Chapter 485 | The Checklist

Chapter 485: 485 | The Checklist

The Sanctum rebuilt itself around my intentions.

Black sand pulled inward like someone had yanked a tablecloth, the volcanic grains swirling into the warm stone floor of a pavilion that was already dissolving. The cliff face folded. The cove collapsed into origami. The golden ocean withdrew into nothing, leaving only the ghost of salt on my lips and the lingering taste of Naomi’s milk on my tongue. She sat wrapped in a towel in the newly reformed pavilion seating area, drinking champagne from a crystal flute with the serene satisfaction of a woman who has just been worshipped on a beach built from her childhood and sees no reason to rush the afterglow.

Aurora handed Naomi a second towel. Addison stole the champagne bottle.

Belle stood.

She’d changed while I was occupied. Not into anything fancy. Black silk camisole. No bra underneath. Black lace underwear visible where the camisole rode up at her hip. Her light blue hair hung loose past her shoulders, still damp at the ends from the champagne she’d spilled on herself during what she would later describe as an involuntary response to auditory stimuli and what Addison would describe as getting wet from the sounds.

Belle walked toward me across the warm stone, barefoot, carrying her empty champagne glass in one hand and her phone in the other. The phone was open to what appeared to be a checklist.

"My turn," Belle said. "Penthouse. High floor. I want a city I’ve never been to. I want a bath deep enough to drown in. I want a bed large enough for poor decisions. I want the windows to go all the way to the floor so I can see every building below me while you make me forget my own name."

She stopped two feet away and looked up at me with those amber-brown eyes that had been doing cost-benefit analyses on my soul since the first day we shared a chicken salad sandwich.

"And I want you," Belle continued, "to worship me. Properly. Like you mean it. Like I’m not the Bronze-tier backup plan you settled for because Naomi was unavailable."

Naomi’s head popped up from behind her towel. "He didn’t settle. We had a schedule."

"The schedule is a spreadsheet I maintain. My name is on it. I should be prioritized." Belle looked at Naomi. "No offense."

"Some taken."

"I’ll allow it."

I put my hand on the back of Belle’s neck and pulled her forward. She came without resistance, which told me more than her checklist did, because Belle Fox resisted everything on principle and the fact that she let me move her meant the three hours of watching and waiting and listening to Naomi scream on a beach had stripped away exactly as much armor as I needed gone.

"Build it," she said against my lips.

I rebuilt it.

The pavilion dissolved. The cliff face crumbled. The sky folded inward, swallowing the permanent sunset and replacing it with the deep blue-black of a city at night, and when the Sanctum finished rearranging itself around Belle’s specifications, we stood in the center of a penthouse so absurdly luxurious that it made Blair Davenport’s Summit House look like a college dorm.

Floor-to-ceiling windows wrapped the entire space, glass panels running from polished marble floors to a ceiling that sat twenty feet overhead. Beyond the glass, a city burned with light. Not any real city. Something the Sanctum assembled from the references I fed it, pulling together the vertical density of Hong Kong, the amber glow of Manhattan at two in the morning, and the winding streets of a European capital I’d only seen in photographs. Towers of steel and glass rose in staggered heights, their windows casting patterns of gold and white across the dark sky. Traffic moved far below like a river of red taillights, too distant to hear but close enough to watch.

The bath sat against the far window. Freestanding. White marble. Large enough for two people and deep enough that the water, already filling from an invisible source, would reach Belle’s collarbones when she climbed in. Steam curled off the surface and fogged the glass behind it, turning the city into an impressionist painting.

The bed occupied a raised platform to the right. King dimensions. White sheets because Belle had specified thread count and the Sanctum interpreted that as Egyptian cotton in the eight hundred range. Candles lined the marble shelf behind the headboard, their flames steady and warm, throwing gold across the white fabric in ways that would make Belle’s blue hair look like something out of a painting she could sell for six figures.

Champagne sat in a silver bucket on a low table between the bath and the bed, surrounded by four crystal flutes and a plate of chocolate truffles I’d added because Belle once told me during our third extraction that she ate Ghirardelli squares when she was sad and I was not going to serve this woman grocery store chocolate in a pocket dimension I’d built from scratch. ℯ

Belle turned in a circle.

Slow. Her bare feet left damp prints on the marble. The camisole caught the city light in ways that turned the silk translucent in patches and opaque in others, revealing and concealing her body in an alternating pattern that would’ve driven a weaker man insane. The blue of her hair looked darker here, richer, picking up navy and indigo from the nighttime palette. Her amber-brown eyes reflected the city’s million lights like someone had scattered gold dust across her irises.

"This is acceptable," Belle said.

The highest praise in her vocabulary.

She walked to the window and placed one hand flat against the glass, looking down at the city that existed because I’d pressed a button and thought about what she deserved. The silk camisole rode up on her left side, exposing the curve of her hip where black lace sat against pale skin. The light from below illuminated her from the feet up, turning her legs into clean lines of shadow and gold, her thighs visible through the thin fabric, the shape of her body backlit against the impossible skyline.

"I spent three days thinking you were dead." Belle spoke to the window. "I wrote your injury report at three in the morning because I couldn’t sleep. I itemized every laceration and fracture because organizing data about your body was the only way I could convince myself you still had one."

She turned her head. Profile. One amber eye catching the light from a tower across the void.

"I need you to make that go away tonight. All of it. The fear. The report. The way I counted your heartbeats on a monitor because I was terrified that if I stopped watching, they’d stop too."

I crossed the marble floor.

Belle watched me come. Her hand stayed on the glass. Her breathing changed when I got close enough for her to feel the heat radiating off my skin, still elevated from Naomi’s session, my blood running hot with essence and satisfaction. I put my hands on her waist and her stomach tensed under the silk.

"No," Belle said.

I paused.

"Lower."

I dropped my hands to her hips. My thumbs pressed into the divots above her hip bones, right where the lace started. Belle’s eyelids dropped to half-mast.

"You’re going to worship me," she repeated. "Not quickly. Not because the System tells you to. Because I spent seventy-two hours believing you were dead and I deserve to feel alive for every second you cost me."