toward the doorman who seemed utterly enthusiastic about letting a ragged character like Lucas anywhere near well-appointed three-story townhouse until the driver gave him a note that had been sealed with the Prince’s ring.

  “A guest with full privileges who can stay as long as he likes? Him? At this hour?” the older man grumbled as he turned and opened the heavy oak door. “Who died and made you Royalty.”

  “Yeah, sssame to you, buddy,” Lucas said, moving past him as he weaved slightly and followed the cute maid who promised to take him to his room.

  Along the way, she tried to chat with Lucas, but he mostly dismissed her, and when he reached the guest room, she offered to draw him a bath, but he declined. “I’m too tired for that ssshit,” he slurred. “Maybe jussst a pitcher of water and a basin ssso I can clean up a bit.”

  He didn’t care about getting the Prince’s nice clean sheets dirty, but he didn’t want to wake up in the morning smelling like an ashtray. She nodded and smiled and came back a few minutes ter with both items. He thanked her for that, but as she pestered him with offers of refreshments or washing his back for him, he balked.

  “I’m good,” he said with a shake of his head at her persistence. “You just take care of your other chores, and I’ll sleep it off, alright?”

  He practically had to force her from the room, and when he did, she seemed somehow disappointed. Lucas didn’t have much time to think about that because as soon as she was gone, he stripped, scrubbed, and then passed out.

  That night, his dreams were troubled, but he slept soundly enough. Whether it was because of the traumatic images of the bodies he’d spent so much time trying to treat or the fact that he still reeked of smoke, he dreamed of fires all night long. While Skyra herself never quite made an appearance, he still woke up pissed at her sometime after noon that the sun ncing through one of the wide bay windows succeeded in waking him. Lucas groaned and rolled over in his sleep, trying to keep the light from making the incipient headache that was growing in his skull that much worse.

  When he found another maid sitting in his room quietly waiting for him to arise, though, it scared the shit out of him, and he only barely resisted making a very unmanly screech. “What the hell are you doing in here?” he asked, wondering if she was a warden or a bodyguard.

  “When you opted to sleep alone, we decided it was prudent to make sure that you had whatever you needed when you woke up,” the woman answered matter-of-factly. “You looked as if you had a rather rough day, and no one knew whether you were injured or not.”

  Sleep alone? What the fuck? Lucas wondered, trying to figure out what this woman meant by that. She was almost as pretty as the blonde maid had been st night, but her dark hair and gsses made her much more severe looking. “I-I’m fine,” Lucas said as he rubbed his eyes and tried to ignore just how much of her thighs her oddly enticing uniform showed off. “I just need some water for the headache and—”

  As he spoke, she got up and walked to the nightstand. Inside were a whole rack of top-shelf potions. There were potions of greater and moderate healing, potions of lesser and moderate curing, and a dozen other intoxicants in both the red and blue spectrum of designer drugs. Though there was no Blue, there were potions of Demons Blood, Dragon Fire, and even Midnight, which had to be some kind of collector's item, considering that the Blind hadn’t even existed to make any more of that stuff in at least a year.

  Maybe they did, though, Lucas considered, wondering if he and his comrades had missed someone in their raid of the blind and the subsequent sughter.

  What caught his eye more than even the drugs, though, were the potions of Lesser and Greater Libido, along with the ointment of lubrication. This wasn’t a drawer for medications. It was a toy chest for forepy, which was very much not what he was here for.

  “Would any of these be to your liking?” she asked in a tone that was sultry enough to make him tear his eyes away from them, only to find himself staring right down her ample cleavage. Though it had been invisible when she’d been sitting, now that she was bent at the waist, he found herself looking right down her dress and at her ample tits.

  Lucas quickly turned away and grabbed a lesser curative. Then he downed it, willing himself not to blush as he said, “This will do me, I think.”

  “Well, if that’s all you want to do, then…” she said, letting the unambiguous offer linger as she closed the drawer and straightened. “Would you like me to have the chef prepare you breakfast or lunch?”

  “Uhmmm, Lunch is fine,” he said. “Whatever’s convenient. But maybe a bath first and a… hey, where did my clothes go?”

  As he did so, he was a little shaken by how brazen all this was as he tried to figure out what fvor of fuckery was going on. He’d been here for so long that he thought Danaria’s need to cover her bnket-like nightgown was endearing rather than ridiculous. After that level of modesty being the norm, the idea that one and perhaps two servants were propositioning him was a bit beyond the pale. The entire time he'd lived at Parin Manor, none of the staff had done so much as flirt with him.

  “Your clothes?” she answered. “Those were rags and needed to be thrown out. I'm sure they will be after a tailor uses them to get your measurements. I’ve been assured you will have a few new outfits before the end of the day.”

  “What?” Lucas demanded. It sounded almost like a joke, but the way she said it so seriously made that unlikely.

  “Is that a problem?” she asked, confused. “The shirt was in shreds, and the pants were so encrusted with—”

  “It’s fine,” Lucas said, willing the whole subject to be dropped. The very st thing he wanted to think about after his fitful sleep was that fire. “I appreciate the forethought; I was just a little surprised. I think maybe I’ll just go for that bath and try to rex for a bit if that’s okay.”

  “Excellent,” she said, csping her hands together and smiling before gesturing to the door on the other side of the room. “I’ll let the chef know, and I’ll have someone draw you a bath. It shouldn’t be more than five or ten minutes. Someone will knock to let you know when you can enter.”

  Lucas thanked the woman and let her leave. A few minutes ter, he heard the sound of buckets being dumped into the basin, which was pretty par for the course. It was too much to believe that even the royal love nest would have indoor plumbing. It didn’t seem to have been invented yet.

  “Why the fuck did he dump me here, though,” Lucas asked himself as he sat in bed, mostly naked.

  In the best case, he wants to cheer me up, he told himself, And in the worst case, he wants to bribe me. That seemed pretty clear, but there was about a zero percent chance that it was going to be effective. The very st thing that Lucas wanted right now was to bang some random woman. If he’d wanted that, then he would have fucked Skyra until she got bored of him, and none of this would have happened.

  “You know, for a smart guy, he’s pretty fucking stupid,” Lucas told himself as he sat there trying to decide what it was he should do next. Eventually, that was interrupted by a soft knock on the second door. So, Lucas grabbed a towel and walked to his bathroom in his boxers.

  There, he found the most luxurious bathroom he’d seen since he’d come to this world. It was two or three times fancier than the one in Parin Manor, with ivory-colored ceramic tiles, an actual porcein tub that was closer to a hot tub than shitty ones that had always come with his apartments, and brass fixtures. It was also filled with steam, which gave it a mysterious ambiance as he stripped and slipped into the tub.

  As he sunk into the tub, he saw the filth come off of him in a thin residue on the soapy water’s surface. Even after scrubbing himself down st night, he really was in rough shape.

  Right now, though, he couldn’t be bothered to scrub himself. He just y there appreciating the hot water as he reflected on all the awful shit that had gone down and everything he was going to have to do as a result. That was when he heard a knock at the door.