Divine Milking System

Chapter 347: 347 | I Won’t Promise

I woke at 4:47 AM to the sound of Belle’s alarm and the sensation of two warm bodies pressed against me in a bed that was never designed for this purpose.

Belle’s phone screamed from somewhere beneath her pillow, a custom alarm that sounded like a nuclear submarine’s emergency klaxon filtered through a garbage disposal. She slapped at it three times before finding the screen and silencing it, then groaned into my shoulder with the enthusiasm of someone who had been woken from the dead against their explicit wishes.

"I hate everything."

Naomi stirred against my right side. Her fingers tightened around mine in a reflexive squeeze that said her body was awake but her brain had not yet accepted that particular reality. The shell necklace had pressed into my chest during the night and left an imprint that would probably look like a hickey from a seashell-themed vampire.

"Five more minutes," Naomi mumbled.

"We said five AM." I stared at the ceiling where the first grey suggestion of California dawn crept through the curtains. "Hikaru could come back any minute and finding all three of us in my bed wearing nothing but my shirts would create the kind of conversation I’d rather not have before coffee."

Belle sat up. Her blue hair had achieved a state of chaos that defied multiple laws of physics, sticking out in directions I didn’t know hair could go, and the stolen crew neck had ridden up during the night to reveal the flat plane of her stomach and the borrowed boxer briefs riding low on her hips. She looked like a raccoon that had broken into a laundromat and decided to stay.

"Nobody told me morning-after hair required a building permit." Belle patted at the disaster zone above her head with both hands and accomplished nothing. "Where’s my bra."

"You threw it at the wall around midnight."

"That doesn’t sound like me."

"You were yelling about how cow-print is a lifestyle and not a costume."

"Okay, that does sound like me."

Naomi rolled onto her back and stretched, the navy henley pulling taut across her chest in a way that reminded me very aggressively that she was wearing nothing beneath it. Her arms extended over her head and her spine arched and the hem rode up past her navel and I looked away because if I didn’t look away we would never leave this bed and Misato would find our corpses and file a formal complaint about our lack of punctuality.

"What time is the briefing?" Naomi asked, rubbing her eyes with the backs of her hands.

"Oh-six-hundred." I sat up and immediately regretted it as every muscle in my body registered a formal grievance about the previous twenty-four hours. Vale’s training had shredded me, the Sanctum session had drained me, and sleeping sandwiched between two women in a bed built for one-and-a-half people had compressed my spine into something resembling a question mark. "We’ve got about seventy minutes. Shower, dress, eat something, then head to the briefing room."

Belle located her bra dangling from the curtain rod where it had landed during her lifestyle declaration the previous night. She held it up and examined the cow-print fabric with the forensic attention of a crime scene investigator before stuffing it into her overnight bag. "I’m showering in my own room. If Jordan sees me walk out of here at five AM wearing your clothes and bite marks he’ll assume the worst."

"The worst is accurate."

"The worst is private." Belle pulled on her jeans from the previous day and kept my crew neck on, apparently having decided that theft of Aurora’s gift was now permanent. She gathered her bag, checked her phone, and paused at the bedroom door. Her hand rested on the frame and she looked back at the bed where Naomi still lay with her hair fanned across the pillow and her legs tangled in sheets that smelled like three different people.

Something passed across Belle’s face. Not jealousy and not calculation and not the usual sharp assessment she performed on everything within visual range. This was softer and more dangerous and she killed it before I could name it.

"Don’t be late." Belle’s voice landed somewhere between a threat and a prayer. "And eat actual food. Not a protein bar."

She left. The apartment door clicked shut behind her and the silence she left was a different shape than the one before she arrived.

Naomi propped herself on one elbow and watched me with those pink eyes that saw too much. "She’s scared."

"About the gate?"

"About everything." Naomi sat up and the henley fell off one shoulder, revealing the smooth brown skin beneath and the mark I’d left just above her collarbone during the Sanctum. "About the gate. About Cassandra. About whatever’s happening between all of us. She covers it with sarcasm and stolen shirts but she’s terrified that this is the part where the good things stop."

I didn’t say anything because Naomi was right and saying so felt redundant.

Naomi kissed my cheek, a quick soft press of lips that carried zero agenda beyond the desire to make contact, and then she was moving toward the bathroom with her overnight bag and her destroyed cow-print panties mercifully disposed of in last night’s wastebasket. The bathroom door closed and the shower started and I sat alone in a bed that still held the warmth of two bodies.

I checked the System.

Lifespan: 14D 6H. Points: 8,480. Four Silver-tier essence cups glowing in the vault. Belle buffed to Silver. Naomi buffed to Gold. The numbers looked good. The numbers always looked good right before everything went sideways.

My phone had accumulated a small mountain of notifications overnight. Aurora sent a selfie at 2 AM of herself eating leftover pasta in the kitchen with the caption "can’t sleep thinking about tomorrow, also this pasta slaps." Addison sent a separate message at 3 AM consisting entirely of a knife emoji followed by a heart emoji followed by three coffee jelly emojis, which I interpreted as a declaration of affection in her native language. Misato’s message was a single line: "0600. Conference room B. Don’t make me come find you."

Jordan had sent nothing because Jordan was probably still unconscious and would remain so until someone physically dragged him from his bed, a task that typically fell to Belle or Naomi because I lacked the emotional bandwidth to manage Jordan’s unique relationship with consciousness.

The group chat titled Managing the Milk Vampire contained a new message from Belle posted at 4:51 AM, four minutes ago: "mission accomplished. both buffs active. vault full. heading to shower. don’t ask questions."

Aurora responded immediately because Aurora apparently did not require sleep to function: "questions are literally the only reason I’m in this chat"

Addison: "did you wear the cow thing"

Belle: "classified"

Addison: "CLASSIFIED??? BELLE FOX YOU TELL ME RIGHT NOW"

I pocketed the phone and got up.

Naomi emerged from the bathroom ten minutes later wearing her own clothes from the overnight bag, her hair re-braided and her expression settled into the focused calm she wore before combat. She looked nothing like the woman who’d demanded harder in a farmhouse pocket dimension three hours ago. She looked like a hunter.

"I’ll see you at the briefing." She paused at the door. "Jace."

"Yeah."

"Today is going to be dangerous."

"I know."

"Promise me you won’t do something stupid to protect me."

I didn’t promise because I would absolutely do something stupid to protect her and we both knew it. She read the answer in my silence and her mouth tightened and she left without pressing the point.