"Allow me to introduce myself..."
Nadia, Talia, and Cora stared at the man as if he had completely and utterly lost his mind.
The silence that followed his declaration stretched long enough to become uncomfortable.
Nadia’s red eyes were wide. Talia’s golden ones had narrowed into dangerous slits. Cora simply stared at him with her lips slightly parted, as if her brain was still trying to process the absolute nonsense that had just left his mouth.
Tristan did not waste the opening. He knew he had a mission to achieve.
He straightened fully, rolled his shoulders back, then spoke with the same calm, aristocratic cadence he had used in court for years.
"My name is Tristan Ashby. I’m the Crown Prince of Valoria." he said with the confidence he had been using to introduce himself whenever he was out and about in his country.
The three women exchanged a single glance.
Then they let out a long hiss.
Nadia looked at no one in particular and asked, her voice dripping with disdain, "Where exactly did this nutjob drop from?"
Talia’s lip curled with disgust. "Crown Prince of what? The asylum?"
Cora’s expression wasn’t any different from the other women. Her nose was scrunched up in disgust.
"A wandering soul with delusions of grandeur. Wonderful. As if this night wasn’t already ruined enough."
The system used that moment to chime;
[Ding!]
[Mission Complete.]
[First Mission: Successful.]
[Rewards issued with 10,000× multiplier.]
[+10,000 Charm]
[+10,000 Dominance]
[+50,000 System Points]
Tristan blinked at the absurd numbers that flashed across his vision, then gave a small, thoughtful nod.
"I will come back to that, I have questions." he murmured under his breath.
Then, Lysander’s voice curled through his mind, warm and teasing.
"Of course you do, my darling intelligent Host. I expected nothing less. I’d be waiting."
Meanwhile, the three women had fallen quiet again, studying him in heavy silence for several seconds. Finally, they turned toward one another, their voices dropping into a rapid, low discussion.
"What do we do with him?" Talia muttered.
"He’s clearly unstable. Unstable and disgusting." Nadia replied, shaking her head in disbelief.
"We can’t just leave a foreign soul walking around in that body," Cora said tightly. "But killing him might not be the answer either-"
Tristan stopped listening.
He needed space. He needed a locked door and five minutes to clear his head before one of them decided to finish the job. If they already thought he was insane, then he would give them every reason to keep believing it and use that belief to get them out of the room.
He lifted his chin, adopting the same arrogant posture he had always used whenever he needed to dismiss incompetent ministers in the making.
"Now ladies, this is not the way to welcome your husband." he said loudly, cutting through their quiet argument.
All three heads snapped back toward him.
Tristan held their gazes without flinching.
"You can continue using your mouths to shout insults, which will label you bad wives" he continued smoothly, "or you can put them to better use and be seen as good wives. Come here, give me a proper wash, and welcome me the way good wives should."
The silence that followed was absolute.
Nadia’s expression twisted in pure disbelief. Talia looked like she was two seconds from lunging again. Cora’s eyebrows had risen so high they nearly disappeared into her hairline.
Tristan glanced down at himself and realized, belatedly, that the body he now occupied was wearing a simple dark shirt and trousers. Without breaking eye contact, he lifted his hands and began unbuttoning the shirt, one button at a time - deliberately slow...
When the last button slipped free, he reached for the zipper of his trousers.
"Well? Which of you is going first?" he asked, in a calm and faintly challenging voice.
The three women stared at him as if he had grown a second head.
Talia was the first to recover. She took a slow step back, her golden eyes still locked on him.
"No, I can’t deal...I need a moment to think."
"Same," Nadia said immediately, her voice tight.
Cora nodded once, already moving toward the door. "We all do."
They made their way out of the room without another word, each of them throwing him one last look of pure disgust before the door shut firmly behind them.
The moment the latch clicked, Tristan’s composed mask cracked.
He exhaled a long, shaky breath he hadn’t realized he was holding and quickly walked to the door. He locked the door from the inside, then turned and leaned his back against it for a second, his heart still pounding.
Only when he was certain they weren’t coming straight back did he push off the door and begin scanning the room with sharp, focused eyes.
An intelligent man did not waste opportunities.
He knew the room definitely belonged to their previous husband, there was just something masculine about the smell of the room, so he was certain. He believed if it was so, then somewhere in this room there had to be something; a book, a phone, a journal, anything that could tell him exactly what kind of mess he had been dropped into.