Chapter 577 | Eighteen Minutes Before the Alarm

Chapter 577: 577 | Eighteen Minutes Before the Alarm

I woke up wrong.

Not wrong like a leopard is eating my face or wrong like the graft behind my sternum has decided to play dubstep at four in the morning. Wrong like the air had weight. Like someone had poured concrete into the atmosphere overnight and forgot to tell the rest of the island. My alarm read five-twelve, eighteen minutes before it was supposed to go off, and Naomi’s head rested on my chest with her shell necklace pressing a cold circle into the skin above my fourth rib. Her breathing came slow and deep. Her fingers had curled into a loose fist against my stomach in her sleep, bunching the fabric of my shirt like a kid holding a blanket.

Normal. All of that was normal. We had been sleeping like this for weeks.

The wrongness lived somewhere else.

I lay still and let my eyes adjust to the dark ceiling of my bedroom. The water stain that looked like an angry rabbit stared back at me, unchanged, still pissed about something nobody could explain. Hikaru’s door was closed. No light underneath. Her tea mug would be on the rack, clean, positioned two centimeters from the edge because Hikaru Tanaka did not tolerate mugs that sat too close to the lip of anything. Outside the window, the California night sky held the deep blue that meant dawn was forty minutes away and the ocean was pretending to be gentle.

Nothing moved. Nothing buzzed or pinged or exploded.

The graft pulsed once, low and tight, and all seven rings burned in the back of my skull at different temperatures. Silver-pink for Naomi, warm against my collarbone. Amber for Belle, steady and sharp. Green for Aurora, bright and reckless, a woman who would destroy a guild headquarters for fun. Dark purple for Addison, fresh and deep like a bruise you keep pressing because the ache tells you it is real. Lime for Misato, still new enough that it flickered when I breathed wrong. Pale blue for Hikaru, barely there but structurally critical in ways Yumi could explain with equations and I could explain with the sound Hikaru made when she said my first name. And the seventh ring, Blair’s ring, which had been flickering at the far edge for days and now burned white and hot and unstable, like a filament one voltage spike from snapping.

Forty-five percent devotion. Three question marks, two of them faded.

And somewhere in the penthouse uphill, a nine-page contract sat in a lawyer’s server, notarized at midnight by a woman who had called a man in San Francisco to draft legal protection for someone she claimed to despise.

That was what made the air heavy.

Not the rings. Not the resonance load sitting at eight-point-seven of nine with graft upkeep recalculation pending. Not the weapon in Santa Barbara being built from every bond I had ever made, or the gate schedule, or the eighteen days left on a clock nobody else could see. The heaviness came from the fact that Blair Davenport had written Clause Fifteen in a contract designed to protect a woman Blair had been treating as property for nine years, and she had done it at midnight, alone, wearing my stolen crew neck.

I knew because Belle had called me at one in the morning to tell me. Belle Fox does not call. Belle Fox texts paragraphs and spreadsheets and invoices. When Belle calls, someone has done something so unprecedented that her documentation system has experienced a stack overflow.

Blair Davenport wrote a legal shield for Misato Ayame’s mother. Blair Davenport waived her claim on Misato. Blair Davenport hired a notary at midnight and paid triple.

The air was heavy because everything was about to change, and everybody in the building knew it except the girl sleeping on my chest, who had drooled a small wet patch onto my collarbone and whose pink eye would open in about nine minutes to ask me if I was thinking too loudly.

I ran my thumb along the back of Naomi’s knuckles where they curled against my stomach. She made a small sound, the sound she always made when she registered touch in her sleep, and her fist loosened for half a second before tightening again. Possessive even while unconscious. Naomi Love had spent her entire life apologizing for existing, and now she slept in my bed with her legs tangled in mine and her shell necklace marking territory on my skin, and she held on like I would dissolve if she stopped gripping.

She was not wrong about that. I would, in about eighteen days, unless the women who loved me kept feeding me enough milk to push the counter forward. The old man in his impossible library had designed a system where survival required real connection, where points came from devotion rather than transaction, where the weapon that would eventually kill dimensional guardians grew stronger every time someone cried my name into a pillow.

The heaviness in the air was love, and it weighed more than anything I had fought in a gate.

I slipped out from under Naomi without waking her, a skill I had perfected over six weeks of early morning training with a man who believed tardiness constituted a moral failure worse than murder. The mattress shifted, and Naomi rolled onto her side, her braid falling across the pillow in pink and black stripes. My old grey training shirt rode up past her hip, exposing brown skin and the edge of black underwear that was regulation issue and therefore boring and therefore somehow hotter than anything Aurora owned from a French boutique.

I stood in the bathroom and brushed my teeth while looking at my cracked mirror, the crack Blair had put there on Monday when she dried her uniform with her bare hands in my apartment. The crack split my reflection down the middle, and both halves looked tired. Four pale scars from a leopard’s claws ran from left collarbone to right hip. Addison’s bite mark decorated my throat. Misato’s mark sat on my shoulder under the collar. Belle’s hickey lived on my hip, and a tentacle sucker mark from the Monterey alpha occupied the spot beside it that would never be attractive regardless of how many push-ups Vale made me do.

Eighteen days on the clock. Seven rings. One contract. And somewhere uphill, a girl in my stolen crew neck who still hadn’t said what she wanted if she won.