Chapter 590 | Now You’re Even

Chapter 590: 590 | Now You’re Even

"Eat first, and then die later," Keiko replied, and Belle made a sound into her coffee that I would be hearing in my nightmares.

Blair cleared her throat. Every head turned toward her, including Keiko’s, and I felt the heat coming off her side of the table double in a single breath. She set the shoes down on the table carefully, lining them up side by side, the way she lined up her pens before a test.

"Ayame-san, you don’t have to go back to that house." Blair kept her voice level, but her fingers were curled hard against the edge of the table. "Clause fifteen covers housing. I can find you an apartment in the city by tonight, and my trust pays the lease for as long as you want it."

"I am going back on the ferry."

"You don’t understand. He brought you here at dawn to use you against me, and he will do it again the moment I make him angry."

"I understand very well, Blair-chan." Keiko reached across the table and put her small hand over Blair’s, right on top of the scorched wood. "Your father is a cold man, and that house has nobody warm in it when you are here at school. When you come home at Christmas, somebody must make the soup you like, the one with the dumplings you pretend you do not eat."

Blair stopped breathing. Her face crumpled at the chin, something I had never seen it do in six weeks, not in the cave and not on the ferry rail. It smoothed out again, then crumpled once more before she got control of it. Steam poured off her collar in a thick curl that smelled like her rose moisturizer, and the tabletop under her other hand turned brown in a perfect palm shape.

"I don’t pretend," she whispered, and her voice cracked in half.

"You pretend very badly," Keiko told her gently. "You always did, even when you were nine years old."

Misato finally looked down from the ceiling, her green eyes red at the rims. "Mama, the ferry leaves at eight-thirty, and the shuttle takes twelve minutes."

"Yes, yes, I know about the ferry." Keiko stood and hooked her tote bag over her arm, then pointed the closed umbrella at me like a sword. "You will feed my daughter real food. She eats protein bars over the kitchen sink like a raccoon when she thinks nobody is watching."

"I’ll handle it, Ayame-san."

"And you will stop letting the pink one carry you, because her back is too nice to ruin."

Naomi turned the color of a fire hydrant and hid behind her pancakes. Keiko gave Blair’s shoulder one last pat, then turned and walked toward the doors with her daughter half a step behind her. Misato didn’t look back at me. She did reach out and squeeze my shoulder as she passed, right on top of her own bite mark, hard enough that I felt the bruise wake up.

The doors swung shut behind them, and our table stayed silent for a long time.

Then I heard a soft scuff under the table. I glanced down without moving my head and watched Blair slip her left foot out of a four-hundred-dollar black pump. She slid her bare foot into one of the rubber-soled housekeeping flats, and then she did the same with her right foot, all of it below the table where she clearly thought nobody could see. Her heels went into her bag. Her chin stayed perfectly level the entire time.

Belle’s fingers started moving on the keyboard.

"Say one word, Fox, and I will fuse that laptop shut," Blair warned her without turning her head.

"I wasn’t going to say anything, Davenport." Belle kept typing. "I’m a professional, and this is documentation."

Naomi leaned against my shoulder and whispered into my ear. "She looks really cute in those."

"I heard that, Love."

"I wanted you to hear it," Naomi replied sweetly, and went back to stealing my bacon.

I sat there between them with my thigh pressed against Blair’s on one side and Naomi’s hand on my other leg. The seventh ring flickered white in the back of my skull, steadier than it had been on the ferry. I finished my hash browns because at least they couldn’t threaten me.

Misato came back six minutes later, alone, walking fast. Her face had gone back to its usual blank captain’s expression, but her ponytail had come loose on one side, and her hands kept closing into fists at her hips. She didn’t sit down. She walked straight to my chair, grabbed the collar of my uniform blazer in one hand, and pulled until I stood up.

"Field lead, you’re with me for a formation debrief right now."

"We don’t have a formation today, Captain," Jordan pointed out through a mouthful of rice.

"Wayne, finish your rice ball and stop talking." Misato was already dragging me toward the back of the dining hall by my blazer. "Fox, if you write one word about this, I’m putting you on the obstacle course with Davenport until Christmas."

"Too late for that, Captain," Belle called after us cheerfully. "I’ve already timestamped your exit."

Misato hauled me past the drink station and through a swinging door marked STAFF ONLY. The service corridor behind the kitchen was narrow and cool, lined with stacked milk crates and steel shelves full of paper towels, and it smelled like dish soap and burnt toast. A single caged bulb buzzed overhead. She let the door swing closed and then shoved me back against the shelves hard enough that a roll of plastic wrap fell off and bounced across the tile.

Green light flashed beside the door. A clone of Misato stood there with her back to us and her arms folded, staring at the swinging door like a bouncer at a nightclub.

"Nobody comes through that door," Misato ordered without looking at her.

"Obviously, I’m you," the clone answered dryly.

Misato turned back to me. Her green eyes were still wet at the edges, and her chest rose and fell hard under the zipped hoodie. Up close I could smell the lavender soap on her neck, and under it the salt of someone who had been crying in a shuttle stop for six minutes and refusing to admit it.

"My mother called you the boy," she told me, her voice rough.

"She also called me an idiot, if you were listening."

"I was listening to every word." Her fingers twisted tighter in my collar. "She told the whole table that I bite when I’m happy, Jace."

"That one was my favorite part."

She made a strangled sound in her throat and pulled me down to her mouth. The kiss was nothing like the shed or the cliff. It was slower and wetter, and it tasted like salt and bag tea, and her hand left my collar to slide straight up under my shirt, palm flat against my stomach. My back hit the shelves again, and something heavy clanked behind my head. Her nails dragged down across the leopard scars, and the graft behind my sternum slammed against my ribs so hard I grunted into her mouth.

She broke the kiss just long enough to bite me. She went for the left side of my neck, right next to Addison’s mark, and she sank her teeth in hard enough to make my knees weak. The Euphoric Feedback turned the sting into a hot line of pleasure that ran straight down my spine and pooled low in my stomach. When she let go, she licked over the bite, slow, and then looked up at me with her lips swollen and her cheeks blotchy red.

"Now you’re even," she breathed. "Love on the right, me on the left, and Baxter can fight me for the territory."

The lime ring in my skull burned so bright my vision went green at the edges. I grabbed her hips and turned us around, pinning her back against the steel shelves instead. A box of napkins tumbled off the top rack and exploded across the floor, and the clone at the door sighed so loudly I heard it over my own pulse.

"How much time do we have before Cross?" I asked against her throat.

"Eleven minutes, and the clone is counting." Misato caught my wrist and dragged my hand down to the zipper of her captain’s hoodie, her fingers trembling against mine. "So stop wasting them, field lead."