Chapter Two
It had never occurred to Tommy that complete and total honesty would play such a big part in his life moving forward, but in the days since he'd captured Kaya, their inability to lie to one another had built the most impressive foundation between the two of them.
There was no need to worry about sparing feelings or trying to play coy. All their cards were on the table for the asking, and neither found it a problem to ask bold and daring questions.
They both found each other insanely attractive, and she had admitted to admiring his gumption coming into her decision to try and flip him. As the youngest Captain ever, his debut had made something of a sizable clatter. She had been watching him before that, tracking his rise within the Green House, and even the Vastian School before that. There he had been something of a prodigy, albeit a somewhat troubled one with a checkered past. Even at an early age, Tommy Clarke had been earmarked by several different houses and factions as someone to keep an eye on.
When he was just eight years old, incredibly early in his magical training, he'd stopped two thirteen-year-olds who had been trying to set up a side hustle. The older boys had been trying to extort the younger kids for lunch money. The older kids might have had a chance, but the third person they'd tried to shake down was Weird Orphan Clarke, and Tommy was not the kind of person anyone could intimidate, no matter how much they had on him in terms of weight, height, age or experience.
The two older boys had spent a month in the infirmary, and Tommy had spent a week in solitary confinement as punishment. But from that moment on, his reputation, both inside the school and out, had been made, cast in iron. There was no fight that Tommy Clarke would back down from, and Tommy would. Not. Lose.
From that day on, Weird Orphan Clarke had gotten the new nickname of Powderkeg Clarke to some, or Overkill Clarke to others.
He'd been an exceptional student who'd mostly kept to himself. Oh, he'd had a few acquaintances here and there, but no real school friends to speak of. The same could be said of his relationships, some girls in and out of his life. They'd all described him the same way - affectionate but somehow distant, like he was keeping some part of his life hidden away. Many of them thought it sprung from the fact that Tommy was obviously the child of two powerful magical bloodlines, but that neither had wanted to keep him, and had left him at the Vastian School as an orphan, one of the very few wards of the school itself. Of course, Tommy had used his own magic growing up, trying to determine his point of origin, but even now, thirty years later, it all remained obscured from him. He'd even broken into the school records, only to find they had no clues about his lineage either, other than to classify him as 'potential omega-class natural aptitude,' something which he found out later meant that most of his teachers had just assumed Tommy would join The Deck someday and assume his position as one of the 54 most powerful mages on the planet. That sort of expectation had certainly put a bit of weight on him growing up.
Kaya had asked him about that early on, and, because he couldn't lie to her, he'd given her a straight answer - of course he'd been distant as a younger man. He'd been focused on his classes, focused on his schoolwork, focused on his training and focused on finding out where he'd come from, and that had left little room for personal relationships. Besides, he'd told her, he'd been able to tell that almost all the women were looking at him as a project, someone to be 'fixed.'
In return, since she couldn't lie to him, Kaya admitted that was one of the things she'd found so utterly enchanting about him - his determination to walk his own path, despite expectations. He'd been willing to challenge other students and teachers, and in doing so, he'd made a few enemies among some of the elder mages, although most of them approved of his moxie.
He'd been fourteen when he met his first member of The Deck, the Four of Spades, a Captain from the Indigo Wizards' House (Indigo was the color for the continent of Australia), hysterically named Bruce. Bruce Hutchison had been giving a lecture at the Vastian School to any student who had wanted to attend. It had drawn an attendance of nearly two hundred students, with not enough room for them all to sit in the largest hall the school had, many crammed into standing room only spaces. Tommy had been there, seated near the front, having arrived before most of the other students had even started to make their way across the campus.
The lecture had been about the differences between workshop magic and field magic, and how field magic was always going to be done faster, less precisely and under more pressure, but that made it the purest expression of a caster's capabilities, and perhaps the only true measure of a mage. It was something Tommy found himself in total agreement with, which, apparently, put him at odds with many of the other students, and a good number of the faculty.
At the end of the lecture, Bruce had asked Tommy to stay after, to talk with him for a few minutes. During their conversation, Bruce told Tommy that a mage was only as strong as they
thought
they were, and asked Tommy how strong a mage he planned to eventually become.
"Strong enough to change the world," Tommy had replied, "but not
so
strong that anyone notices before I do."
"That's a
very
good answer," Bruce had told him. Every year since then, Bruce had come to check up on Tommy and spent a few days imparting some new skill or concept to Tommy, who'd taken all the lessons to heart, and had started adapting them into his own fashion. He'd wanted to have a lot more time to get up to speed on the various political factions and their current states before he'd gotten dragged into politics, but when his name was put up for consideration, Tommy knew he'd be confirmed as a Captain, much earlier than he'd intended to.
Someone noticed faster than he wanted.
While he hadn't found out who'd put his name forward for a Captain's consideration, Tommy had always suspected that Bruce might have recommended it to Grand Captain Feng, although there were a number of people in the Green Wizards' House who might have made mention of him.
By contrast, Kaya had wanted to make a name for herself as quickly as possible, coming from royal lineage where either you started big, or you were a non-starter. Kaya was far enough removed from the throne that if she wanted to, she could've simply laid back and spread her legs for a very comfortable life with little in the way of day-to-day concerns, but that was precisely what she
didn't
want.
She was eighty years old, which put her just a smidgen below twenty in terms of human maturity levels. (The common rough estimate was that four years to an elf was the emotional equivalent to one year as a human.) Therefore, she was still considered young, impetuous and mercurial. The Orange House of Elves was headquartered in Moscow, and they lived in the life of extreme luxury, but Kaya had felt they had been living their lives of luxury behind their gilded walls too long and had lost touch with the world as it was today. As such, she had enrolled herself in Fyodor's Academy, a Russian school where those with natural magical talents could refine them, regardless of their Faction. There she studied with humans, elves, vampires, faeries, werewolves, shades and dragons all the same. She had been a gifted student in private study and felt like her skills would progress much faster if they were constantly being challenged by hungry and eager students. So out with the personal tutors and in with the public-school education system.
Kaya had hidden her personal lineage from all her fellow students and teachers alike, happy to pass herself off as a little orphan girl with a wealthy patron. Much like Tommy, she'd wanted her skills to speak for themselves, and didn't like the idea of trading on her family name, although a few members of the executive staff at the school knew her real identity, as her parents had insisted that she have a guard enrolled in classes with her, and that she be protected at all times.
(In line to the throne of Avalon, even if it was dozens and dozens of deaths away, was
still
in line to the throne of Avalon.)
When she got out of school, she resumed her name and position with the family, but had also decided to try and get involved in the family business, which was the gathering and manipulation of information. The Russian elves were secret brokers, the kind of fixers who always had the dirt on someone and could use it to the best of their advantage.
The problem was that the North American houses - the Green Houses - they were such anarchy that it was hard to get a read on who was important within them and who was simply a background player. So various members of the Russian elves had begun trying to study all the Green Houses for weaknesses or places they could exert pressure. Kaya was one of the three elves who'd been assigned to the Green Wizards' House, and when Tommy asked her, she provided the names of the other two without any pushing. But the Orange Elves' House didn't trust the Green Elves' House as far as they could throw the Empire State Building.
For the last few days, Tommy and Kaya been mostly like a couple of college kids in a new relationship, fucking each other senseless and occasionally remembering to go and get meals, but after day five, Tommy knew that they had to go and make it official. He did have a full week to claim a Plunder, but there was no reason to delay it up to the wire. And after a week, his claim to Kaya as Plunder would be... much more complicated.
"You like having an elvish princess as a fucktoy, don't you?" Kaya asked him as she ran her tongue along the length of his cock. "Don't feel bad. I love the idea myself. The fact that we can't lie to each other in any way?" She shuddered in delight. "I didn't realize what a fucking turn on that would be for me, but I have to admit... I get off on how dirty I can be with you, when I don't have to act like a noble princess with a stick up my ass."
