Lewd System: Every Scream and Moan is EXP

Chapter 362: A Four-Star Recipe for Disaster

Claude answered his own question before she could. "Because I wanted you to figure it out yourself, Ashy. The world, I mean. I wanted you to learn with your own two eyes just how cruel it can be, how many smiling faces are hiding knives behind their teeth, and how every kind word from a stranger usually comes with a price tag stitched into the lining."Astrid looked back at him and shook her head slowly. "Dad, you’ve got it all wrong. All of it."

"Have I?" He wore the look of a man profoundly let down. "Look at yourself, dear. You aren’t the daughter I know. My daughter doesn’t bend for anyone. My daughter doesn’t defy her father in one breath and defend a man she’s known a handful of months in the next."

"The girl I raised may be naïve, but not this naïve, not so far gone she can’t even see what’s being done to her. So forgive me if I can’t quite recognize whoever’s wearing your face tonight, because someone has very clearly crawled into your head and made themselves at home."

"Enough, Dad. Just... enough." Astrid’s shoulders dropped. "Why is it so impossible for you to trust me?"

"I trust you, dear." He let a pause settle before the rest. "It’s that boy I don’t trust. Tell me, what makes you so certain he’ll stand at your side, and only yours? The whispers that reach my desk paint a very different man, one with rather a lot of women orbiting him. So come to your senses before he two-times you, breaks you in a way that never mends, and strolls off whistling. You’re still naïve, Ashy. You don’t yet understand how this world truly works."

Astrid met him without a tremor or a flicker of doubt. "He won’t cheat on me. He never would. I’m not some blind girl clinging to a fantasy, Dad. He told me everything about himself, about every other woman he keeps close, who they are and what they mean to him. I know their names, and I know exactly where I stand among them."

She drew a breath and kept going. "And I won’t insult you with a lie. He loves them too, so no, I’m not the only one. But that doesn’t mean he’ll ever leave me behind. I can’t chain a man like that and pretend I have him all to myself, and the truth is I’ve stopped caring, as long as he stays at my side."

Claude’s jaw came loose. For the first time in more years than he cared to count, he was genuinely shocked, blindsided by a possibility he had never once accounted for and never, across a thousand quiet calculations, would have.

He had come here for something simple. He only wanted to know whether his daughter truly loved the boy, or whether this was obsession wearing love’s coat, a fleeting infatuation, a girl dazzled by the thrill of something new.

Her devotion answered him, and then it kept answering, dragging out a fresh twist in an already twisted little romance. He had known plenty of butterflies fluttered around that brat, but it never once crossed his mind the scum was so far ahead of the pack that he’d talked every last one of them into agreeing to share the same flower.

The shock soured into anger as the full shape of it landed. That saint-faced little parasite had not only stolen his daughter’s heart, he had gone and earned Claude’s own grudging respect along the way, which somehow stung as the greater theft of the two.

’How did I fail to see through this?’ Claude thought. ’Perhaps Astrid is right and the years have dulled me. Talking about her how on earth my child who once literally set fire to her own clothes and toys after learning I promised those old belongings to the orphanage where I first met her just because she hated the mere idea of sharing her possessions is now volunteering to share a man. That does not make a single bit of sense. It does not add up in the slightest.’

"Gods above," Claude said, the frustration breaking loose. "What has gotten into you? You’ll share your love? You’ll stand there and smile while that bastard two-times you?"

"Four-times, precisely," Astrid corrected him, breezy as a girl fixing a dinner reservation. "Though it’s a touch complicated to explain right now. And honestly, two-timing is the wrong word entirely, since he’s never once been dishonest about any of it."

Claude’s jaw dropped a second time, and this round it took his heart down with it. He stood there speechless at the number four, and behind his eyes he could already picture his late wife leaning down from the heavens with a freshly lit candle, hunting for somewhere deeply uncomfortable to plant it.

"This cannot be the daughter I raised," he said, his voice cracking at the seams. "Go on, look in the mirror, and tell me to my face that you can’t see how thoroughly he’s playing with your mind."

Astrid stepped close and took her father’s hands in both of hers. "Maybe I have changed, Father. Maybe he’s the reason. Maybe that’s simply what love does to a person, so I won’t waste breath arguing it."

A smile bloomed across her face as she went on. "But I’m still the same girl you raised. The same girl who learned at the knee of the greatest merchant the world has ever produced, and I remember every lesson, word for word. You taught me that compromise is the single greatest key a merchant carries, the one that opens doors brute force never could."

"I’m only following your teachings, Dad. I know that without compromise I never get what I truly want. Worse, I know that if I grasp too tightly, if I demand all of him for myself, I’ll shatter the very future I’ve already built inside my head. So I made my decision a long time ago. I am going to share him."

The smile sharpened into a grin. "But sharing him doesn’t mean I’ll keep things fair and square."

Claude was still cursing Jax in his mind, until he sighed and called up the image of the boy from last night, those burning eyes and the depth of the love they carried for Astrid, a thing Claude could read all too well. Even so, Jax’s official rating in his private ledger had just slid from a five-star perfect son-in-law down to a four-star recipe for disaster.

Still, he found himself scanning her face and reckoning with how much she had grown, matured beyond measure by the simple fact of that boy wandering into her life. The vicious jealousy that once forced him to battle half a dozen factions in a single season had cooled, and she even treated the staff with something close to kindness and real people now, provided one politely overlooked this past week.

’She has even grown wise enough to compromise for the sake of her love,’ he admitted to himself.

Then his game slid neatly back into place. "Don’t you dare come crying to me about this decision somewhere down the road. But answer me honestly, girl. Are you truly prepared to stand against your own father if I forbid it outright? Are you seriously telling me you’d leave me behind for a boy who wandered into your life all of a day ago?"

Astrid crossed her arms. "You’re the one who taught me to fight to the bitter end for whatever I want."

The grin returned, wider than before. "And who said a single word about leaving? I’m not going anywhere, old man, because I know you far too well. You couldn’t survive a month without me. It’ll take you a while, your pride being the stubborn beast it is, but sooner or later you’ll come crawling back, begging me to forget your precious, stupid principles ever existed."

She shrugged. "And then I’ll make you sweat a little. And eventually, very generously, I’ll forgive you."

"And in the off chance it somehow doesn’t work, which I’d put at roughly a 0.0001 percent possibility, I’m fairly certain the very second you lay eyes on your twin grandchildren, that mighty ego of yours will crumble like wet bread. Isn’t that the whole formula anyway? The evil father melts the instant someone hands him a grandbaby. It’s in every story ever told."

Claude’s palm met his own forehead with a slap. "Wonderful. So now I’ve graduated to evil father. If you’d ever had the pleasure of meeting your grandpa, dear, you’d understand what that word actually means."

Astrid wasn’t listening anymore, her brain already simmering up fresh angles of attack. "And if you’re still so desperate for a son-in-law with a noble title, then give me three months. Jax will be a noble by then, I guarantee it, because it happens to be his birthday, and I intend to gift him a throne."

"That’s a fair trade, wouldn’t you agree? In exchange for the lovely gifts he’s given me and the task itself won’t be a biggie."

Claude was thoroughly finished, undone by the sight of his daughter’s true self surfacing in piece after piece, so he simply closed the distance, rested a hand on her head, and began to laugh. Astrid blinked up at him, completely lost.

"That bastard," Claude said through it, "has truly stolen my daughter right out from under me, to the point where I’ve somehow been cast as the villain of the whole tale."

He patted her hair once more. "Let’s drop the act, dear, we’re low on time. This entire conversation was only ever a way to test you, to learn what’s stirring around inside that head of yours. It was never about Jax. Him I tested long ago. I’ve already acknowledged him. I’ve already decided to consider him my son."