Chapter 552 | Exhibit A: One Bite Mark

Misato’s alarm went off at five-thirty with a tone designed to wake the dead and then march them into formation. She slapped the phone off the nightstand without opening her eyes, and it skidded under the dresser and kept screaming at us from the dark.

“I am throwing that phone into the ocean,” she mumbled into my neck.

“You picked that ringtone yourself, Captain.”

“I picked it so other people would suffer, and you were never supposed to be in this bed to hear it.”

She lifted her head off my chest. Her hair had dried overnight into a lime green crime scene, flattened on one side and standing straight up on the other, and a red crease from my collarbone ran across her left cheek. Her eyes found my face and went wide. I watched nine years of Captain Ayame try to boot up behind them and crash on the loading screen.

Then she remembered what she was wearing, which was nothing, and what she had screamed into her own concrete walls around eleven last night. The blush started at her sternum and climbed all the way to her hairline in about four seconds.

“Don’t you dare say a single word about last night, Monroe.”

“I wasn’t going to say anything, Captain, I was going to look.”

She was still sprawled across me on a mattress designed for one small, lonely person. The sheet had slid down to her hips sometime in the night, and the gray light leaking through the blinds did things for her that the lamp hadn’t managed. Her breasts lay heavy against my chest, and the red grooves from her compression top had faded to soft pink lines underneath them. Both nipples were dark and swollen, and a thin wet line of milk had dried in a stripe across my ribs.

My body had apparently been awake for a while, and it chose this moment to make an announcement against her thigh.

Misato went rigid on top of me. Her eyes dropped down between us and then snapped back up to my face.

“Absolutely not, Monroe, we have twenty-nine minutes.”

“I can do a lot in twenty-nine minutes, you’ve seen my lap splits.”

“Your lap splits are exactly why I’m worried about the next twenty-nine minutes.”

She shoved off me and stood up beside the bed, and I spent a full second appreciating the view, because the woman who screamed at me about hip alignment every morning had an ass that should require a permit. She caught me staring over her shoulder, grabbed my ankle, and yanked me off the mattress onto her floor.

“Shower, now, because I’m not walking onto my own training field smelling like you.”

Her shower was the size of a phone booth and had the water pressure of a firehose that hated its job. Misato cranked it to scalding and backed me into the tile with one palm flat on my chest, right over the scars, and the steam rolled up around us until the rest of the bathroom disappeared.

“You burned a bottle yesterday,” she said. “Fox will spend the whole week complaining to me about it, and I refuse to listen to that.”

“Are you offering to refill my vault, Captain?” ℴ

“I’m ordering you to refill it, and you have seven minutes to do it.”

She pulled my head down to her chest herself. The first pull filled my mouth with buttermilk again, thick and tangy with that sweetness hiding underneath, and she made a noise against the top of my skull that I am going to remember on my deathbed. I routed it through the graft instead of swallowing, and the counter in the corner of my vision ticked upward in slow pulses.

◆ ESSENCE VAULT: 9 / 12 CUPS ◆

My hand slid down her wet stomach and found her already slick, and not from the shower. She hissed through her teeth, grabbed the towel bar beside her head, and spread her feet on the tile to give me room.

“Five minutes,” she gasped. “Make it count, field lead, or I’m adding laps.”

I made it count. Two fingers and my thumb, the circles I’d mapped last night, and Euphoric Feedback at four because anything higher would have dropped her onto the floor. Her milk came faster while she climbed, and the counter jumped twice more before her knees buckled and she came against my hand with her forehead pressed into my shoulder and her teeth sunk into the bite she’d left there last night.

◆ ESSENCE VAULT: 11 / 12 CUPS ◆

She held onto me under the water for a long time after, her breath shaking against my neck.

“That counts as your warm-up,” she said finally. “Don’t tell Jordan, or he’ll want the same deal.”

“I promise that Jordan is never getting the same deal.”

She laughed and shoved me out of the stall.

I left Summit House at five fifty-one in yesterday’s jeans, my shirt with a scorched handprint above the pocket, and a captain’s hoodie she’d thrown at my face with the words “Return it washed or die.” It said AYAME across the back in block letters. Belle was going to have a stroke about it.

The walk down from Summit to the east field takes nine minutes. I ran it in six, because Misato had left four minutes before me in full uniform and I knew exactly what would happen if I showed up after her.

The campus at that hour was gray and empty and smelled like wet grass and salt. A Ruby third-year jogged past me in the other direction, read the name on my back, and nearly ran into a lamppost.

I hit the edge of the east field at five fifty-seven.

Belle Fox sat cross-legged on the grass with her laptop balanced on her knees and a thermos of coffee steaming beside her. Her blue hair was pulled into a high ponytail, and she wore black compression leggings with a cropped gray tank that had clearly been chosen to ruin the concentration of everyone within forty meters. She looked up when I came over the rise, and her eyes went from my face to the Summit path behind me, then to the hoodie, then to the scorch mark peeking out above the zipper.

She opened a new tab without breaking eye contact.

“Summit path, five fifty-seven, wearing a hoodie with somebody else’s name across the back.” She typed while she talked. “Do you want to give a statement, or should I put down no comment?”

“Put down that I was getting coffee.”

“You aren’t holding any coffee, Jace.”

“I drank it already on the walk down.”

“Your lips are swollen, there’s a bite on your shoulder that wasn’t there on the ferry, and you smell like lavender soap.” She took a slow sip from her thermos. “Naomi doesn’t own lavender, Aurora wears jasmine, and Addison smells like a blood bank that sells candles. That leaves one person on this campus who showers in lavender and owns that hoodie.”

“Is this really how you spend your mornings?”

“This is how I spend every morning, and you’ve only now started noticing.”

Naomi came jogging across the grass from the far side of the field. Her pink and black braid bounced against her back, and a thin gold shimmer still lingered under the brown skin at her wrists from Monterey. She stopped in front of me, looked at the hoodie, leaned up, and sniffed my neck like a dog checking another dog.

Then she smiled at me, wide and real and a little smug.

“You smell like lavender,” she said. “The Captain looked happy walking down here, and she didn’t scowl at the sunrise once.”

“I’m not confirming anything this early in the morning.”

“You don’t need to confirm anything, your neck is doing all of it for you.”