Chapter 484 | One Down, Three to Go

Chapter 484: 484 | One Down, Three to Go

I moved.

Slow at first, drawing back until only the tip stayed inside her, then pushing back in until our hips met. Naomi’s legs locked behind my back, her heels digging into my spine, her body rising to meet each thrust with a rhythm we’d built over six weeks of learning each other.

I lowered my mouth to her breast and drank as I moved.

The dual sensation hit her the way it always did. Milk drawn from one end, me buried in the other, her nervous system trying to process two sources of pleasure at once and failing. Naomi’s head fell back against the towel. Her hands scrabbled at my shoulders. Milk flooded my mouth in time with my thrusts, each stroke pushing a fresh pulse from her breast that I swallowed before it could spill.

The System pinged. Twenty-five points. Then twenty-five more. Then more. My lifespan counter ticked upward and I felt the extra days settle into my chest like warmth from a hearth, but that wasn’t why I was doing this and both of us knew it.

I quickened my pace. Naomi’s moans climbed in pitch, sliding from her chest up into her throat, her Carolina vowels flattening the vowels of my name until it barely sounded like a name at all.

"Harder." Her voice had dropped into that lower register, the one that came out when the polite girl left the building. "I’m not going to break, Jace, harder."

I gave her harder.

The towel bunched beneath us. Black sand kicked up around our knees. The fake ocean rolled onto the shore in a rhythm that had synced to my hips somewhere along the way, and I didn’t know if I’d done that on purpose or if the Sanctum had decided to be poetic without my permission.

Naomi’s nails raked down my back, opening thin lines over the ones Addison and Belle had left in previous sessions. Peterson would’ve refused to heal these too, out of spite. The pain converted through Euphoric Feedback’s passive processing into a sharp bright pleasure that made my hips snap forward hard enough to rock her up the towel.

She loved it. Her whole body arched into the impact, her breasts pushing against my mouth, her hands pulling me deeper like she was trying to fold me inside her.

I reached between us and found her clit. Circled it with my thumb while I drank and thrust and let her drown in all three at once.

"I’m close," she gasped. "I’m so close, don’t stop, don’t you dare stop, I’ll never forgive you—"

I pressed level eight into the contact.

Naomi came apart for the third time.

This one broke different. Not a wave this time but a collapse, her entire body seizing around me, her inner walls clenching in rhythmic pulses that squeezed a groan out of my own chest. Milk sprayed from her breast into my mouth, hot and sweet and endless, and I drank it down as she screamed my name loud enough to wake anyone in a fifty mile radius if there’d been anyone to wake.

The System chimed with a tone I’d never heard before. Not the standard ping. Something deeper.

◆ RESONANCE COUPLING: NAOMI LOVE ◆

Three peaks achieved. Coupling: MAXIMUM.

Field density increasing. 1/4 targets complete.

I ignored it. Naomi’s body was still pulsing around me and her nails were still buried in my back and her mouth had found my throat, sucking a mark into the skin over my pulse that would sit right next to Belle’s and Addison’s like the world’s most confusing collection.

I hadn’t finished. That was the point. Three peaks for her didn’t require one for me, and I had three more women waiting in a pavilion I’d built from their dead mothers and childhood restaurants and secondhand memories.

But Naomi’s legs tightened around me and her mouth left my throat and she pulled back far enough to look at me with pink eyes gone soft and wrecked and fully present.

"Finish," she whispered. "Inside. I want the buff. I want to be strong enough to matter next gate."

The lie sat right there under the words. She didn’t want the buff. She wanted me to finish inside her because the last time I hadn’t, she’d cried in the shower afterward and thought I didn’t notice. She wanted proof I’d chosen her. The buff was just the excuse she’d found that let her ask without asking.

I could’ve called it out. Six weeks ago I would’ve. Read the tell, catalogued the vulnerability, filed it under leverage.

Instead I kissed her and moved again.

Slow this time, deep, dragging out each stroke while she was still oversensitive and shaking. Naomi whimpered into my mouth. Her body took me anyway, her hips rolling up to meet me, chasing something on the far side of too much.

I drank from her breast one last time as I felt myself climbing. Milk warm on my tongue. Her heartbeat under my mouth. Her hands framing my face like I was something worth holding.

I finished inside her.

Naomi gasped and pulled me deep and held me there, her ankles crossed at the small of my back, her whole body milking mine while the System lit up my vision.

◆ DIVINE EMPOWERMENT ◆

Target: Naomi Love

Wave Motion: Silver → GOLD (48 hours)

Physical Performance: 125%

Mana Pool: +30%

Devotion: 97% → 99%

Status: Yours

Ninety-nine percent. One point from a wall I wasn’t sure I wanted to hit, because I didn’t know what waited on the other side of a hundred and part of me was scared to find out.

I collapsed onto the towel beside her. Both of us wrecked, both of us covered in milk and sweat and black sand, the fake ocean rolling onto the shore and the golden sun hanging in a sky that would never let it set.

Naomi rolled onto her side and threw a leg over me, her face pressed into my throat, her breathing gradually slowing from ragged to something almost calm.

"That was the beach," she mumbled. "I told you it was a good idea."

"You did."

"Belle owes me an apology."

From the pavilion twenty feet away, Belle’s voice carried across the sand, hoarse in a way that suggested she hadn’t been sitting there watching with clinical detachment. "I don’t owe you anything, that was the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen and I filmed forty seconds of it for research."

"You did not," Aurora said. Her voice had gone thick.

"For science."

Naomi laughed against my throat, and I felt the vibration of it in my chest, right where the graft sat warm and full and humming with something that had nothing to do with survival math.

I turned my head and pressed a kiss to her sandy, sweaty, disaster of a hairline.

"One down," I said.

Naomi’s fingers found the shell necklace and adjusted it back into place over her sternum. She looked up at me with those soft pink eyes and the smile she saved for exactly nobody else.

"Three to go," she said. "Don’t die."

"I never do."

"You literally died twice last week."

"Details."

She laughed again and settled her weight against me while the golden hour held its impossible ground and the ocean I’d built from her memories rolled on and on and on.