Chapter 110: 110. The Nerd’s Mother Is A Baddie! I Can’t Wait To Taste Her!

Mike hadn’t minded. He’d been looked at in worse ways by worse people.

The entry hall of the Schmith residence opened up behind the staff member, and it was, by any honest measure, enormous. Mike had seen impressive properties before. He had lived in a villa in that district for six weeks under an alias and slept in rooms that cost more per night than most people made in a month.

He was not easily impressed by space or the things people put in it to signal that they had money.

But he cataloged what he was seeing with the particular attentiveness he applied to anything useful, and what he was seeing was very useful. High ceilings, the kind that absorbed sound instead of bouncing it back.

Polished stone flooring in the entry and warm wood further in. The artwork on the walls was chosen to be looked at, not to fill space.

Two staircases are visible from the entry, one straight ahead and one curving to the right. There are multiple hallways that lead into different areas of the building.

This was not a house someone bought because it was practical. This was a house someone bought because they could and then filled with a life that only partially occupied it.

Mike looked at the staircase on the right. The curve of it was an architectural choice that had cost someone a specific number of Dollahs to execute, and whoever signed off on it had not had to think about the number for very long before deciding it was acceptable.

He looked at the hallways leading deeper into the building and roughly calculated the square footage in relation to the number of people who actually lived there, which, based on what Tyler had told him, included himself and his mother, along with staff members who were not family and were somewhere in the building.

He looked at the art on the walls, which was good enough to have been selected by someone who knew what good looked like or had hired someone who did.

Tyler Schmith, quiet and bespectacled, was currently struggling to put his full weight on his left side. He had grown up in this expansive building. He had eaten breakfast here and read his physics textbooks in one of the many rooms along those hallways.

Over time, he developed his unique brand of careful, methodical, analytical solitude in a place that had more rooms than he could ever need and more space than a single family could occupy.

Mike felt something he rarely allowed himself, which was genuine amusement at the universe’s sense of humor.

The nerd lives in a manor. The thought arrived fully formed, and Mike did nothing to correct it.

He pressed the handkerchief more firmly against his right cheek and waited while Tyler was led carefully inside by two of the staff, and then the woman appeared.

She had come down the left staircase with the kind of controlled urgency that told Mike she had been awake and waiting, not asleep and startled. The red hair pulled back but not severely, a few strands loose around her face in the way that happens when someone has been awake for hours running through scenarios they couldn’t fully predict.

She was wearing a light cardigan over something underneath it, and her feet were in flat house slippers that somehow didn’t make her look casual, just at home in a way that fit the house. 𝒻𝘳𝘦𝘦𝘸ℯ𝒷𝘯𝘰𝑣ℯ𝑙.𝘤𝑜𝘮

It seems like she is wearing new clothes and some make-up, even though he had already seen her before.

She moved immediately to Tyler, put both hands on his face first, as though checking if the face she knew was still the same, and then stepped back to look at the rest of him with an expression that Mike read as someone fighting to keep their assessment clinical because the alternative was harder to manage in front of strangers.

Mike watched her and said nothing, because occasionally the most effective thing a person can do in a room is wait.

He was also watching her in a different way, which was the way he watched most things that were worth watching. She was tall in a way that was proportionate rather than conspicuous, and she moved through the entry with the ease of someone who had long since stopped thinking about how she occupied space and simply occupied it.

The cardigan was something she had put on quickly, but it fit her well, similar to how clothing fits people with a naturally good baseline. The hair, loosened from wherever it had been pinned earlier when he met her for the first time, fell to the angle of her jaw on one side, and she hadn’t bothered to fix it, which was either because she didn’t care about it or because Tyler’s face had been the only thing on her mind since the intercom buzzed.

Probably both.

She spoke to the staff member who had held the handgun and gave a quiet instruction, and the woman nodded and guided Tyler toward a door off the left side of the hall. Then she turned to Mike.

The look she gave him was direct and unguarded in the way that only happens when someone’s fear for someone else has temporarily overridden their social calibrations. She took in the handkerchief against his cheek, the steadiness of his posture, and the fact that he was still holding himself like someone who had not been rattled.

"You’re the one who brought him home," she said.

Not a question, exactly. More like something she was confirming for herself.

"I found him near the east campus boundary," Mike said, to provide more context. "Three of them."

"He was already on the ground."

She breathed through her nose slowly. "Come, come, don’t just stand right here."

He followed her into a sitting room to the left of the entry hall, which turned out to be larger than his entire apartment at Schneider’s and furnished with the kind of restraint that expensive taste sometimes produces.

She gestured toward a seat, and he took it, settling into the chair across from the sofa where she sat, and the distance between them was polite and readable but not cold.

The room had the quality of a room that was actually used, not staged. Two books were on the side table by the sofa, one open and face-down in the particular way of someone who had been reading before the evening went sideways.

A glass of water, half-finished. A lamp rather than the overhead light, because someone who spent time here preferred the warmer version of the room to the accurate one.

He looked at it the way he looked at everything, briefly and completely.

The house, which was this size and included staff, a gated garden, stone floors, and art that was selected rather than collected, was occupied by a woman who read at night, kept water on her table, and pulled strands of hair loose without noticing, along with a physics student who built six-week avoidance schedules and proposed formal payment arrangements in alleys at two in the morning.

Mike turned the picture over and considered what it told him, which was several things he filed under pending.

"Allow me to introduce myself... I’m Aveline," she said. "Aveline Schmith."

"Mike Hawk," he said. "I’m a postgraduate student at Valcrest."

"I’ve been speaking with Tyler since earlier this week."

Aveline Schmith looked at him the way someone does when they’re deciding how much to trust what they’re being told, which is to say she looked at him carefully, taking inventory.

She was somewhere in her mid-forties, though she wore it in a way that made the number feel approximate rather than fixed. Whatever the number was, it had produced someone whose face had settled into something that read as both composed and alert, the kind of face that had finished becoming what it was going to be and was comfortable there.

Her eyes were steady, the specific steadiness of someone who looked at difficult things without needing to look away from them, and the worry that had been in them when she came down the stairs was still present but had organized itself into something more manageable.

She was, by any reasonable assessment, a very good-looking woman. Mike noted this the way he noted most things, which was without making anything of it immediately and without losing track of it.

Her composure exuded a quality that indicated its development over time and circumstances, rather than mere inheritance.

Mike was paying attention.

Then the system placed something in the upper corner of his awareness, quiet as a card being set on a table.

[NEW TARGET DETECTED.]

[AVELINE SCHMITH. AGE: 44. DESIRE LEVEL: 15/100.]

[ACQUISITION FACTOR: GRATITUDE. SHE OWES YOU HER SON. DO TRY NOT TO WASTE IT.]

’Huh...? Her desire level is already raised...? Oh yeah, I owe her for saving her son...’

Fifteen was reasonable. Gratitude was a strong foundation, particularly when it was the kind that arrived at two in the morning, when a person’s defenses were lower because the fear was still fresh.

Mike set the information aside and kept his expression exactly where it needed to be.

"How bad was it?" she asked.