Chapter 476 | Open the Door

Chapter 476: 476 | Open the Door

"It’s a legitimate tactical consideration," Belle said.

"It’s the horniest tactical consideration I’ve ever heard." Addison’s black lipstick had smeared slightly at one corner and she made no attempt to fix it. "Also the field capacity thing. Six extra cups in the vault means he stops walking around with four days on the clock like an idiot with an overdraft."

"You understood the vault mechanic," I said.

"I listen when Aurora talks about you, which is constantly, and it’s exhausting." She said it without heat, which from Addison Baxter was practically a love letter.

Naomi hadn’t spoken. She was still holding the pillow, and her ears were the color of the cider, and when she finally opened her mouth her voice came out smaller than she wanted it to.

"All four of us," she said. "At the same time."

I sat forward. Slowly, because she was already at the edge of something and I’d learned exactly how much room Naomi Love needed before she chose to step forward on her own.

"You don’t have to," I said.

"I know I don’t have to." Her chin came up. That was the thing about Naomi that people missed, the guild kids and the professors and everyone who saw the apologizing and the tears and filed her under fragile. Underneath all of it was a girl who hauled fishing nets at six in the morning in November water and never once asked to go inside. "I’m not asking permission. I’m asking if you’d still look at me the same after."

The graft in my chest did something complicated.

"Naomi." I said it plain, no performance, no angle. "You carried me out of a hole in the world. On camera. With your arm broken in two places three days before that."

"It was one place."

"It was one place, and you still did it, and there are forty-three million people who watched you do it." I held her eyes. "There is no version of after where I look at you differently. There’s only the version where I look at you more."

Aurora made a noise into her hands.

"What," I said.

"Nothing." Her voice came out strangled. "It’s fine. He does this. He just says things. Nobody warned me he’d just say things."

"You told me he was like this," Addison said.

"I told you and you didn’t believe me and now you’re on my couch with a hospital lobby story, so."

Naomi let out a breath and set the pillow aside. Her hands went to her hair, and she pulled the tie out, and the pink and black spilled down over her shoulders in the loose waves it always made after a braid. She did not look away from me while she did it.

"Okay," she said.

Two syllables. That was the whole answer, and it landed harder than any of the rest of it.

Belle stood. She crossed the carpet in three steps and stopped in front of my chair, and she looked down at me with her jaw set and her ears pink and her entire posture saying that if I made this a moment she would fight me.

"Hands stay on the armrests," she said. "For the first part."

"That’s not going to happen."

"Then I’m putting it in the record that you were noncompliant."

"Put it in the record."

She grabbed the front of my shirt with both fists and dragged me up out of the chair, and she kissed me the way she did everything, which was hard and immediate and with an accounting ledger open in the back of her mind. Butterscotch. That was Belle, that had always been Belle, warm and rich and a little burnt at the edges, and the taste of her hit the graft and the graft answered so loudly that I felt it in my molars.

The System pinged.

RESONANCE COUPLING INITIATED

Target: Belle Fox (Devotion 89%)

Field density climbing.

She broke off, breathing hard, and pressed her forehead against my collarbone right where the scar ridge ran. "Don’t die again," she said into my shirt.

"That’s not a promise I make."

"I know. That’s why I keep saying it." She stepped back and wiped her mouth with the back of her wrist and did not look at anyone. "Aurora. Your place, your rules. Where."

Aurora had already gotten to her feet. The party hat with the fox ears sat crooked on her head, and she reached up and pulled it off and dropped it on the coffee table next to the cake and the coffee jelly pyramid with its little flag.

"Not upstairs," she said. "Upstairs is a bedroom. That’s for two people."

"Then what."

Aurora looked at me. Her green eyes did that shift, from the playful thing she wore for guild scouts and hallway politics into the other thing underneath, the one that had orchestrated an entire evening in a farmhouse just so her best friend would finally get held by someone who wasn’t afraid of her.

"His place," she said. "The one he builds."

The Private Sanctum.

Capacity two. Which meant two, and I had four women standing in Aurora’s living room who had all just said yes.

I pulled up the interface and found the upgrade path I’d been ignoring for three weeks because the number was obscene.

PRIVATE SANCTUM — BRONZE → GOLD

Cost: 4,500 points

Capacity: 4 targets. Duration: 60 minutes external.

Time Dilation: 4:1.

I had 8,480 banked. Four days of gate clears, one alpha kill, and a Void Gate that nearly took everything.

I spent it without letting myself think.

"You just did something," Belle said. "Your eyes changed color."

"I upgraded it."

"To what?"

"Gold." I looked at the four of them. "Capacity four. One hour out here." I let the pause sit. "Four hours in there."

Addison’s lollipop stick hit the carpet.

Naomi made a sound.

Aurora’s grin spread slow and wicked across her face, and she held out her hand.

"Then stop talking," she said, "and open the door."