Beast Gacha System: All Mine-Chapter 230: Mutual

"Don’t worry."

Cecilia said gently, almost like the kind of tone one used to calm a startled animal. She patted the spot on her coat where the recording crystal was stored.

"What I have recorded here cannot prove that she actually did what she did." Her smile was warm, almost kind. "It’s just her big reactions. Her aggression. She never said, never outwardly admitted that she did it."

Arkai’s eyes widened.

No.

She hadn’t failed to get Sienna’s confession. This woman had ensured that Sienna didn’t outwardly confess. She had goaded her emotionally, poked and prodded until Sienna’s psyche was laid bare, until every ugly impulse and desperate justification was exposed.

But never once had she let the words cross Sienna’s lips.

"I did it."

"I drugged him."

"I locked him in."

None of it. Not a single admission.

If Cecilia had wanted to, she could have made Sienna confess. Could have dragged it out of her, manipulated the conversation until the words were unavoidable. She had that power. Arkai had just watched her freeze an entire cemetery, stop nature itself, hold a girl’s life in her hands like a toy.

She had chosen not to.

She had simply scared the girl. Destroyed her certainty. Left her broken and exposed without ever giving her an escape route of confession.

"So, let me keep it, alright?" Cecilia asked.

She wanted to keep it to control Sienna.

The realization hit Arkai.

This was something he had never thought possible. Something that shifted his understanding of power, of leverage, of the thousand subtle ways one person could hold another.

Yes, the recording didn’t outwardly prove what Sienna had done. But it would still make anyone who saw it suspicious. And in this day and age, speculation was worse than proof. For a girl like Sienna, beautiful, privileged, protected, reputation was as important as life itself.

She might not care if her reputation was destroyed because people thought she had slept with her brother. That, twistedly, might even satisfy something in her warped desires.

But she would care very much if just a sliver of speculation led people to believe she had drugged her brother to do it.

Cecilia held that power now.

"Mr. Dawnoro."

Her voice pulled him from his spiraling thoughts.

"Accept my help."

She raised her hand slowly, the way one might approach a wild thing that could bolt or bite. Her palm was open, offered, waiting.

"Let me help you."

***

This was three in the morning... and Cecilia had finally returned to her dorm long, long ago.

The room was dark, quiet, blessedly empty. No frozen pigeons. No hysterical sisters. No beautiful, shame-faced wolf kings looking at her like she held the keys to both salvation and damnation.

Just her. Her bed. Her pillow.

For fuck’s sake.

What had she done?

She buried her face under the pillow and screamed into it.

"WHAT HAVE I DONE?!"

The muffled cry echoed off the pillowcase, absorbed by the fabric, heard by no one but herself and whatever gods were amused enough to be watching.

Did she just say what she said?!

IN FRONT OF DR. SILVER’S GRAVE, MIND YOU!

"Mother, I’m sorry!" Her voice was a strangled wail into the pillow. "Your daughter is a slut...! Wuw, wuw, wuw—"

The words replayed in her mind.

"If I was his sister, he’d fuck me."

Ah.

"If I was his sister, even if we didn’t get trapped in an impossible situation with drugs... he’d still fuck me. On a random Tuesday. Just because I walked ’different’."

Aaah...

"It’s not because you’re his sister, Sienna. It’s because you didn’t turn him on."

"At all."

Aaaaaaah...!

"Say, Mr. Dawnoro. Wouldn’t it turn you on more... if we were... ’siblings’?"

A—

"Wouldn’t it be even more exciting?"

AaaaAAAaaaaAAAAhhh!!!

She thrashed against the mattress, pillow still clamped over her face, legs kicking at the blankets.

She had gone crazy.

Right.

She had done this before. Said the most outrageously vulgar, obscene thing imaginable around Arkai. She had done it to shame and provoke Elara, her ex-mother-in-law, the woman who had made her life hell in the real world.

And now she had done it to her sister-in-law?!

For God’s sake, this could form a habit.

Why—why—did existing around Arkai Dawnoro make her revert to factory settings and say the most primal, unhinged shit ever?!

She became the meanest creature ever existed when he was in proximity!

Was this a curse?!

She screamed into the pillow again, longer this time, louder, more desperate.

The pillow absorbed it all.

The room remained silent.

And Cecilia lay there, mortified, wondering if she could simply cease to exist before the next time she had to look Arkai Dawnoro in the eyes.

But it should be tomorrow.

Day two of the International Magic Student Conference.

Technically, she had completed all her assigned work. The boxes were checked, the tasks were done, the responsibilities fulfilled. She could stay in this room forever if she wanted, hiding under her pillow until the conference ended.

But it never hurt to check.

And Arkai should be there. He was the student council president, after all. The face of the Athenaeum. He couldn’t hide in his room the way she could.

Which meant tomorrow... today, technically, she would have to see him again.

"AaaAAaaaAAAaaaaAAAAhhh..."

The whine escaped her, long and pathetic. She whined again, and again, the sound muffled by the pillow but still audible in the quiet room.

She sat up abruptly.

If she couldn’t sleep, then let’s not sleep. There were better ways to spend three in the morning than falling into shame-spirals about things she couldn’t undo.

She reached over to her bedside cabinet and fished out a stack of papers.

OG!Cecilia’s files.

Let’s study it properly now.

Since she had entered this world, she hadn’t had time to try and act like the original version of "herself".

With Eastiel, she had been too busy learning the mechanics of the scenario, trying to live the life she could have had with him, to experience the version of their story that might have been. With Oathran, she had been singularly focused on finding out about him, about his curse, about the secrets he carried.

She had been so caught up in them that she had neglected herself.

Or rather, the self she was supposed to be in this world.

She needed to fix her act. Before people burned her at the stake as a witch.

Eastiel already loved her. He hadn’t minded her change. Had embraced it, actually, and immediately remembered everything. Oathran met her for the first time the moment she entered his scenario. He had no baseline, no before-and-after to compare. To him, she had simply been.

But Arkai Dawnoro was an observant stranger in close proximity to her. And he had all the information in the world at his fingertips.

Her change, from the quiet, studious top nerd to the woman who had frozen time and psychologically dismantled his sister and asked if being siblings would turn him on more—must have been ridiculously drastic in his eyes.

Well. What could she do?

Again, that man caused her to go back to factory setting.

Could she even control herself at this point?