Lust Meter System: Conquering Beauties

Chapter 229: The Underdogs

Everyone at the table looked at Derek and the man in the red suit.

Victor Rothschild was the first to speak. He sat back slightly in his chair and looked at Derek with the composed expression of a man who had seen many things presented to him as solutions and had learned to be patient about what they actually turned out to be.

"And precisely what," he said, his accent clipping the edges of each word in the particular way of old European money that had never quite left his speech regardless of how long he had been in this city, "iz zis supposed to mean for us."

Derek looked at him.

Then his smirk arrived, unhurried, taking its time getting to his face.

"I was just about to say zat," Derek said, the accent landing in the room with the precision of something thrown rather than spoken.

Victor’s jaw tightened. The composure stayed exactly where it was but something moved underneath it, something old and specific, the particular hatred of a man who had been mocked in a room full of people and could do nothing about it in this specific moment without making it worse. His eyes stayed on Derek and they said everything his mouth wasn’t saying.

Derek held his gaze and kept smiling.

Then he looked away from Victor like the exchange had concluded to his satisfaction and turned his attention back to the room.

"My solution is simple,"

Derek stood with his hands in his pockets, eyes moving around the table, easy and unhurried in the way he was always easy and unhurried in rooms like this.

"And honestly it’s something we should have considered a long time ago." He let that sit for a second. "We’re overcomplicating this."

Roland looked at his son from the head of the table. "What is it."

Derek looked at his father. "Why aren’t we using the numbered fighters."

Silence arrived in the room and stayed for a moment.

Then Aldric Morgrave, who had not said a single word since the meeting began, shifted his weight in his chair.

It was the most he had moved all evening and it drew every eye in the room the way large things moving unexpectedly.

"That," he said, his own accent different from Victor’s, heavier, the consonants carrying the weight of a different country entirely, "is a stupid idea."

He said it without heat, the way he said most things, like a man delivering a weather report. "It does not resolve anything. It makes it worse."

Derek pointed at him. "It would," he said, nodding like he was agreeing, "unless we put some underdogs in with them."

Aldric looked at him.

Several people at the table looked at him.

"Underdogs," Raymond Hilton said, his voice flat, turning the word over.

"Underdogs," Derek confirmed.

He said it like the word was self-explanatory and the room just needed a moment to catch up to it.

"You’re going to need to say more than that," Victor said, his jaw still carrying the tension from earlier, his accent thickening slightly the way it did when he was controlling something.

Derek looked around the table and then looked at the man in the red suit beside him and nodded once.

The man in the red suit looked back at him.

Then he dipped his head in a short bow, turned, and walked toward the far end of the room.

Then he was gone.

Not through a door.

Not around a corner.

Just gone, the space where he had been standing suddenly empty, the room absorbing his absence the way it had absorbed his arrival, without ceremony.

Victor looked at where the man had been standing and then looked at Derek. "Where did he go."

"Wait," Derek said.

Nobody spoke.

Three seconds later.

Then the air shifted in the way it had shifted when Derek arrived, that specific change in the texture of the room that preceded a presence landing without announcement, and Derek was no longer alone in the space he was standing in.

Beside him stood a figure.

Young, twenty-five at most. Sharp features, pale skin, dark hair falling messily across his forehead and hanging just above his eyes like he had never done anything about it and didn’t intend to start.

He was lean in the way that suggested the leanness was functional rather than incidental, built for something specific.

He stood with the particular stillness of someone who was comfortable in rooms full of people looking at him and had been comfortable in that situation for long enough that it had stopped registering.

Victor Rothschild looked at the figure standing beside Derek.

"Ha." It came out once, sharp, and then again, "Hah, hahaha," the composure he had been wearing all evening cracking clean open, his hand coming up and pressing against the table as he shook his head slowly, his shoulders moving with it.

He looked around the table like he needed witnesses and then back at the figure. "Zis," he said, still laughing, gesturing with one hand, "iz who you have for us?"

The figure looked at Victor.

His hand moved to his coat.

He reached in and came out with a knife in each hand, the movement unhurried, the blades catching the light of the room as he brought them level.

He held them loose and easy at his sides and looked at Victor with eyes that had not changed expression since he arrived.

Derek stepped in front of him and put one hand flat against his chest.

The figure looked down at the hand on his chest.

Then he looked up at Derek with an expression that communicated a clear and specific position on being touched.

He reached up and moved Derek’s hand away from him without force but without asking permission either.

Derek looked at him for a moment.

Then he looked back at the table.

"He is," Derek said, "a very nice underdog."

Elena watched from the far end.

She had been watching since the figure arrived, her eyes moving over him carefully, reading him the way she read everything, quietly and completely.

There was something in her eyes that wasn’t curiosity. It was harder than curiosity and colder and she kept it directed at the figure with the knives and the messy hair and said nothing.

Roland looked at his son. "You said underdogs." He said it carefully, the word carrying the weight of its plurality. "You’re implying more than one."

Derek’s grin arrived wide and unhurried.

He looked at his father and then he looked at Elena at the far end of the table, his eyes settling on her face with the specific satisfaction of someone who had been waiting to deliver a thing and had arrived at the moment of delivery.

"Yes," he said, his eyes still on Elena. "There’s more. And I have that covered too."

Elena looked back at him and said nothing.

Roland looked between them and then looked at the figure with the knives still standing at Derek’s side.

He looked at the knives and then at the face above them and then back at his son. "Alright," he said. "We’ll have the fight. We’ll talk about the rest of it." He looked around the table once, the look of a man closing a meeting. "We’re done here."

---

Chairs moved. People stood.

The room shifted from its held quality into the particular business of people who had things to return to and were returning to them.

Elena was moving before most of them had fully stood.

She came down the length of the room with Wrath behind her and her eyes already on Derek where he stood near the door with the figure beside him.

Derek saw her coming and watched her approach without moving, his expression carrying the same ease it had been carrying all evening.

She stopped in front of him. "What was that."

Derek tilted his head slightly. "What was what."

"Don’t," she said.

He looked at her for a moment. "You know," he said, his voice conversational, his eyes moving over her face with mild interest, "when you keep talking without actually saying what you mean, people have a very hard time understanding you."

Elena looked at him.

"You think you’re smart," she said.

Derek smiled.

He didn’t answer.

He just smiled and let the smile be the answer and stood there being comfortable about it in a way that was specifically designed to be irritating and achieved its purpose.

Elena’s jaw tightened.

She held his gaze for another second and then turned and walked.

Wrath fell in behind her without a word.

The figure with the dark hair watched her go. He stood with the knives put away now, his hands loose at his sides, his eyes following her across the room until she reached the door.

"Is that her," he said. His voice was quiet and even and didn’t carry any particular urgency.

Derek glanced at him. "Yeah."

The figure watched the door she had gone through. Something moved at the corner of his mouth, not quite a smile, something closer to anticipation settling into an expression that was comfortable holding it.

"The woman connected to my prey," he said. He wasn’t asking.

"Yeah," Derek said again.

The figure looked at the door for another moment. "Good," he said quietly, more to himself than to Derek. "I can’t wait to fight him again." The corner of his mouth completed the movement it had been making and became something that looked like a smile the way a blade looked like an object.

Derek looked at him and then looked at the door Elena had walked through.

His own smile stayed where it was.