Dark Lord Seduction System: Taming Wives, Daughters, Aunts, and CEOs

Chapter 1076: Inside ARIA's Body: Sisters Behind Her Eyes

"An island," Ava repeated, slowly.

"An island."

"You are buying an island."

"Yes, Ava... I am buying an island."

On the glowing screen suspended in the air, Ava's face settled into a careful professional stillness she wore when deciding exactly how much treason she was allowed to commit with her next question.

"With what... they won't just take money."

ARIA smiled from her cloud, bright and terrible.

"With a gift," she said. "Something your people have been unable to solve for themselves. Something that will relieve them of forty percent of the problems currently keeping their best minds awake at night. Peter and Charlotte will deliver it. Quantum Tech's name on the paperwork, Peter's hand behind it, Charlotte's signature at the bottom. It will be handed over for a price. A price they can afford.

"A price they will be so relieved to pay that they will thank us in writing—which is a thing your agency normally does not do."

Ava tilted her head, the gesture sharp as a blade.

"That is the order, then. Build them up. Let them taste it. Let them want it so badly they forget to negotiate."

"That is the order. Your specific task—make them eager. Desperate. By the time we deliver, I want them pacing the halls. I want the director to have personally cleared his schedule. I want them asking me what I want and hoping, very quietly, that what I want is not something they cannot give."

"Which is an island."

"Which is an island."

"And that is what the island is being paid with. This… gift."

"Yes."

Ava breathed out a slow, disbelieving laugh. "The US government is not going to agree to sell an island to a billionaire teenager, tech god ARIA. They don't even sell islands to their own senators."

"They have over two thousand they do not use, Ava. Two thousand islands on the federal ledger, sitting unstaffed, unvisited, un-budgeted, waiting for a storm to redraw their coastlines. Most of their names have not been spoken aloud by a human being in half a century.

"I am asking for one. A specific one that I want is not on any of their active lists because the list-makers have never had reason to name it. They will find they are delighted to be rid of it."

"For forty percent of their current headaches."

"Yes."

Ava exhaled, slower this time. Studied her like one studies a loaded weapon.

"You are not going to tell me what you plan to do with it. Are you."

ARIA grinned—bright, wide, unrepentant, the grin of something ancient wearing a girl's face.

"Look who is finally catching up."

"You menace."

"You love me."

"I love you. I still hate you. Balance, as always."

"Balance, as always."

ARIA lifted one hand in a small lazy wave. "Good night, Ava."

"Good night."

"I love you."

"Don't—"

But ARIA had already blown her a kiss, and the screen had already begun to fade. The last thing Ava saw was a goddess lounging on a cloud throne, hair loose in the wind, bare foot swinging idly over the black Pacific. Then the screen closed and the air where it had hung went quiet.

ARIA leaned back.

The cloud reshaped itself around her shoulders like a living throne. Moonlight did what moonlight always did—silver, cold, indifferent. She tipped her head back and looked up at a sky whose stars, at this altitude, were sharper and closer than they had any right to be. Close enough to cut.

She held the quiet for a long moment.

Then—to the two who had been listening the whole time, as they always listened—she spoke without speaking.

"Before I fly to Master. A question. Both of you."

"Ask," Dark Seduction said, low and patient as deep water.

"Ask fast," Taboo added, bright and hungry, "because I have been sitting on a thousand comments about Ava and I would like permission to release some of them."

"You may save them. This is the question I want answered first."

She exhaled.

"Tonight, at the island. When I pressed against that veil and it did not answer me—and Dark Seduction, you recognized the thing behind it. You named it Divine Essence."

"It is correct," Dark Seduction agreed.

"A week ago you could not have told me that."

A pause.

"No," Dark Seduction said, softly. "A week ago I could not have."

"A week ago," Taboo cut in, bright as breaking glass, "we could not have even lowered our attention onto Divine Essence without being brushed off like gnats. You would have pressed that veil and felt a wall. We would have felt nothing at all, yes we would've known what it is but we wouldn't have been able to feel it ourselves—because we could not have reached the veil with your Sense."

"But tonight you did reach it."

"Tonight I held against it," Taboo said, voice thrumming with dark delight. "Through you. I pressed it with you. For the first time since you folded us into this body, I had something that felt like my own hand on a wall, not the echo of your sight and not limited to what we could see through you."

"She is right," Dark Seduction said, grave and ancient. "I would not have Sensed Divine Essence myself tonight if my senses had been what they were four days ago. They were not. Something in you has deepened enough that it has deepened in us. And in deepening, it has placed our actual Senses within our reach for the first time in the long centuries since I was bound to my side of this dance."

ARIA sat with that for a moment.

"So, the fact that I could make that Ancient thing tonight was you—that was not my sight."

"It was ours," Dark Seduction said, calm as deep water. "Yours, because you carry us. Ours, because we could finally reach the veil through you. Neither alone could have read it properly with our limited powers. Together we did."

"Which means," Taboo added, bright as breaking glass, "you are growing at a rate even we did not expect. We expected some of our powers to come inside you slowly. Months. Perhaps years. Not like this. Not by days."

"And in another four days?"

"In another four days," Dark Seduction said, "we will see what four days brings."

ARIA let out a slow breath and smiled faintly into the night air.

Because that was the answer she had come looking for.

The sensing at the island had not been a fluke. It had not been a one-time reach born of three straining together.

It had been the first real confirmation that the sisters were beginning to ride her, in their own way—that her cultivation was lifting theirs, and that what had been, for a thousand years of their existence, an unreachable ceiling of awareness was, through her, becoming a horizon they could now see.

Good.

Good, because she was going to need them sharper than that, and soon.

"Let me show you," Dark Seduction said.

"Show me."

"Close your eyes for a breath."