Chapter 597: His

I kissed the side of her neck, and Blair's head tipped back against the shelf hard enough to dislodge another atlas. My mouth found the start of her burn scar below her jaw, the raised pink line that ran from the forest fire she'd set to save her squad, and I kissed it slowly from top to bottom. Every inch of damaged tissue. Every ridge and seam where the healing had rebuilt her skin into something new. Blair's hand flew to the back of my head and pressed me closer, and I heard a sound escape her that I was ninety percent sure she had never made in front of another human being.

"Monroe." Her voice cracked. "Jace. Don't stop."

I didn't stop. My mouth continued down the scar until it disappeared beneath the grey crew neck, and I pushed the collar aside with my nose to follow its path across her collarbone. Blair's fingers tangled in my hair and her leg tightened around mine, pulling my hips harder against hers, and the contact sent a jolt through both of us that made the air shimmer. The graft sang. The seventh ring burned white and gold and fierce, and I could feel it stabilizing in real time, the frequency locking into place beside the other six like a tuning fork finally finding its note.

Blair grabbed my face with both hands and pulled me up to look at her.

Her mascara was ruined. Tear tracks cut dark lines through her foundation. Her lipstick was smeared across her chin and probably across half my face. The third and fourth buttons of her shirt had both given up, and her black lace bra did nothing to hide the fact that her body was responding to me with the same involuntary honesty her fire displayed. Her nipples pressed against the lace, and I could see the faint darkening of the fabric where her skin radiated enough heat to evaporate her own sweat on contact.

She was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, and I had seen Naomi Love glow gold on a black sand beach I built from her childhood.

"Tonight," Blair said, and her voice was ruined. "Seven o'clock. Summit House."

"You already told me."

"I'm telling you again so you understand." She swallowed. "I'm not coming to negotiate. I'm coming to stay."

The devotion counter in my peripheral vision hit sixty-two percent and the status changed. The three question marks that had haunted Blair's entry since the ferry dissolved. In their place, two words appeared in clean white text.

Status: His.

Not Yours. Not the word every other woman had settled into. His. As if Blair Davenport could not bring herself to use the same label as everyone else, because even in surrender she required her own classification.

A second line slid in under it, gray, at the very bottom of my vision, where its older version had been sitting since the ferry home on Tuesday.

[Resonance load: 9 / 9. Graft upkeep recalculation: scheduled.]

I felt it like a held breath, the whole graft pausing at the top of an inhale and waiting for something it didn't bother to explain. Blair was shaking against my collar. I decided, once more, to let it wait.

I kissed her forehead the way I had kissed Naomi's the first night in the Sanctum, and Blair made a sound like someone had removed a knife from between her ribs. Her hands dropped from my face to my chest, and she pressed both palms flat over the graft. The heat from her skin sank through my shirt and into the thing behind my sternum, and for three seconds the graft pulsed in time with Blair's heartbeat instead of mine.

"I expect platinum," she said against my collarbone. "Not white gold. Not silver. Platinum."

"I know."

"And it needs to be custom. I'll send you three catalogs."

"Blair."

"The clasp must be removable by me alone, per Clause Seven subsection A." She was talking faster now, the way she did when emotion was chasing her and she was trying to outrun it with logistics. "And it cannot be worn inside academic buildings, which I may amend because Cross's classroom has never technically been classified as, as..."

I kissed her again, and she stopped talking.

This kiss was slower and softer, and it didn't demand anything. I held her face in both hands and I kissed Blair Davenport like she was something worth being careful with, and she let me. Her hands stopped fisting my shirt. Her fingers uncurled. Her palms lay flat against my chest, and her shoulders dropped, and the temperature around us came down from scorching to merely warm.

When I pulled back, Blair's eyes were closed. Her lashes were wet and clumped together, and her mouth was slightly open, and she looked like a girl standing in a room where nobody was grading her.

"Tonight," she said one more time, soft and raw. "Don't be late."

"Fox already threatened me about that."

"Fox is smart." She opened her eyes. The blue was still cracked and wet, but underneath it something new had settled into place, something that looked like the first minute after you stop running and realize you can actually breathe. "Don't tell her I said that."

"She already knows."

Blair pushed off the shelf and took one step back, and the distance between us went from zero to fourteen inches and felt like a canyon. She looked down at herself. Her shirt hung open with two buttons gone. The grey crew neck showed beneath it, my bleach spot visible at the cuff. Her skirt had ridden up on one side from where her leg had been hooked around mine. The housekeeping shoes sat flat and ugly on the library carpet.

Blair Davenport adjusted nothing. She looked at me with her ruined makeup and her stolen sweater and her contract sitting in a lawyer's server in San Francisco, and she said, "Walk me to the stairwell."

I did.

We walked down the reference aisle side by side, close enough that our arms touched with every step but not holding hands. Blair kept her chin up and her spine straight, and the scorch marks she left on the carpet faded to nothing behind us. When we reached the stairwell door, she stopped and turned to face me.

"The essay was good," she said. "Cross shouldn't have made you read it aloud."

"Cross does what Cross does."

"You undersold the shot." Blair's mouth twitched. "The humidity compensation was eleven percent, not eight. I lied in class because Sapphire was listening."

I grinned at her. "I know."

"Of course you do." She reached up and straightened my collar the way Misato had done that morning, her fingers brushing the four bite marks that decorated my throat like a necklace of teeth. She counted them with her eyes. Addison on the left. Naomi on the right. Misato's fresh one beside Addison's. The fading one from the cave that she thought nobody could see.

"I'll need a spot," she said.

"There's room."