Chapter 435 | Every Last Knot

Chapter 435: 435 | Every Last Knot

The heat wasn’t just relaxing her. It was doing something more fundamental than that. He could feel it working the way the System had described, therapeutic but deeper, and under his hands the faint headache she’d carried to bed unspooled and vanished. The one from staring at spreadsheets for three hours straight. The one she hadn’t even mentioned because Chloe never mentioned discomfort, never admitted weakness, never gave anything away unless he pried it out of her with questions she couldn’t deflect.

But the heat knew. His palms knew. They found the tension at the base of her skull and dissolved it before she could tense up again.

Her breathing changed. It evened out into something deeper than sleep, something that looked closer to bliss if he was being honest about it. Her fingers curled into the sheet and uncurled. The small muscles in her shoulders went slack.

This is a cheat code. This is a genuine, unfiltered cheat code and it’s disguised as a spa treatment.

He thought about the onsen. About Ayaka’s hands finding the exact bruise from Maya’s body hook and calling it out before he’d said a word, before he’d admitted the sparring session had left him walking funny. He’d thought that was supernatural at the time. Some kind of Japanese bathhouse magic that came standard with the wooden buckets and the stones. He’d been half right. It was the same category of thing the System had just poured into his palms, except now it lived in him permanently, and he could feel exactly how far it went.

How much it could do.

How much damage it could undo if he let it.

Even the bodies of gods, the card had said.

He didn’t know if he believed that part. But Chloe Kim, who never let her guard down, who slept in a defensive sprawl and analyzed his facial tics and priced strangers for liquidation, was currently melting under his hands like the ice had gone out of her entirely.

He moved lower. His palms found her hips, thumbs pressing into the tension that had gathered there, and Chloe made a sound that was less sleep and more awake, a soft broken whine that climbed at the end.

"Mmm... ’m I dreaming...?"

"Go back to sleep," Jordan said, low.

Jordan hadn’t meant to use the voice. But Chloe was face-down in his bed with his hands working through the knots in her lower back, and the words came out before he could stop them. The full warm frequency. The one she’d banned in public. The one she’d specifically requested he not use while she was trying to have a crisis.

She wasn’t having a crisis right now.

The Alluring Whisper landed on top of the massage skill and the two of them together did something to her that made her spine curve deep, made her breath catch and hold, made a wet broken sound leave her throat that had nothing to do with physical tension being released.

"Ohh... that’s not... fair..." Her words came apart in the middle. Stopped being complete thoughts and became just sounds shaped vaguely like language. Her hips pressed back against his hands, chasing the pressure, chasing the heat, chasing him. "You can’t do both at... aah... Jordan..."

"You told me to pull it," Jordan murmured. His thumbs traced the curve of her lower back, following the path of her spine down to where it met her hips. He leaned down. Pressed a kiss to the top of her spine between his own working hands. Let his lips rest there for a second. "This is what it gave me."

Her entire body shivered under him.

Not from cold.

"A massage... skill?" She was surfacing now, pulling herself up out of the deep, but slowly, reluctantly, like a diver who didn’t want to leave the warm water. Her voice had that thick underwater quality. "Of course. Of course it gave you... hnn... a way to make me... useless..."

"You’re not useless. You’re relaxed. There’s a difference. You’ve just never experienced the second one before, so it’s confusing."

"I hate you." She said it into the pillow, and there was zero venom in it, and her body arched into his palms as she said it. "God, I hate you, keep doing that, right there, that spot, that’s the... aahh, Jordan..."

He kept doing it.

The heat poured out of him steady and endless, no strain, no tiring, and he understood then that this was the other half of the gift. Ceaseless Discharge had given him a body that didn’t quit in one specific way. This gave him hands that didn’t quit in another. He could do this for hours. He could take Chloe apart with nothing but his palms and put her back together better than she’d started, could reach into the tension she’d carried for eighteen years and pull it out of her like a splinter.

Chloe’s hand found his forearm and gripped it, not to stop him, to hold on. Her nails pressed into his skin. She turned her face out of the pillow, and in the harbor light her eyes were half open and glassy and dark, her natural brown, soft in a way she’d only ever shown him.

"This is going to be a problem," she whispered.

"Why?"

"Because I’m never going to let you stop." Her breath shook. His thumb found the last knot, the deep one at the base of her spine, and pressed, and she made a sound against the sheets that would have made Miss Valentine bring over an entire tray of snickerdoodles. "Because I’m going to demand this every single night for the rest of my life. Because you just weaponized the one thing I can’t defend against."

"You can’t defend against being taken care of?"

"No." The word came out cracked. Her eyes closed again, and her whole body went loose and boneless and hers, spilled across his mattress with his hands in the small of her back and the harbor light on her skin.

"I never learned how."