SSS-Ranked Surgeon In Another World: The Healer Is Actually OP! - Chapter 369: Before He Arrives
Chapter 369: Before He Arrives
“I’m sorry for asking that considering what we’ve been through and how close you’re with my father… I’m just trying to hold my own nervousness. I still can’t believe this is happening… My heart is filled with joy…”
Bruce smiled, he understood that feeling, too much joy might make one question things too much… Even a powerful Awakened like Sophie was no exception to that…
His hand shifted slightly beneath hers. Not pulling away. Settling.
“Don’t worry, i told you before.” His voice was low, deliberate without being heavy. “I’m not planning to let anything happen.”
Sophie’s breath caught, barely, small enough that it might not have registered at all. But her grip on his hand tightened just slightly, and the expression that moved through her eyes was something deeper than gratitude and simpler than relief. It was trust, the particular, quietly enormous weight of it, and she carried it without hiding it from him.
“I know,” she said softly. “That’s why I wanted this.”
She leaned her head back against the seat, her shoulder resting warm against his arm, her gaze moving to the window where Reignland continued to unfold past them in its careful, restrained beauty. The destination was close now. She could feel it in the way the pathways narrowed, in the faint shift of ambient light filtering through the gardens on either side.
But neither of them rushed it.
Because the meeting ahead would arrive when it arrived. The conversation with her father would be what it would be. The weight of the Reign name, the expectations bound up in this place, the thousand unspoken calculations that came with it, all of that was waiting, patient, at the end of this road.
Right now, there was just this. The steady hum of the Fenrari moving through Reignland’s quiet interior. The warmth where her hand rested in his.
Their Destination was a popular restaurant in Reignland called Reignland’s Haven
Reignland’s Haven was a grand restaurant located at the curve of one of the estate’s quieter inner pathways, a low, elegant structure set slightly back from the walkway behind a curtain of pale flowering trees that caught the ambient mana light and scattered it in soft, directionless gold. The kind of restaurant that didn’t need a sign because everyone who needed to find it already knew where it was.
Bruce brought the Fenrari to a stop and stepped out first, moving around to Sophie’s side before she’d fully gathered herself. She took his offered hand without comment, her fingers curling around his with a naturalness that had long since stopped requiring thought from either of them, and together they walked through the Haven’s entrance, unhurried, quiet, drawing no more attention than any other well dressed couple arriving for an early dinner.
That was intentional. Both of them had drawn their auras inward before they’d even left the vehicle, compressing everything that made them what they were into something small and unremarkable. It was a practiced thing for Bruce. For Sophie, who carried the Reign name in her very bloodline, it required more deliberate effort, but she managed it cleanly. To anyone without significant sensitivity, they were simply two people. Nothing worth a second glance.
The maître d’ led them through the main dining room, warm amber lighting pooling across tables set with dark linens and understated crystal, the low murmur of other conversations threading through the air along with something slow and instrumental that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once, and then through a narrow corridor that opened into a smaller, separate chamber at the restaurant’s far end. Curved walls.
A single window overlooking an interior garden where pale blossoms drifted in the breathless quiet. One table, precisely set, with enough distance from the corridor entrance that the sounds of the main room barely reached them.
Private. Unobtrusive. Exactly what Sophie had intended.
They settled across from each other, and almost immediately a waiter appeared, young, composed on the surface, but her eyes moved in a way that betrayed her. From Sophie to Bruce, then back to Sophie, then carefully to her notepad, as though she’d made a decision about where to focus her attention and was determined to honour it. She recognized them.
That much was obvious. The particular quality of stillness that came over her face was the kind people wore when they were concentrating very hard on behaving normally.
Bruce noticed. He didn’t particularly care. If anything, it was useful, a waiter who knew exactly who she was serving would handle the order with more care than she might otherwise bother with. He scanned the menu briefly, then set it down and ordered for them both without consultation, his choices deliberate: a slow braised cut of Ashveil venison served with roasted root vegetables glazed in elderberry reduction, accompanied by a sharper side of herb marinated greens and a bread service infused with Something that the menu described only as hearthgrain, he had a juicy, well seasoned meat to go with it.
For Sophie, a lighter arrangement, poached silverfish from the Reignland reservoirs, resting in a broth made from white mana bloom tea that would carry warmth without heaviness.
The waiter wrote everything down with great precision. She bowed once, caught herself almost bowing again, and left.
A selection of drinks arrived in the interim, two glasses of something pale and faintly luminescent that carried a clean, delicate sweetness on the first sip, with a warmth that settled slowly through the chest afterward, unhurried and even. Not enough to dull anything. Just enough to ease the edges of the room.
Sophie lifted her glass but didn’t drink immediately. Her gaze had dropped to her smart bracelet, thumb moving across its surface in a way that had become familiar in the past quarter hour, checking, reading, setting it down, then returning to it minutes later as though the message it contained might have changed its meaning since the last time she looked. It hadn’t. Bruce was certain of that. But he understood why she kept looking.
