Kaiden’s eyebrow rose.
One brow, barely a centiter. The rest of his face didn’t move.
"You know who my mother is."
"I do."
"That’s a very short list."
"It is." Eleanora crossed back to her chair, his tea in her hands, and set it in front of him with the care of a woman who’d just told a dangerous young man that she knew his biggest secret and wanted him to have a warm beverage while they discussed it. "Which should tell you where I sit in the food chain."
Kaiden took the cup. The chamomile and honey hit his senses, grounding and absurdly dostic given the circumstances. He sipped.
’She’s higher up than I assud,’ he thought. The Association knew. He’d known that the Association knew. The governnt didn’t let an Ashborn heir walk around unregistered without soone keeping tabs, and Kaiden had made peace with that reality years ago. But he’d expected the information to live in sealed files handled by high-level intelligence analysts who’d never et him face to face.
The Senior Director of the Competition Division knowing on sight ant that she was likely more than t the eye. A re competition director didn’t need to be aware of such secrets, as opposed to Grace, for example, the Association Chairman’s Secretary.
"You’re not very surprised," Eleanora observed.
"That the governnt knows who my mother is? No, of course not." He set the cup down. "That the woman running the entire tournant knows? That’s new information."
She smiled at that. The genuine one, not the professional variant.
"Did you know? I owe my life to Vespera Ashborn."
The words ca out simply, without ceremony.
"About seven years ago. Early days of the awakened era, back when the Association was still writing protocols on the fly and every field operation was a coin flip. I was running a survey assignnt in a rift zone that had been classified as low-risk." She paused. "It was not low-risk."
She folded her hands on the table.
"My team was wiped in the first engagent. I spent two days pinned under rubble with a shattered femur and a communication artifact that couldn’t reach anyone. The rift had destabilized, the extraction window had closed, and the official assessnt was that everyone inside was dead."
Her eyes were steady.
"Your mother walked into that rift alone. The Association had flagged the zone as compromised and actively discouraged entry. She went anyway, because she was interested in the monsters inside."
Kaiden’s expression didn’t change, but sothing behind his eyes settled into recognition. He knew exactly what kind of woman his mother was.
"She wasn’t there for ," Eleanora said. "She was there because she slled opportunity. A collapsing rift full of creatures that the governnt had decided were too dangerous to engage was, for Vespera Ashborn, a buffet. She walked in alone and she cleared the entire zone by herself."
She paused.
"Finding was incidental. I was buried under a slab of collapsed stone, half-dead, and she pulled out, checked my pulse, told that she wasn’t with the association so I should take care of myself because she was busy, and moved on. I don’t think she spent more than ten seconds on ."
"My apologies... She can be a cold person at tis," Kaiden apologized, though he knew it was too little too late.
But instead... "Oh, there’s no need for that. No child should answer for the actions of their parents, and also, I admire her greatly."
"Shouldn’t that reduce your admiration?" Kaiden asked with a raised eyebrow and a second sip of his tea.
Eleanora smiled.
"You’d think so." She leaned back, and the posture carried the ease of a woman who’d had years to make peace with this particular contradiction. "I’ve been part of many rescue operations, Kaiden. I know how they work. The planning, the risk assessnt, the careful deploynt of teams with redundant safety protocols. I’ve seen brave people do brave things in service of saving lives, and I respect every one of them."
She turned the teacup on the table between her fingers.
"But there is sothing breathtaking about a slim, graceful woman who walks into a zone that the governnt itself has written off, alone, because the things inside it are strong enough to be worth her ti. No team. No backup. No extraction plan. Just appetite. Don’t you agree?"
Her voice carried sothing that lived between reverence and disbelief. "The public calls her a cold monster. The forums dissect her every move and find her lacking in warmth, in empathy, in all the qualities a woman is supposed to perform. And she has never once, in all the years I’ve watched her, shown the slightest indication that she cares."
She paused for a mont, taking a second to breathe in and out.
"Your mother is the kind of person I always thought only existed in novels. The kind of character you read about and think, ’no real human being operates like this.’ And then you et her, and she pulls you out of the rubble without breaking stride on her way to kill the next thing, and you realize that the novels were underselling it."
Kaiden listened, and the expression on his face was complicated in ways he wasn’t offering to explain.
"I owe your mother my life," Eleanora said. "She didn’t an to save it. She was there for the monsters and I happened to be between her and one of them. But I’m alive because of that appetite the public despises her for, and my son has a mother because Vespera Ashborn is exactly the kind of person everyone says she is. Or at least..."
A sly smirk appeared on her features, "...the kind of person everyone says she is until her eldest son enters the picture, isn’t that right?"
Kaiden offered no reaction, which seed to amuse the woman nonetheless.
Then she continued.
"So when I tell you that watching you grow into the man you’ve beco fills with genuine admiration, I want you to understand the lens through which I’m saying it."
Kaiden observed the woman, and for once, he simply didn’t have a ready response. She was talking to a man who killed humans in cold blood just minutes ago. It was absurd to him.
"You grew up in a household that should have broken you," Eleanora explained. "Cast out of a family that should have been your greatest advantage. And instead of becoming bitter or cruel or any of the other things that broken hos produce, you beca..." She paused, searching for the word. "A gentleman."
Kaiden blinked.
"A gentleman," he repeated.
"I’m very aware of what you did today. Yet my statent stands."
Her expression didn’t waver. "Do you know why?"
"I honestly have zero clue. To be honest, you’re not making much sense to right now."
Eleanora chuckled at that. "Your confusion is understandable. Let try to explain."
She leaned forward.
"You stood on that ridge surrounded by five won who would die for you, and every single one of them looked at you the way a person looks at soone they trust with their whole heart. That’s what I noticed."
Before Kaiden could respond, she continued.
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