Chapter 371: The Father Arrives

Upon spotting Bane, Conversations dropped mid sentence. Glasses were set down without being raised to lips. A couple near the window turned toward the entrance and then very deliberately turned back, the way people do when they’ve decided that what they saw was not something they should appear to be watching.

Bane Reign had not bothered hiding his arrival.

He had, in fact, teleported directly into the restaurant’s vicinity, a fact that would have sent ripples through the enhanced senses of half the patrons before he’d taken a single step through the door.

In Velmora, where Awakened of varying ranks moved through public space daily, the casual exercise of that level of ability in a civilian setting was the equivalent of a declaration. Not aggressive. Not threatening. Simply honest. He was who he was, and he had never seen the value in pretending otherwise.

He walked through the main dining room in a dark, precisely fitted suit that carried no ornamentation beyond its cut, his bearing unhurried, his gaze moving across the room in a single sweeping assessment that catalogued everything without lingering on any of it.

The conversations that had stalled did not resume. The staff who had been moving between tables stopped where they stood. Those with enough strength to feel the weight of his aura sat very still, not out of fear exactly, but out of the particular instinct that comes from being in the presence of something significantly larger than yourself, the awareness that the room has reorganized itself around a new center of gravity, and the wisest thing is to let it.

Most of the room did not see where he was going. Bruce and Sophie’s chamber was through a corridor and out of the sightline of the main floor, their auras compressed to near nothing.

They had arrived quietly, unremarkably, and Reignland’s Haven had absorbed them without record. Bane swept the room in a single scan, not with his eyes alone, found what he was looking for, and moved without hesitation.

The whispers that followed him were quiet and careful. The name passed from table to table like something almost too significant to say at full volume.

Bruce felt him coming before he heard the footsteps in the corridor. Sophie felt it too, her hand stilled against her glass, and she straightened very slightly in her seat. Not tensing. Just orienting. The way a compass needle moves when north arrives.

The curtain at the chamber entrance shifted. Bane Reign stepped through.

He took in the room in a single, unhurried moment, the table, the meal between them, his daughter’s composed face, and the man seated across from her. Something moved through his expression, brief and unreadable, and then it settled into the same quiet steadiness that Bruce had come to associate with him.

Bruce rose.

Not formally. Not with ceremony. He simply stood, the way he would stand for someone he respected without needing to perform the fact, and extended his hand.

Bane crossed the space between them in three steps and took it.

The handshake was firm and immediate, not the measured grip of two people assessing each other, but something warmer than that. The grip of two people who already knew exactly where they stood. Which was accurate. Because the last time their hands had met, Bruce had been pulling Bane back from the edge of something that didn’t leave room for second attempts, and neither of them had forgotten it.

The word ’buddies’ was perhaps an unusual one for a man of Bane Reign’s standing and a former Earth surgeon operating in a world that still hadn’t entirely decided what to make of him, but unusual or not, it was accurate. That kind of history didn’t produce acquaintances. It produced something else.

Bane settled into the seat across the table from them, his posture easy, his aura, still uncompressed, still present, still carrying its quiet weight in the air, simply a fact of the room now rather than an intrusion on it. He glanced at the meal. At the drinks. At his daughter, who was watching him with an expression she was maintaining with some effort.

Then his gaze moved back to Bruce.

“Yes, I did, Sir Bane.” Bruce held his gaze without hesitation, calm and direct in the way he was calm and direct about most things that mattered. “And she accepted. Which is why I wanted to speak with you, about the marriage.”

Bane was quiet for a moment. His eyes moved between Bruce and Sophie once, unhurried, and then a smile appeared at the corner of his mouth, slow, deliberate, the kind that suggested he’d been holding it back and had decided it had waited long enough.

“Marriage,” he said. “So soon after proposing?”

Bruce opened his mouth.

Bane laughed, a genuine one, low and warm, filling the small chamber with a sound that had absolutely no business being as disarming as it was coming from a man whose mere arrival had silenced an entire restaurant full of Awakened. He raised one hand slightly, the gesture easy and unbothered.

“Don’t mind me. I’m just teasing you.”

Sophie exhaled beside Bruce, something between relief and exasperation moving across her face. She reached for her drink.

Bruce settled back into his seat, the faintest shift in his expression that wasn’t quite amusement but was adjacent to it. “I wasn’t sure if that was a genuine concern.”

“If it were a genuine concern,” Bane said, already reaching to pour himself a glass from the pale luminescent drink at the center of the table, “you would know.”

He lifted the glass, examined its colour briefly against the amber light of the room, and took a measured sip. Something approving moved through his expression, subtle, almost professional in its assessment. “This is from the eastern cellars.”

“Moonveil press,” Sophie confirmed quietly. “You gave me a case last year.”

“I have good taste.” He set the glass down. “So does your partner, apparently, this table is well ordered.”

His gaze moved across the dishes with the practiced appreciation of a man who took food seriously. The venison’s dark reduction had deepened as it cooled slightly, its edges thickening against the glaze, and the elderberry note had grown richer in the air. The hearthgrain bread, still faintly warm, sat between them half finished. Bane glanced at Bruce. “You ordered?”

“I did.”

Bane nodded once, as though this confirmed something he’d already suspected. Then he signalled without looking toward the corridor, and a waiter appeared at the entrance with the speed of someone who had been stationed nearby for exactly this purpose.

Bane ordered briefly, the same venison, prepared rare, with a different side and a second bread service, and the waiter disappeared with the focused energy of someone whose evening had just become significantly more important.

For a moment the three of them simply occupied the space together. The garden beyond the window had deepened with the settling of the evening light, the pale blossoms now carrying a faint luminescence of their own, drifting in the breathless quiet of a Reignland night. The instrumental sound from the main room reached them as something shapeless and warm.

“So,” Bane said, his voice returning to its earlier register, easy, unhurried, but present in the way that his voice was always present. “The marriage. Tell me what you’re thinking.”

Bruce set his fork down and met Bane’s gaze evenly. “Nothing extravagant. I know Sophie, and I know she doesn’t want something performative. Something real, intimate, considered, done properly.” A brief pause. “I have a rough timeline in mind. I wanted your input before anything was decided.”

Bane’s eyes moved to Sophie. “Hmm.”

Sophie kept her expression composed, but her fingers tightened slightly around her glass. “I’m aware.”

“Most men in his position would come here and tell me about the venue first.” Bane picked up his own glass again. “The guest list. The scale. The things that make the statement.” He glanced back at Bruce. “You led with her. That’s either very intelligent or very genuine.”

“Both, ideally,” Bruce said.

Bane’s mouth curved. “Both. Yes.” He swirled the pale drink slowly. “Alright. Timeline.”

“A week,” Bruce said. “At minimum. There’s no need to rush the preparation, and I want everything in order before we move into it. Venue, ceremony, the formal arrangements on both sides. Done without cutting corners.”

“A week,” Bane repeated. He seemed to be measuring the number against something internal. “You’ve thought about this.”

“I’ve thought about very little else recently.”

Sophie turned to look at him at that. He didn’t look back at her, but the line of his jaw shifted almost imperceptibly, the specific quality of a man who had said something true and was not going to take it back.

Bane watched this exchange with the particular stillness of a father who had been watching his daughter for her entire life and was now watching someone else watch her the same way. Something settled in his expression. Then, because he was Bane Reign and restraint only extended so far, he said: “Six months is also long enough for Sophie to change her mind.”

Sophie set her glass down. “Father.”

“I’m just noting the possibility.”

“Please stop noting it.”

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep