Chapter 486 | Worship

Chapter 486: 486 | Worship

I leaned down and kissed her throat. She tasted like champagne and the specific anger that Belle used instead of crying. I worked my mouth down to her collarbone, slow, pressing my lips flat against each inch of skin before moving lower. Belle’s hand came off the glass and found the back of my head, her fingers curling into my hair without pulling. Not yet. She was letting me set the pace, which meant she was testing whether I knew the correct one.

I did.

I lifted the camisole over her head and dropped it on the marble. The city light hit her naked chest and turned her pale skin into porcelain streaked with gold, her breasts full and heavy, the nipples already hard from three hours of anticipation and the cool air conditioning of a penthouse that existed in a dimensional fold.

Belle stood in front of me in nothing but black lace underwear with the entire fabricated skyline behind her, and I dropped to my knees.

Not because the graft told me to. Not because the System awarded points for kneeling before Silver-tier extraction targets. Because Belle Fox grew up in a single-wide trailer in Burns, Oregon, eating chicken salad sandwiches with chips from a vending machine, sending money to a mother who worked three jobs, and she had never in her life been treated like she was the most valuable thing in the room by anyone who wasn’t trying to buy something from her.

I kissed her navel. Her stomach contracted. I kissed the bottom of her ribs. Her breath caught. I kissed the underside of her left breast and her fingers tightened in my hair with a sound she’d be embarrassed about later and deny ever making.

I pulled her nipple into my mouth and the graft did the rest. Milk flooded my tongue, warm and rich and distinctly Belle. Butterscotch and caramel with a sharpness underneath that tasted like ambition, the same profile I’d catalogued during our first session when she’d screamed into a pillow and made me promise never to tell anyone about the sounds she made. Twenty-five points per mouthful. I ignored the number. The number was the least interesting thing happening to Belle Fox’s body.

"More." Her voice had roughened. "Don’t stop. Don’t you dare stop, Monroe, I swear to God—"

I lifted her. C-rank strength made the motion effortless, one arm under her thighs and the other across her back, and Belle’s legs wrapped around my waist on instinct as I carried her from the window to the bed. She landed on white Egyptian cotton with her blue hair fanning across the pillow in waves, her eyes wide, her chest heaving, milk still leaking from both nipples in thin white trails that ran down the curves of her breasts and pooled in the hollow between them.

I stood at the edge of the bed and looked down at her.

"What are you doing," Belle said. Her voice had gotten quiet.

"Looking."

"Don’t just look."

"You said worship. This is worship. Let me look."

Belle’s cheeks flushed pink. The color spread down her neck and across her chest, turning the milk trails rosy where they crossed heated skin. Her hands fisted in the sheets on either side of her hips, not from fear but from the specific frustration of being seen completely by someone whose attention she had spent six weeks pretending not to want.

I hooked my fingers into the waistband of her lace panties and pulled them down her legs. Belle lifted her hips to help, a motion so instinctive she probably didn’t register doing it. The lace caught at her ankle and I peeled it free and tossed it somewhere behind me where it would become a diplomatic incident when someone else found it later.

Belle lay naked on white sheets in a penthouse with a city burning below her, and she was wet enough that I could see it from standing height. Her thighs pressed together and then fell open, a battle between modesty and desire that desire won in approximately half a second.

"You’re staring again."

"You’re beautiful."

"Don’t—" She stopped. Her jaw worked. "Say that again."

"You’re beautiful."

Belle’s eyes glistened and she blinked rapidly, twice, three times, fighting the thing she’d sworn she would never do in front of another person. Her hands released the sheets and covered her face.

"I hate you," she said through her fingers. "I hate that you say things like that and mean them. You’re not supposed to mean them. You’re supposed to be running a con and I’m supposed to be your Bronze-tier backup plan and none of this was supposed to be real and I was fine before you sat down at my table with your stupid salad and your stupid chicken and your stupid face that I can’t stop thinking about—"

I pulled her hands away from her face. Her eyes were bright and wet and furious.

"Belle."

"What."

"Shut up."

I kissed her before she could file a formal complaint about being silenced, and she kissed me back hard enough to split my lip. The copper mixed with the butterscotch still coating my tongue and the combination tasted like everything we’d built from chicken salad sandwiches and shared bus rides and three AM injury reports.

I climbed onto the bed over her. My knees bracketed her thighs. My hands pressed into the mattress on either side of her head, caging her without touching, letting her feel the space between us shrink until the heat from my skin pressed against hers like a promise with no exit clause.

Belle’s breath came fast and shallow. Her chest rose and fell, milk still beading at her nipples, her blue hair spread across the pillow, her amber eyes locked on mine from six inches away.

"Worship me," she whispered. "Please."

She never said please.

Belle Fox did not negotiate from a position of vulnerability. Belle Fox did not ask for things. Belle Fox took what she wanted, calculated the exchange rate, and ensured the transaction favored her position before committing resources. The word please did not exist in her operational vocabulary.

Until right now, naked in a penthouse I’d built for her, looking up at me with eyes that had stopped calculating.

I lowered my mouth to her breast and began.

The graft sang. Milk filled my mouth in a hot rush. Twenty-five points vanished into my bloodstream and added themselves to my lifespan, but the taste mattered more than the math. Butterscotch and brown sugar and the faintest trace of salt from tears she’d never admit to shedding.

I drank slow. Savored every mouthful. Let my free hand travel south across her stomach, her hip, the inside of her thigh where the skin turned softest and she gasped when my fingers brushed close enough to feel the heat radiating off her center without making contact.

Belle’s hand found the back of my head and pushed. Demanding. Impatient. Classic Fox.

I moved lower.

Down her sternum, collecting stray milk with my tongue. Down her stomach, pressing an open-mouthed kiss to the spot below her navel that made her hips jerk off the mattress. Down to where her thighs had fallen open and the city’s light painted everything in stripes of gold and shadow.

I activated Euphoric Feedback at level seven and put my mouth on her.

Belle screamed.

Not the controlled sound she made when she wanted people to hear. Not the performance. The real one. Raw and wrecked and dragged from somewhere behind her sternum that she’d kept locked since she was twelve years old and her mother lost the house with the iron sconces. The sound bounced off the penthouse windows and echoed back to us from a city that had never existed and would never exist again after tonight, carrying Belle Fox’s voice across a skyline I built because she once told me she wanted to see everything below her.

I gave her that.

All of it.