❝I've been yours since the second we met.❞ — Jamie McGuire, Beautiful Disaster
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SAYO TRACED THE RIM of her tea cup, half-listening to the aristocrats debate over whom they wanted to send to spy from within the royal palace.
The king owed them a favor, and they had used that to promote the presence of an aristocrat inside his inner circle to allocate for the faction's interests; but of course, their actual goals strayed a bit further from from that.
It was also obvious they had already planned on presenting her as the member representing the faction; the meeting was simply a formality.
"It's decided then, we'll have Lady Sayo function as a spy from within," Markus Teliman, head of the faction, concluded, and the rest nodded their heads in agreement.
"Is that fine Lady Sayo?"
Her eyes narrowed; she had expected as much. They wanted her as a sacrificial piece. But just because she enjoyed the thrill of the cliff, didn't mean that she wanted to fall.
There was no prancing around the fact that if she gets caught, her head would be the first to leave.
"With all due respect,"Sayo said curtly, mock sourness dampening her tone, "what's in it for me?"
"What did you have in mind then?"
A beguiling expression fell onto her face, and she urged the men to not be so tense at her previous words.
"I want forty percent of the faction's investments," she requested as the room descended into a deathly silence. All eyes sharply darted to her, and she welcomed them, taking another sip of her tea while they spit out theirs.
"40 percent, are you crazy?"
'Of course not', she mused softly, observing her cup as the noblemen at the table started bickering over her ridiculous proposal.
Twenty was all she really needed - considering there was only one business in particular that had caught her interest - but that was already unreasonably high, so she placed a bar high enough that the high bar would seem low.
"You surely don't expect me to risk my life by spying from within the castle - for free?" She inquired, slowly setting the drink back down. Her eyes flickered over to theirs, head tilted suggestively, "I thought you gentlemen knew how to do business."
