Chapter 489 | Mr. Monroe

Chapter 489: 489 | Mr. Monroe

Belle didn’t move. I didn’t either. We lay in the wreckage of eight-hundred-thread-count Egyptian cotton that would never be white again, breathing together while the fabricated city threw light across our bodies. Milk dried on my chest and jaw. Belle’s blue hair stuck to my neck in damp threads that smelled like her shampoo and something sweeter underneath.

The System notification resolved in my peripheral vision.

◆ RESONANCE COUPLING ◆

Target: Belle Fox

Devotion: 93% (▲4)

Status: Yours

Coupling: MAXIMUM

Targets Complete: 2/4

Field Density: Climbing

I dismissed it with a thought. The number mattered less than the fact that Belle’s breathing had gone from ragged to steady to something dangerously close to sleep. Her hand rested on my forearm, her fingers loose but present. The city lights painted her closed eyelids in alternating gold and blue.

"Belle."

"Mmph."

"You can’t sleep. We have a schedule."

"I hate your schedule." She turned her face into my shoulder. "I hate your spreadsheet. I hate your system. I hate that you made me say please."

"You said please twice."

Her teeth found the muscle between my neck and shoulder and bit down hard enough to make me hiss. "That’s for counting."

I kissed the top of her head because she deserved it and because she would never ask for it. Belle’s fingers curled against my arm, tightened once, and released.

"Go take care of Aurora before she hurts someone." Belle rolled off me and pulled a pillow over her head. Her voice came out muffled through goose down. "Tell her I said the penthouse is better than the classroom and she can fight me about it at breakfast."

I stood, legs unsteady, and found my shorts on the marble floor near the bathtub neither of us had used. The penthouse dissolved around me as I walked toward the pavilion, the city skyline folding inward like closing curtains until the cliff and the ocean and the golden-hour sky reassembled themselves around my feet. The transition felt smoother at Gold rank, like stepping between rooms rather than being shoved through a dimensional membrane.

The pavilion came into focus, and the scene waiting for me stopped my brain like a blown fuse.

Naomi lay wrapped in the navy blanket on the largest cushion in the sunken seating area, asleep with her mouth slightly open and sand still in her hair. One hand clutched her mother’s shell necklace. The other rested on the cushion beside her, palm up, fingers curled. She looked fifteen years younger and entirely unburdened, the specific kind of peace that only arrives after someone has been thoroughly and comprehensively taken care of.

Addison occupied the opposite end of the sunken area, boots off, legs stretched across three cushions, a champagne flute balanced on her stomach while she scrolled through her phone. Her purple highlights caught the permanent sunset. Her black tank top had ridden up to show a strip of pale midriff and the silver glint of her navel piercing. She glanced up when I appeared.

"Thirty-eight minutes." Addison took a sip of champagne without sitting up. "That’s what it sounded like, anyway. Belle screamed your name four times. Naomi counted."

"Naomi’s asleep."

"She counted before she fell asleep. She yelled ’four’ from over there and then passed out. It was adorable and horrifying." Addison set her phone on her stomach. "Aurora went inside about twenty minutes ago. Said she needed to change."

I looked toward the pavilion’s interior rooms, where a hallway extended into the architecture I’d built from references and longing. "Change into what?"

Addison’s mouth curved beneath the black lipstick she’d reapplied at some point during the interval. "Go find out. And Jace?"

I turned back.

"She’s been touching herself since the beach." Addison’s violet contacts held mine with the comfort of someone delivering a weather report. "Through yours and Belle’s. Couldn’t stop. I watched her hand go under her skirt about nine minutes in and it never came back out." Addison finished the champagne. "Whatever you did to Naomi on that sand apparently broke something in Aurora’s brain. She’s been making sounds for the past half hour that I will be thinking about for the rest of my life and I resent you deeply for that."

I processed this information. My body, which should have been finished after Naomi’s ocean and Belle’s penthouse, decided it had opinions about the image of Aurora Fitzgerald touching herself for forty minutes while watching through floor-to-ceiling windows.

The graft in my chest pulsed once. Hungry. Warm. Eager.

I walked down the hallway.

The Sanctum had built a corridor of dark wood and warm stone that opened into a second space, separate from the cliff pavilion but connected through the architecture. I’d told the Sanctum that Aurora wanted a classroom, and the dimensional engine had taken that request and run with it at Gold-rank fidelity.

The room that materialized around me as I crossed the threshold was a high school classroom straight out of a fever dream. Wooden desks with fold-out writing surfaces arranged in three rows. A blackboard at the front with the day’s date written in white chalk. Fluorescent tube lighting overhead, though the Sanctum had rendered the tubes slightly warm rather than the soul-crushing blue-white of actual institutional lighting. A bulletin board on the left wall displaying club announcements and a sign-up sheet for the photography club. The windows along the right wall looked out onto an empty hallway where the sound of distant footsteps and locker doors created the ambient noise of a school that had mostly emptied for the afternoon but not completely, because clubs were still running.

Someone had left.

A teacher’s desk sat at the front of the room. Heavy oak with a drawer on the right side and a nameplate that read MR. MONROE in black lettering on a brass plate. Behind the desk stood a swivel chair. On the desk sat a red pen, a stack of blank papers, a coffee mug that read WORLD’S OKAYEST TEACHER, and a small bell.

I looked at the bell.

I looked at the desk.

I looked at the hallway windows where anyone walking past for club activities could theoretically see inside.

Aurora Fitzgerald sat in the third row center desk, spine straight, hands folded on the writing surface, legs crossed beneath the desk in a position of complete academic attention.

She wore a schoolgirl outfit that would have gotten her expelled from every educational institution in the Western Hemisphere.

The top was a white dress shirt two sizes too small, buttons straining across her chest with the bottom three left entirely undone to show a strip of tanned stomach and the underside of a black lace bra that was doing approximately zero structural work. The shirt’s collar was turned up on one side and down on the other. A loosely knotted red tie hung between her breasts, the fabric thin enough that I could see the outline of her hardened nipples through the shirt. A grey pleated skirt sat high on her waist and ended so far above her knees that the term "skirt" became more of a suggestion than a description. Black thigh-high stockings with a thin lace band at the top, the kind that stay up through hope and elastic and the knowledge that someone is going to see them, covered her legs from mid-thigh down. Her feet were bare. Red nail polish on her toes.

Her orange hair had been pulled into twin ponytails tied with red ribbons, one on each side, the kind of hairstyle that existed for exactly one purpose and that purpose had nothing to do with academics. Her green eyes wore a coat of liner that made them enormous and bright and completely, devastatingly aware of what she was doing. Her lips were painted the same red as the tie and the ribbons and her toenails.

She had a pencil between her teeth.

My mouth went dry.

The old Jace, the one who had entered this world six weeks ago with seventy-two hours and a spreadsheet, would have immediately started calculating extraction windows and devotion percentages and mana costs. That Jace would have seen the outfit as a strategic asset rather than the expression of a woman who had spent forty minutes working herself into a frenzy while listening to two other women scream and who had then retreated to a private room to dress in an outfit she’d been fantasizing about since our first conversation about teachers and detention.

The current Jace looked at Aurora Fitzgerald in her schoolgirl costume on a warm Tuesday afternoon in a magical pocket dimension, and the current Jace thought one thing.

I am going to destroy her.

Aurora removed the pencil from her teeth with a slow pull and set it on the desk. "You’re late, Mr. Monroe."