Chapter 848: House Hunting In Valoria City [Bonus - ]

Chapter 848: House Hunting In Valoria City [Bonus Chapter]

The wrought-iron gates creaked open.

The agent was a sweaty bustling man named Harrison in an expensive tweed suit, and he bowed so low to Harper that his forehead nearly bumped his clipboard.

’I already had all of them prepared…’

“Miss Whitmore! Master Graves! An absolute privilege,” he gushed, his eyes bouncing nervously between Harper’s houndstooth blazer and the sleek black cat draped across Silas’s shoulders like a living fur stole. “When your office called my agency for a family home on the Ridge, I immediately thought of this one! Completely modernized and four floors of pure architectural refinement!”

Ten minutes later, Silas was standing in the master bathroom with his head tilted sideways at an awkward angle so he wouldn’t brain himself on a decorative cedar beam.

“Harrison,” he said mildly. “I’m six-foot-two… If I stand up straight in this shower, my skull becomes part of the ventilation.”

“It’s an intimate Europa-inspired loft aesthetic, Master Graves!” Harrison insisted, waving his hands as if he could push the ceiling up by force of will. “Very cozy and very historic!”

“It’s a broom closet with a gold faucet,” Harper said flatly.

She stood in the doorway, tapping the toe of her heel against the marble threshold.

“The outside looks like a manor house, but whoever designed the inside clearly hated oxygen and legroom… Look at the master bedroom! If we put a king-size bed in the middle, we’d have to crawl over the mattress just to reach the balcony door!”

’Or was it perhaps made for short people…?’ Silas thought, he would never understand how it felt to be short since he had always been tall.

Her voice had slipped into the sharp tone that made junior executives break out in cold sweats, but Silas caught the tiny slip buried in the middle of it.

’We’d have to crawl over the mattress, huh?’

A slow smirk tugged at the corner of his mouth as he turned his head toward the doorway as far as the beam would let him.

“Is that so, Miss Whitmore?” he asked. “You’re already planning where our bed goes…?”

Harper’s spine snapped straight.

A bright flush of pink bloomed across her cheeks as she cleared her throat with a sharp little cough and stared very intently at a brass coat hook on the wall.

“I was speaking from a purely spatial-planning perspective, Silas,” she sniffed, flipping her hair over her shoulder. “A modern couple needs room for a proper morning routine, or domestic harmony collapses. Any child understands floor plans…”

On Silas’s shoulder, Nitocris let out a long theatrical snort.

“Spatial planning, my tail,” she purred, rolling her violet eyes up at the ceiling. “The girl wants to share your mattress, and she lacks the courage to declare it before the heavens… In my dynasty, if an empress wanted a warrior in her chambers, she simply had her guards grab him by the belt and throw him onto the silk pillows. All this squirming over floor plans is deeply pathetic, Nyaa~”

“Quiet, Nito,” Silas murmured, reaching up to scratch the soft spot behind her ear. “Or I’m leaving you in the broom closet…”

Her eyes half-closed against her will, and a tiny treasonous purr started up in her throat before she yanked her head away with an indignant hiss.

“Do not try to bribe a monarch with ear scratches, peasant, Nyaa~!”

Harrison was staring at the cat in pure paralyzed horror, his tablet trembling in his hands.

“D-did the cat just critique the floor plan?”

Why was the cat talking as well…? Was he perhaps going senile…?

Silas ducked out of the shower, bumped his head on the beam anyway, and walked out into the master bedroom rubbing his skull.

Harper was right… The room was absurdly narrow, He stretched out both arms and could almost touch both walls at once.

“See?” Harper said triumphantly, following him in. “No room at all… If you rolled over in your sleep, you’d fall straight out the window.”

“I don’t roll over in my sleep though.”

“How would you know? You’re asleep…” She tapped her chin thoughtfully. “Someone would have to watch you to find out.”

Silas looked at her as she looked very innocently at the ceiling.

“…Are you volunteering?”

“I’m a scientist, hubby. I volunteer for all kinds of research including watching you at night.”

“She’d stare at you all night and drool on your pillow,” Nitocris announced. “I sat on her nightstand for days. I know exactly what she’d do, Nyaa~”

“NITO!”

“She’d also steal the blankets, and Hoodies too… Guard them with your life, nyaa~”

“I do not steal blankets!”

“You do… You wrap yourself up like a burrito. I watched her do it every single night, Nyaa~”

“She’s an architectural consultant,” Harper said through gritted teeth to Harrison, stepping past him into the hall with her ears on fire. “And she’s correct… Next listing, Harrison and if the next master bath has a ceiling built for a garden gnome, I’m canceling your firm’s retainer.”

The second property, on a sprawling three-acre lot in the southern hills, had the exact opposite problem.

It was huge.

It was absurdly huge, and it had apparently been built by an eccentric mining magnate with an unlimited budget, no taste whatsoever, and a violent obsession with gold paint.

Every interior wall was coated in blinding reflective gold… The main foyer featured a pair of life-sized rearing bronze stallions whose flared nostrils doubled as automatic air fresheners, puffing out clouds of artificial cinnamon mist every thirty seconds.

PSSHT!

Nitocris sneezed so hard she nearly fell off Silas’s shoulder.

PCHOO!

“Curse this wretched tomb!” she wailed, digging her claws into his jacket as another cloud of cinnamon drifted past. “The builder was clearly possessed by demons of madness! Even the high priests of the sun would have called this much yellow paint an abomination, Nyaa~!”

PSSHT! PCHOO!

“Bless you…” Silas said out of habit.

“Don’t bless me! Burn the horses, Nyaa~!”

The agent for this one was a glossy polished woman named Madame Odile who wore sunglasses indoors to deal with the glare bouncing off the walls.

She swept her arm grandly toward the double staircase.

“Eighteen bedrooms, Master Graves! Seven grand reception parlors! A banquet rotunda that seats two hundred! And just look at this magnificent imported crystal chandelier in the atrium—”

“It looks like a chandelier factory exploded,” Silas said, shielding his eyes as the sun hit a wall of mirrored tiles. “If I make Martha dust eighteen bedrooms covered in gold leaf, she’ll murder me in my sleep with a frying pan, and no court in the province would convict her…”

“I could hire you thirty maids by tomorrow morning,” Harper offered, stepping up beside him then her hand found his.

Her fingers simply slipped into the space between his, and her warm palm settled against his own as naturally as breathing however Silas didn’t pull away.

His fingers curled around hers, and his thumb brushed lightly over her knuckles.

A small quiet shiver ran through Harper’s shoulders at how easily his hand closed over hers but she didn’t let go.

She squeezed his fingers, and her violet eyes softened behind her glasses as she gazed up at the hideous gold ceiling.

“Though even thirty maids couldn’t fix this taste, handsome,” she admitted with a laugh, leaning her shoulder against his arm. “It looks like someone tried to build a palace out of melted coins… If you slept here, you’d wake up with a migraine every morning.”

“The lighting offends the eyes of gods and mortals alike,” Nitocris agreed, her nose twitching. “If you made me live in this golden monstrosity, I’d be forced to relieve myself in the cinnamon horses out of pure civic duty, Nyaa~”

Madame Odile’s jaw dropped so far her sunglasses slid down her nose.

“I beg your pardon?”

“You heard the cat,” Silas grinned, tugging Harper toward the exit by their joined hands. “Thanks for your time… We’ll be going before the horses sneeze on us again.”

PSSHT! PCHOO!

“TOO LATE, NYAA~!”

Outside, Harper laughed so hard she had to lean against the car.

Nitocris was still sneezing cinnamon out of her nose in tiny, furious bursts.

“Did you see her face?” she gasped, clutching her stomach. “When Nito said the thing about the horses?”

“I’ll be seeing it in my nightmares,” Silas said, plucking a stray glitter of gold paint off the cat’s ear. “That whole house was a nightmare… Two down.”

Harper wiped a tear from behind her glasses, still giggling, and Silas noticed that she hadn’t let go of his hand the entire walk back to the car.

She only let go now because she needed it to open the door, and she did it reluctantly with her fingers trailing off his slowly.

’Holding hands with Harper is actually very calming…’

The drive to the third house took twenty minutes.

Nitocris spent the first five of them curled on the dashboard grooming cinnamon out of her fur with the grim focus of a soldier cleaning a battlefield, and the next fifteen fast asleep in a patch of sun, snoring in tiny wheezes.

Harper drove with one hand.

The other rested on the console between them with the palm up, and after a minute, Silas laid his own hand on top of it.

She laced her fingers through his without looking as she kept driving and neither of them said anything about it.

“Can I tell you something embarrassing?” she said after a while.

“Of course you can…”

“I hate big houses.” She kept her eyes on the road. “The Whitmore estate has forty-one rooms… I counted them once when I was little… Most nights it was just me and the staff when I lived there at least, and I’d eat dinner at this enormous table that sat thirty, all by myself, and you could hear the clock ticking from the other end of the hall…”

Silas looked at her.

“That’s why I moved into my own place as soon as I could though I had to come back,” she said. “And that’s why I keep showing up at your apartment uninvited… It’s small, and it’s noisy, and Martha’s always humming in the kitchen while Lia’s always yelling at her homework, and somebody’s always laughing about something…”

Harper smiled a bit.

“…It’s the warmest place I’ve ever been, everything with you is warm~”

“And you still want me to move…?”

“I want you to have more room,” Harper said. “Not less warmth… Those aren’t the same thing. Whatever house we pick, I want it to sound like your apartment.”

Silas squeezed her hand.

“Then we’ll just have to fill it up with noise,” he said.

Harper laughed softly, and her thumb stroked slowly over his knuckles for the rest of the drive.

The third house sat in a gated neighborhood in the eastern hills, behind a low white wall covered in climbing roses.

It was a wide two-story home of pale stone and dark wood with tall windows, a clean flat roof and a wraparound porch and a big maple tree in the front yard was shedding red leaves all over the lawn.

Harper parked, and for a moment, neither of them moved to get out.

“Oh…?” she said softly.

“Yeah…?” Silas agreed.

It looked like the kind of house a family would live in and on paper, it looked almost perfect.

It was close to the train line.

It was fifteen minutes from the Academy… The rooms were spacious and bright, the ceilings were high enough that Silas could stand up straight anywhere he liked, and the kitchen had just been fitted with brand-new, top-of-the-line appliances that made Harper nod with grudging approval.

“Okay,” Silas said slowly, turning in a circle in the middle of the open living room. “Okay. This is actually good…”

“This is actually good,” Harper agreed, running her fingers along the clean stone of the kitchen island. “Look at the pantry, Silas… Martha could store enough food in here to survive a siege and the light in the living room is beautiful.”

Nitocris hopped down off his shoulder and trotted straight to a wide windowsill flooded with afternoon sun.

She turned a tight circle, tucked her paws under her chest and settled into the warmth with a long, satisfied sigh.

“A tolerable dwelling,” she declared, her eyes half-lidded in rare, grudging approval. “The sun is warm… The winds are minimal and there are no screaming bronze horses… I grant this house my royal approval, Nyaa~”

The agent for this one was a very professional woman in a navy pantsuit named Miss Corva, and she smiled at the cat with only a slight twitch of unease.

“I’m so glad you like it,” she said. “There’s just one more thing I need to show you before we talk numbers. The private courtyard garden…”

Something in the way she said it made Silas glance at her.

Her smile was very fixed, her knuckles were white around her tablet, and a small bead of sweat had appeared at her hairline despite the cool autumn air.

Harper’s eyes narrowed.

In her experience, agents only sweated like that when there was a body in the basement or a lawsuit in the paperwork.

“Is something wrong with the garden?” he asked.

“Nothing is wrong with the garden,” Miss Corva said, a little too quickly. “The garden is lovely. It’s… the garden has a feature.”

She slid open the glass doors at the back of the living room. Silas, Harper and the cat stepped out onto the patio flagstones and all three of them stopped dead.