LTSV - Harbingers of Change - 47 (Patreon)

Mira and the group minus Syrith, who did not want to test her impersonation of the Dark Lady any further than was necessary, went to celebrate her win at a very nice restaurant at the top of one of the big sky rise buildings in downtown San Aurelio. The restaurant was one of the ones that rotated so that the diners could always have a fresh view.

"It's a little weird that Dietrich just sat there and didn't say anything," Alan commented as they all worked their way through a seafood tower. "He was on their side and his eyes were open, but I swear no one was home."

"Mason is a major shareholder in LivingShadow," Adra replied like a seasoned liar. "He may not be a pleasant man, but it's in his best interests to keep Samira with us and to prevent her parents from continually draining her bank accounts to funnel resources to Blake Heron. Even if Virgil managed to appeal to Mason's vanity and somehow overrode his personal interests, the Dietrich conglomerate threw a lot of their weight behind him when he backed my bid for the guild permit. They're not about to let a rival guild fatten themselves at their expense so I don't expect that Mason wrote them the glowing testimonial that they were expecting."

Mira wondered just how scathing that affidavit had been. Adra had refused to let her see it in case that invalidated his statement. Maybe he still had a copy she could read after the fact?

"I guess that's why he's been acting so differently lately," Cece mused aloud as she toyed with a breadstick. "I swear, I used to catch him staring whenever he thought I wasn't looking and my dad said he caught him outside our old house once or twice, but then one day its like he forgot I existed. I'm not complaining, but it was a weird 180 in behavior."

She turned to Mira.

"Do you know what was up with that?"

Mira stomped on her urge to grimace as she was reminded of Mason's original role as Cece's erotomaniac stalker. She'd actually spent a lot of time deliberately not thinking about that, to the point where she'd almost managed to forget about it.

She just shrugged. "He and I don't exactly talk much," she replied. "It's not a personable relationship. We just show up at the same parties and even that is over. Her Grace said the engagement is over, unless he proposes with a better ring and I feel like saying yes."

That reminded her— she paused and took off the 'diamond' solitaire she'd been wearing since she'd woken up in the hospital and dropped it on the table.

"Allow me," Adra said with a smile. He picked it up, walked over to the open-air part of the observation deck and chucked the ring out over the city before anyone could stop him. In fact, at least half the party was halfway out of their chairs when he released it.

"Don't do that!" Cece gasped.

"Yeah, we could have pawned that for operations funds!" Alan added.

Cece squinted at him. "I was going to say 'it'll hit someone'," she said in reproach.

Alan winced. "That too, but that was at least two carats of diamond."

"Cubic zirconia," Mira corrected as she took a sip of her wine. "It came up when Cece happened to be looking at my hands the other day when she was practicing her Appraisal skill. The band was gold, though."

"Oh, well nevermind," Alan relaxed back into his seat. "It'll probably hit a rooftop around here rather than a person. I noticed a lot of awnings between us and the street. They've probably have had issues with stuff occasionally falling down from the deck for years."

Adra radiated pleasure as he too resumed his seat. He'd hated that ring and Mira had often found him staring at it with the shadows getting hot all around him. She suspected he knew from Mason's memories exactly what it was and how little respect it signified that Mason had had for her.

She rubbed her finger and thought, randomly, of her first wedding ring. She'd been wearing it when she fell into the Dark Lake so it was probably long gone and she'd scarcely thought of it in years—actually, that was a lie. She thought about it every time she got a new wedding ring and had mostly resigned herself to its loss, but she missed that ring a little bit extra today.

Her gaze slid over to Adra.

She had the most important part of her marriage back and that was what mattered.

"Has the System told you how much money you got back?" Will interjected. He'd mostly been concentrating on cracking stone crab claws, but he'd now moved on to the oysters. "I've been curious about this ever since you told us about the conservatorship."

"Oh, I snoozed the alert because Lady Celebrana was still talking," Mira realized aloud. "System, display my updated list of holdings, please?"

A System window popped up before her with a long, scrolling list of cash, real estate, business licenses, and weirdly a ton of designer bags. They must have held their value well enough to count when the System started reassigning property. She was also now the beneficiary of several whole insurance policies, with a note that she'd be removed when Virgil and Helena made their final payments to her—with the exception of the whole life policy they'd taken out for her.

Fascinating.

She called up a report on that one and discovered they'd borrowed heavily against the principle of her policy and had used it to finance things like automobiles and some of those handbags the System had repatriated. Those loans had been reassigned and divided up amongst the other whole life policies, including Viola's so none of them were tapped out yet.

She also thought of the dysfunctional families she'd lived in before, especially the ones with a golden child and a scapegoat child. She'd been the golden child more than once and knew that when the scapegoat escaped confinement, all the abuse that they'd been absorbing would eventually fall on the supposed 'golden' child.

It would just look different and be harder to cry about.

"Is something wrong?" Randall asked. "Your face is doing a thing."

"I received some of Vi—Violani's things in th settlement, like a life insurance policy. I'm not sure I should have this.

Virgil and Helena's? She didn't care. She'd tap them out without a second thought, but having this access to Viola's security net made her feel gross.

Viola was a dangerous young woman, but Mira now knew from her previous life that she was also capable of affection and loyalty that Virgil and Helena would never understand except to exploit it. That automatically ranked Viola higher in Mira' estimation.

It looked like she had the right to allow or deny further loans to be taken out against these policies and Mira took a second to lock Viola's down so that her parents couldn't drain it in the name of emergency funding. Mira also permitted the System to keep paying the premium on it from her account until Viola was an adult. She did the same with a little trust fund she found that was also in Viola's name and badly mismanaged. She was now the executor and sole trustee of that, too.

She suspected the System had just lumped everything that Virgil could use to write a check from together and dumped it into Mira's control.

"I've inherited a mess, is what's happened," she sighed. "I think it's included some things I shouldn't have, but Virgil can't be trusted with.

"Speaking of Viola," Cece said, looking thoughtful. "Does anyone else think she looked too nervous when they caught her livestreaming?"

"Kind of," Alan agreed. "A little scared, too. What was up with that? The last time I saw her, she had the energy of a tiny queen bee; real Regina Börge energy. Where did that go? I was more worried for the Dungeon monsters than her when they announced she was a Gate Hunter. As far as I know, they haven't been in a Dungeon except for during the Gate Crisis yet, so what changed?"

Mira suspected Blake Heron had happened. It was just a question of how he'd happened.

She doubted he'd put hands on Viola. That wasn't really his pattern, previously. He liked women well enough, but he liked adult women who had ambition because he could make use of their ambitions; women like Madame.

Actually, if Viola was here then was Madame here too? They had been such a unit in the previous life, together with Raoul.

Helena wasn't half or even a quarter of the scheming mastermind Madame was, so Mira doubted she'd somehow overlooked that reincarnation.

'Maybe, from now on, I'll need to start looking for my enemies as urgently as I seek out my allies,' she realized.

Previously, she'd been the only 'antagonist' that the Cycle chose to recycle regularly. There were other enemies for the protagonists to defeat, but they varied from life to life. Mira usually appeared as a mid-level member of the enemy camp and got promoted during the course of the story, but she was never the end boss because she never wanted to be. Now there was a whole cast of them who'd repeated from one life to the next.

At the same time, Mira had been immediately absorbed into the 'good guys' before she was even sure what had happened.

Was it a coincidence that this happened in the first life where her plot knowledge had been rendered immediately invalid?

Note:

Regina Börge - Regina George