Chapter 603 | The Administrative Assistant is a Health and Safety Violation [CASTLE BONUS]

Chapter 603: 603 | The Administrative Assistant is a Health and Safety Violation [CASTLE BONUS]

"I took the bus you guys told me to take."

"The bus was on time. I checked the Metro app." She finally raised her eyes, and they were grey and unimpressed and ringed in so much black that the whites looked like headlights. She looked at me from my hair to my boots. "Ew. You’re so much less cute in person."

"That’s a new one for me."

"It’s not new, it’s just the first time someone said it to your face."

She hopped off the desk, and the skirt flared on the way down in a frothy black cloud that caught the afternoon light pouring through the front window. I got a clear view of garter straps, a band of bare thigh that was pale and smooth, and a flash of lace that matched the parasol.

She landed on her platforms with a thump that shook the desk calendar, and she tucked the bear under her arm like it was a purse.

"Gross, don’t look at my legs."

"You jumped off a desk in front of me in a skirt."

"Then you should have looked at the ceiling like a gentleman."

[INTERFACE: New Heroine detected. Ophelia Lin. Aspect data unavailable. Temptation Gauge initialized: 0%. Note: Subject has classified the Host as "not cute."]

Ecchi Logic had officially clocked in for the Eastside shift. I considered filing a complaint with human resources, and then I remembered that my human resources department was a gacha wheel with opinions and a notification system that seemed to find my discomfort hilarious.

"You’re Lin," I said. "As in the restaurant."

"Ophelia Lin, and that’s Grandma." She twirled the parasol, and one drill of pink hair swung into her face and she blew it back out with an exaggerated puff. "I’m the administrative assistant. Part time. I answer the phone and do the scheduling, and I decorate, because otherwise this place would look like a prison for lizards. Also I do the social media, but Dralun keeps telling me to stop posting pictures of his tail."

"He’s not a lizard, he’s a dragon," a voice said behind her. It rumbled up out of the floorboards and shook the coffee carafe on its burner. The sound had texture, like someone dragging furniture across concrete. "And you don’t decorate, you put bats on everything."

"Bats are cute!"

"Bats are rats with wings."

"Then you’re a rat with scales!"

The back wall had a second door I’d taken for a closet. It swung open, and a man had to turn sideways and duck to come through it.

Dralun was big.

He stood six-five easy, maybe taller depending on how you counted the horns, and his shoulders were built to carry weight that would have broken most men’s spines before they’d finished bending their knees.

His whole body was plated in scales that ran the spectrum between old bronze left out in the rain and dark earth somebody had compacted with machinery, interlocking with the kind of precision you didn’t get from design, only from evolution or an Aspect that had rewritten his entire genome from the ground up. The scales weren’t smooth.

They were thick, textured, crossed over with pale lines where something had cut deep enough to leave a record. Two horns jutted up from his forehead like a bull’s, short and blunt and brutal, and the left one had a chunk missing from the tip that looked old enough to have its own history.

Behind him, a tail as thick as my thigh and longer than I was tall swept low across the linoleum and knocked a rolling chair six feet across the room in a lazy arc. He didn’t notice. The tail kept moving like it had its own nervous system.

He wore a sleeveless black tactical vest over a grey thermal shirt that had seen better decades, cargo pants that had pockets holding things I didn’t want to catalogue, and steel-toed boots scuffed down to bare metal on the right toe like he’d been kicking through cinder blocks for stress relief.

No mask. No logo. No branding of any kind.

His draconic features were his uniform, and they were doing all the work his costume budget wasn’t. His face was broad and weathered, with a jaw that looked like it had been shaped by years of physical labour and a lifetime of biting back words that wouldn’t have helped.

His eyes were brown, sharp, and so deeply tired that the bags under them looked like they’d been there since his twenties and had no plans to leave.

He held a ceramic mug in one clawed hand. The mug was chipped at the rim in two places, white ceramic showing through where the glaze had given up, and it said WORLD’S OKAYEST UNCLE in faded letters that might have been funny once.

The coffee inside smelled like it had been brewed sometime last week and reheated until it gave up on being a beverage and committed fully to being a liquid grudge.

He looked at me for a long time. His tail twitched once, slow, and then settled.

"Belmont," he said.

"Yes, sir, reporting for placement."

"Don’t call me sir. I work for a living." He took a sip of the coffee and winced at it, and then took another. "You’re forty minutes late."

"I walked past the building three times because the sign’s missing half its letters."

"The sign’s been missing half its letters since the Cataclysm." He said the word flat, with no weight on it, and then his jaw worked from side to side and I heard his teeth grind. His eyes stayed on my face a beat too long. "Anybody who grew up here knows where Lin’s is."

"Well, I didn’t," I said. "So now I know."

Dralun grunted. It was a noise that could have meant anything from approval to indigestion, and Ophelia rolled her eyes hard enough that I worried for her eyeliner.

"He grunts, and that’s how he talks," she told me. "One grunt means yes. Two grunts means no. A long grunt means he’s thinking about his feelings, which is disgusting."

"Ophelia, go get the stack."

"You get the stack. My parasol is heavy."

"You’re holding a parasol inside a building."

"It’s for my complexion!"

"There’s no sun in here."

"There’s you, and you’re blinding me with your lack of style." But she stomped toward the filing cabinets anyway, her platforms clunking on the floorboards, and her drills bounced with every step. She bent over to reach the bottom drawer. The skirt rode up, the stockings pulled tight over the backs of her thighs, and I found a sudden and deep interest in the tin ceiling.

"Good," she said without turning around. "Keep looking up there."

"How did you know I was looking?"

"Everybody looks, and you’re the first one who stopped. That’s one cute point, and you still have negative forty."