Chapter 643: Beautiful Women Inside these Walls

They were, without exception, striking women.

Each carried herself with the kind of confidence that turned heads—not the loud, demanding confidence of those who needed to be noticed, but the deeper kind, the kind that came from knowing exactly what one was capable of and feeling no need to prove it.

The sudden presence of armed, beautiful strangers in my household did not sit well with my wife or my daughters.

The first night was filled with sharp questions and suspicious glances across the dinner table, with silences that stretched too long and answers that came too short.

My wife’s smile was polite but thin—a smile that said I am watching you without saying anything at all.

My daughters spoke in careful, measured tones that made their discomfort obvious to anyone paying attention—and I was paying attention, had been paying attention since the moment the Apex Girls had appeared at my door.

However, after a long conversation, several clarifications, and more than a little awkward negotiation, a fragile understanding was reached.

The women would stay as temporary guests. We would all make the best of it.

Today was their third full day living beneath my roof in the Lot district of Thaad.

Lot had not always been the fractured, wary place it had become.

In earlier decades—decades I remembered, and had lived through—it ranked among the most orderly and peaceful location in the entire world of Elyndor.

The streets were kept clean, the nights remained quiet, and neighbors still greeted one another by name when they passed.

They stopped to ask after children and grandparents, and the small, ordinary details of ordinary lives.

That older reputation began to erode when successive waves of criminals, debtors, exiles, and simply broken people started seeking the relative safety of the open place.

They brought their troubles with them—their feuds, their debts, and their desperate schemes—and the old calm slowly gave way under the weight of the new reality, crumbling like a wall that had been asked to hold back too much water for too long.

In time the district split into three clearly defined sections, each with its own character and its own dangers.

The Hub sat nearest the main entry points that connected Lot to the wider city.

It was the loudest and most volatile quarter—full of shifting deals, temporary alliances, whispered contracts, and people who could vanish into the crowd if they were clever or desperate enough.

Power changed hands there with unsettling frequency.

A man could arrive with nothing and leave with influence, or the reverse, in the span of a single week.

The Hub did not care about your past, your name or your intentions. It cared only about what you could offer and what you could take.

The Slums were the second part: they occupied the lower ground between the Hub and the older residential streets.

Crime was not the primary affliction there. Hunger was.

Most of the people who lived in those narrow lanes and leaning tenements simply wanted enough food to survive another day, to see another sunrise, to keep their children alive for one more season.

The atmosphere was calm in a tired, defeated way that made visitors lower their voices without quite knowing why.

Violence happened, but they were usually the subtle ones born of desperation rather than ambition—a theft gone wrong, a dispute over bread, a man who had simply reached the end of his rope and found nothing left to hold onto.

Then there remained Original Lot—the narrow, stubborn remnant of what the district had once been.

The atmosphere still had a cleaner scent, still held the memory of flowers, baking bread, and woodsmoke from proper hearths.

Old habits of courtesy and quiet living survived behind its borders and courtyards.

A number of powerful families and a few of the district’s actual rulers still kept their homes here, and their presence discouraged the worst of the criminal element from testing boundaries too openly.

My family and I lived in this last pocket of relative order.

We were a minority now—a small, stubborn minority clinging to a way of life that had largely ceased to exist elsewhere—and we had learned to keep to our own affairs, to tend our own garden, to close our ears to the sounds that drifted in from the other sections of the district.

That afternoon I sat in the house, trying to enjoy a rare stretch of stillness—a moment of quiet in a life that had grown increasingly loud, crowded, and complicated.

One of my daughters had just finished binding her hair when the loudmouthed woman with the ponytail reached over without invitation and began idly twisting the ends of it between her fingers, as though my daughter were a doll to be played with, a decoration to be admired.

"Hey, old man!" she called out, her voice bright and completely without shame, "Why are you tying these beautiful women down inside these walls, making them spend their days looking after your aging self? You ought to let them go out and see the world while they still have the years for it."

"I agree with Zanya. Your time is nearly finished," from one corner of the hall, where she sat with a porcelain cup of tea balanced in her hands, Zuri spoke as well.

And it was an uncommon event, rare enough that everyone in the hall turned to look at her.

She did not lift her eyes from the thin curl of steam rising off the surface of the tea, and she did not even acknowledge the sudden attention.

However, her words were clear and unhurried, each syllable placed with the precision of a master craftsman. "There is little sense in allowing them to spend the meaningful years they have left simply keeping an already old man warm. They are well in their forties."

I felt a slow, familiar irritation settle in my chest—not anger, not exactly, but something closer to the feeling of being misunderstood by people who had no business judging.

The suggestion landed heavier than I wanted to admit.

Did these girls truly believe I was the sort of father who would chain his own daughters to the house and refuse them any life beyond my care?

I opened my mouth to respond, but the words did not come.

They sat in my throat, heavy and useless, and I realized with a start that I did not know what to say.