Chapter 585 | Exhibit B

Chapter 585: 585 | Exhibit B

Vale was waiting in the gym when I got back, sitting in his usual chair with his feet up on a weight bench and his coffee mug balanced on one knee. He had not bothered to take off the sunglasses. The resistance band station sat calibrated behind him, and the mats lay in his favorite pattern, and the note that said Run was still taped to the mirror where he had left it twenty minutes ago.

"You carried her down the hill," Vale said.

"I was providing a transportation service to a teammate with no shoes."

"You carried an S-rank Davenport down a public switchback in a princess hold while she wore your clothes. Three security cameras caught it from different angles." He took a long sip from the mug. "I have already watched all three of them twice."

"You were on the helipad. Then you teleported away, and now you are here. When exactly did you have time to pull security footage?"

"I am very good at multitasking, Monroe." Vale set the coffee down on the floor and stood, stretching his arms over his head until his spine cracked in four places. "Twenty-two rounds. Then we break your nose. Then you go to breakfast and explain to Fox why the campus forum has a new thread titled Burger Guy Carries Princess."

I dropped to the mat and started the push-ups because arguing with Vale before seven in the morning was a losing proposition that only made him add rounds out of spite. The first five went smooth. My B-rank Endurance turned bodyweight work into a warm-up instead of a crucible, and the butterscotch still sitting in my veins from the vault made my arms feel lighter than they had any right to feel after the night I’d had.

Round nine was when Vale crouched beside me and started talking.

"Johnathan Davenport does not lose," Vale said. "He reschedules his victories for later dates. You understand the difference?"

"He’s coming back."

"He’s coming back with paperwork you can’t read and lawyers you can’t afford, and he’s going to look for the softest thing you care about." Vale tapped the back of my head with two fingers on my next push-up, enough to throw off my form. "You have seven rings in your skull. That’s seven soft things, and Cassandra already clocked the one on your finger."

"Yumi’s ring."

"Yumi’s ring transmits on a frequency that a Diamond-tier analyst could trace in an afternoon if she cared enough to try." He stood and walked back to his chair. "She will care enough to try, because you refused her tea."

I finished round twelve on pure spite and rolled onto my back long enough to glare at the ceiling. The water stain up here was shaped like nothing at all, which annoyed me more than the angry rabbit in my bedroom ever did.

"Why do I get the feeling you wanted that to happen?" I asked.

Vale smiled behind his mug. "Up. Ten more rounds."

He broke my nose at six thirty-one. He broke it again at six forty-four because I complained about the first time. By seven I had burned through two cups from the vault and my face had reset itself twice. The scorch mark on my training shirt from Blair’s hand had faded to a light brown smudge, and Vale had drawn a smiley face next to it with a marker he pulled from nowhere.

"Go eat," Vale said, already scrolling through restaurant reviews on his phone. "Tell the Love girl that Yumi wants her on Saturday at noon sharp."

"Her name is Naomi."

"There it is." He did not look up. "Four interesting things now, Monroe."

I didn’t ask what the fourth one was, because Vale would have made me run until I forgot the question.

The apartment was quiet when I got back to Building C. Hikaru’s door was closed, and her mug sat on the drying rack in its usual spot again, pulled forward to the front edge where it belonged. That was the only sign she had noticed anything this morning, and it told me more than a paragraph would have. Hikaru Tanaka moved her tea mug a full inch back on mornings when she was worried, and she moved it forward again once she was satisfied that the apartment still had two living occupants.

I pushed my bedroom door open with my shoulder and stopped.

Naomi was awake. She sat in the middle of my bed cross-legged with my blanket pooled around her waist and my old grey training shirt hanging off one shoulder, her pink and black hair spilling down her back in a loose tangle of stripes. The shell necklace had migrated back to the front of her throat. Her phone was in her hands, and the screen showed a grainy security image of a guy in a training shirt carrying a redhead in a sweater down a gravel path at dawn.

"Belle sent this at six-twelve," Naomi said without looking up. "She captioned it Exhibit B and gave me a full minute to respond before she started typing her own analysis."

"Good morning to you too, sweetheart."

"I’m not done with you." She turned the phone around so I could see the image better, and her pink eyes finally lifted to mine over the top of the screen. "You carried her. In a princess carry. While she wore your sweater with no pants on."

"She had underwear on."

"How do you know that?"

I opened my mouth and then shut it again, because I could not think of an answer that wouldn’t end with Naomi using Wave Motion on my face. Naomi watched me fail in real time, and then the corner of her mouth started twitching. She tried to keep the stern expression, and she held it for about two seconds before it cracked down the middle and she fell sideways onto my pillow laughing so hard her whole body shook.

"You should see your face right now," she gasped into the pillowcase. "You looked at the door. You actually checked the exits."

"It was a tactical consideration."

"Belle’s going to put that in the spreadsheet." Naomi rolled onto her back and stared up at me with her hair fanned across my sheets, still breathless and still grinning. "I don’t care that you carried her, for the record. Misato texted me at six-oh-five. She said Blair stood barefoot in front of her own father and wouldn’t move. She said Blair protected her mom."

"She did."

"So she earned a ride down the hill." Naomi stretched her arms over her head, and the grey shirt rode up her stomach until I could see the edge of her navel and the healing scratch along her ribs. "I’m only a little jealous. I’ll get over it after you buy me pancakes."

"I can do pancakes."

"You smell like the gym," she said, wrinkling her nose. "And Blair’s moisturizer. And blood. Did Vale break your nose again?"

"Twice."

"Go shower. I’m coming with you." She sat up and pulled the grey shirt off over her head in one motion, leaving her bare from the waist up in the soft morning light from the blinds. "Don’t make that face at me. We have forty minutes before breakfast and I’ve been awake since you snuck out at five."

"I did not sneak."

"You crawled out of bed like a burglar." Naomi stood and walked past me toward the bathroom, her hips swaying in black regulation underwear, and she didn’t bother to look back over her shoulder. "I noticed the second you left. The bed got cold."