Chapter 174: Slaps, Tongues, and One Unexpected Lie

Chapter 174: Chapter 174: Slaps, Tongues, and One Unexpected Lie

They dragged me into a windowless room and didn’t speak a single word the entire way.

The corridor had been short, the lighting clinical, the suppressors on my wrists already humming at a frequency that made the Hunger curl in on itself and go quiet.

Two of the guards took the corners outside.

The third shoved me through the door hard enough that I had to catch myself against the edge of a metal table bolted to the floor.

Giselle followed me in.

The door sealed behind her with a hydraulic sigh.

For a moment the only sound was the low electrical buzz of the dampeners embedded in the walls.

She watched me the way she had watched the biscuit on the hall floor: inventory first, decision later.

White hair fell over one shoulder.

The cut on her lower lip from the earlier exchange had reopened.

A thin line of blood tracked down her chin, and she ignored it completely.

They forced me into the single chair.

Heavy cuffs locked around both wrists and anchored to the armrests with a click that felt final.

The suppressors climbed another notch.

Whatever was left of the override dropped another few points and stayed there, sulking.

Giselle didn’t sit in the second chair.

She perched on the edge of the table directly in front of me, close enough that her knee almost brushed mine.

"What’s your class?"

"Acolyte."

She made a small, unimpressed sound and simply studied the air between us, eyes slightly unfocused, the same way she had when she copied the chain technique in the first hall.

I felt her core reach out: delicate, precise, Empress-line scanning, and trying to map whatever had allowed me to pull two percent of her foundation into myself.

Nothing answered her.

"Hmm. Weird."

"What is?"

"I can usually copy a class’s speciality after I’ve studied how it works."

Her voice was almost conversational.

"I did it with your chains. I’ve done it with kinetic fields, blood constructs, displacement hooks, even a couple of the rarer support pipelines. Pattern recognition plus residual sampling. It is not complicated once you have seen the architecture."

Her fingers came up and traced the line of my jaw.

Nails bit in just hard enough to break skin.

"Yet you keep something I cannot copy."

"Well...," I said, tasting blood where her nails had landed, "I did tell you I have tricks hidden up my sleeve."

"But you didn’t tell me it could kill me."

She slid off the table and onto my lap in one smooth motion.

The cuffs kept my hands useless.

Her position was deliberate: too close, too intimate, the exact opposite of every professional boundary the academy pretended to enforce in confinement rooms.

Her weight settled across my thighs.

The cut on her lip was close enough that I could smell the blood.

"You are assaulting me back?" I asked.

"Is that how it looks?"

"Yes."

"Good."

She kissed me.

Not the mid-combat violation on the rooftop.

Something slower, testing, almost curious.

Her mouth opened against mine, and she waited, clearly expecting the same automatic draw that had terrified her earlier.

"Do it again," she murmured against my lips.

"...Do what?"

"Drain me."

"No."

She pulled back just far enough to glare.

The red in her eyes had gone sharp again.

Then she slapped me, open-handed and hard enough that the chair rocked.

My head turned with the force.

Heat flooded the side of my face.

She caught my chin and turned me back toward her, then kissed me harder.

Her hips rolled once, twice, generating deliberate friction, deliberate heat, trying to force the same physiological trigger the override had used on the roof.

For a single, dangerous second the Hunger stirred: interested, remembering the taste of her core, calculating whether the cuffs and the suppressors could be ignored.

It reached its limit and stopped.

Whatever percentage I had already taken, whatever the transformation bar had recorded, the system had decided the well was closed for now.

No automatic draw.

Just the ordinary, humiliating fact of a girl on my lap in a locked room trying to recreate a violation for science.

Giselle pulled away.

A string of saliva still connected us for a moment before it broke.

She looked genuinely thrown.

"Not interested anymore?"

"Not interested in whatever this is."

She studied me in silence for several heartbeats, then opened her mouth again the same way I had opened mine on the rooftop, expecting the architecture to answer simply because she had reverse-engineered the posture.

I almost laughed.

"That’s not how it works."

Her eyes narrowed to slits.

"You’re laughing? I almost died to a nameless support, and you’re laughing."

The second slap landed harder than the first.

My ears rang.

I hated, truly hated, the small, traitorous part of the override that still catalogued the sting as something other than pain.

"Stop it."

The voice came from the doorway.

Laila Thornsworn stood on the threshold, one hand still on the frame, blue eyes taking in the exact arrangement of Giselle on my lap, the fresh marks on my face, the cuffs, the blood on both our mouths.

Her expression didn’t change, but the temperature in the room seemed to drop two degrees.

"Giselle...," she said, calm and absolute, "we will take action appropriately."

Giselle held the position for one deliberate extra second, then rose with grace.

She smoothed the front of her jacket as if she had simply been adjusting a cuff.

"Yeah, well. I was the one assaulted, not you."

"And we will investigate."

Giselle walked to the door.

She paused at the threshold, exactly long enough for Laila’s final question to land.

"Was it just a kiss?"

Giselle turned her head.

Her eyes found mine across the small room.

For a moment I saw the same personal, permanent promise she had carried on the rooftop when the exam ended, the fact that an Empress-line core had been touched without permission.

Then she looked at Laila and lied with perfect, crystalline clarity.

"...Yes," she said.

"He just kissed me."