Harem System novel · Chapter 14 of 24

Chapter 14: One Thread

Veyra was in the long room, on her knees, scrubbing the floor.

She wore a nurse's gray apron over her white nightgown, and her feet were bare on the wet stone.

A bucket of gray water stood beside her.

Her hands were raw to the wrist.

"Veyra," Nils said.

She did not look up.

"Bed twelve needs her sheets changed," she said. "The night nurse is short. I did the basins already."

"You're on crystals. You can barely stand."

"I can scrub."

Liriel came up behind him and stopped with a sigh.

"I told her no," she said. "She said she'd scrub the floor outside my door until I wrote her name on the roster."

"So I wrote it."

"Liriel."

"She's dying either way, Nils. She asked to do something useful." Liriel's mouth was tight. "I said she could do the floors."

Veyra wrung out her cloth.

"I owe this Ward," she said. "I owe you more. I can't pay you with my body. I'll pay with my hands."

"You don't owe me labor."

"I owe you three months of it."

She said it flatly, to the floor.

The women in the beds had gone quiet.

They were watching an S-rank succubus, the finest earner in the Mourne Guild, scrub a puddle of broth off the stone.

A woman in bed nine pulled her blanket up to her nose.

Nils crouched in front of Veyra.

"Stop for a minute."

"No."

"Look at me."

She looked up.

Her amber eyes were ringed with gray, and a vein jumped in her temple.

"I will work until I fall down," she said. "Then you can carry me to bed and be angry. Until then, let me."

He stood, took the second cloth off the bucket's rim and knelt on the other side of the puddle.

They scrubbed in silence.

At dusk Liriel sent them both to the supply closet to fetch linen.

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