Chapter 598: Congratulations, You Are Now Dating…

Blair's fingers lingered on the last bite mark, the one from the cave that I kept telling everyone had healed. Her thumb pressed into it, and the skin beneath was still tender enough that my breath caught. She noticed. Of course she noticed. Blair Davenport noticed everything except her own feelings, and she was running out of excuses on that front too.

"Here," she said, and tapped the bare skin just above my collarbone on the left side, the one gap between Addison's territory and Misato's claim. "This one's mine."

"That's prime real estate. Fox already has dibs on my hip."

"Fox can file a complaint with my lawyer." Blair's thumb stayed on the spot. Her nail was painted dark red, and the color looked expensive against my skin. "I'm not biting you in a library. I have standards."

"You kissed me in a library thirty seconds ago."

"Kissing is civilized." She pulled her hand back and folded both arms across her chest, which pushed the open panels of her shirt wider and gave me a view of black lace that I was going to think about during Vale's next training session and probably get my nose broken for. "Biting is for tonight."

She said it like a promise. Like a threat. Like a woman who had drafted four versions of a contract at midnight because the first three did not adequately capture the depth of her need to control every variable in the universe, and then signed the fourth version anyway knowing full well that the only variable she could not control was standing in front of her with four hickeys and a death timer.

Blair turned and pushed through the stairwell door. The hinges squeaked, and the fire exit sign cast a red glow across her face that caught the tear tracks still drying on her cheeks. She did not wipe them. Blair Davenport, who checked her reflection in every available surface and maintained a multi-step skincare routine that cost more than my monthly food budget, walked into a public stairwell with mascara running down her face and did not fix it.

She looked back at me one final time from the landing.

"Monroe."

"Princess."

Her ears turned crimson. The air on the landing warmed by three degrees. Her mouth opened, closed, opened again, and whatever she wanted to say got swallowed by the version of Blair that still believed vulnerability was a weapon pointed at herself.

"Bring chips tonight," she said instead. "The barbecue ones. Not the cheap brand. Belle's selection is an insult to the concept of flavor."

Then she was gone, her housekeeping shoes slapping against the concrete steps in a rhythm that got faster as she descended, like she was afraid that if she slowed down she would turn around and come back.

I stood in the stairwell and listened to her footsteps until they faded into the lobby noise two floors below. The fire exit sign buzzed overhead. A faded poster on the wall warned about the importance of proper mana channel maintenance during gate operations. Someone had drawn a crude picture of a monster with googly eyes on it in black marker.

The graft pulsed behind my sternum. Seven rings. All burning. Six of them steady and familiar, anchored to women who kept choosing me despite every reason not to. The seventh had stopped flickering and now burned with the same fierce permanence as the others. A white ring edged in ice blue, sitting at the outermost edge of the constellation but holding its position without wavering. The status in my peripheral vision had not changed since the shelf.

Status: His.

I pulled out my phone. Fourteen messages waited.

Belle had sent five in the span of four minutes. The first read: timestamp logged, reference stacks, fourth floor, six minutes and forty-two seconds, notable that you returned with two fewer shirt buttons than you left with. The second was a spreadsheet screenshot with a new row added in red font. The third simply said Davenport Variable confirmed. The fourth was a photograph of the spot where Blair had been sitting during Cross's lecture, showing a faint scorch mark on the desk surface in the shape of a palm print. The fifth said congratulations, you are now dating the most expensive woman in the American hunter economy and I expect chips as compensation for emotional labor.

Naomi sent one message: a heart emoji followed by she kept the sweater, didn't she.

I typed back: she kept the sweater.

Naomi's response came in four seconds: good. it looks better on her anyway. also Belle is updating the spreadsheet in real time and has added a column called "library incidents" and I think you should know this before lunch.

Aurora sent a voice note that I opened on speaker in the empty stairwell. Her voice was bright and sharp and laughing. "Jay Jay. Fox just sent me a photograph of a palm-shaped scorch mark on an academy desk and told me to check the forum. There is a thread with eight hundred replies and a poll asking whether Princess Davenport sets furniture on fire because she's angry or because she's horny, and I voted horny, and I'm forwarding this to Addison because she owes me twenty credits from orientation week when I bet her that Davenport would crack before Christmas. I love you and I want my tablecloth date on Saturday and if you cancel I will scramble your visual cortex until you see everything upside down for a week. Also Addison says to tell you that the coffee jellies are non-negotiable and that she is keeping count."

Addison's message was a skull emoji, a coffee cup emoji, and the number three underlined twice.

Misato sent nothing. The absence sat heavier than any words. I could still taste her lip gloss on the left side of my mouth from the service corridor, and I could feel the bite mark she had left on my neck throbbing in counterpoint to Naomi's mark on the other side. Misato communicated through the spaces between sentences, through the things she chose not to say, through the volume of silence she deployed like a weapon in formation drills. The empty message thread told me that she knew about the library. That she was not angry. That she was giving me room, the way a captain gives her field lead room to make the call, trusting that the call would include her when it mattered.

Hikaru sent a period. One dot. A full stop at the end of a sentence I could not read. The pale blue ring pulsed once in the back of my skull, cool and certain.

Jordan sent: bro.