My Scumbag System

Chapter 619: The Fury of Two Women

The walk back to the Olympus Rising compound took twenty minutes. Maki spent most of it complaining about the quality of the city’s rat population and making increasingly graphic threats about what she’d do to the next person who looked at her funny.

I barely heard her.

My head was full of equations and diagrams and the face of a man I’d never met who’d apparently decided before I was born that his son would make an excellent guinea pig for interdimensional soul transplantation.

Thanks, Dad. Really appreciate the heads up.

The pendant pulsed against my chest. Warm now. Natalia had been listening to everything through our bond, and I could feel her processing the information with the same cold fury she brought to everything else. She wasn’t angry at me for once. She was angry at the world that had shaped both of us into weapons without our consent.

That made two of us.

Maki and I slipped back into the compound through the same service entrance we’d used earlier. The security cameras remained blind to our passage. Reyna’s intelligence about the patrol schedules proved accurate. The girl had resources I was only beginning to appreciate.

The elevator ride to her floor felt longer than it should have.

I found Reyna still asleep when I entered her suite. She’d shifted since I left, her body curled around the pillow I’d been using like she was trying to hold onto something that wasn’t there anymore. The moonlight through the uncurtained windows painted silver streaks across her crimson hair.

Beautiful. Dangerous. Mine.

I stripped off my clothes and slid back into bed beside her. The moment my body touched the mattress, Reyna’s eyes snapped open with the alertness of someone trained to wake at the slightest disturbance.

"You left." Her voice was rough with sleep but sharp with accusation. "I felt you go."

"Had something I needed to do."

"At two in the morning?"

"Best time for shady meetings with mysterious informants."

Reyna propped herself up on one elbow and stared at me with those emerald eyes that could see through bullshit like it was made of glass. Her tank top had ridden up during sleep, exposing the taut muscles of her stomach and the curve of her hip where her underwear sat low on her waist.

"You’re an idiot," she said. "Going alone to meet someone who knew classified information about you."

"Maki was there."

"The cat."

"The three-hundred-year-old lightning demon cat. She’s killed more people than most S-Ranks."

Reyna didn’t look convinced. She reached out and grabbed my face with both hands, tilting my head back and forth like she was checking for damage.

"You’re not hurt."

"Disappointed?"

"Relieved." She let go of my face and flopped back onto her pillow. "If you die before I can properly introduce you to my sister as my boyfriend, I’ll be very upset."

"Your sister already knows."

"Knowing and formal acknowledgment are different things. There are protocols. Presentations. Veronica will want to give you the shovel talk personally."

"Pretty sure she already did that over breakfast."

"That was the preliminary warning. The real shovel talk involves PowerPoint slides and financial projections about how much my happiness is worth to the Olympus Rising brand." Reyna’s voice carried that particular mix of affection and exasperation that seemed reserved exclusively for discussions about her sister. "She’ll have pie charts about projected emotional damage versus long-term relationship stability. Maybe a few infographics about the correlation between athlete performance and romantic fulfillment."

I laughed despite myself. The sound surprised me—genuine, unforced, bubbling up from somewhere deep in my chest. I hadn’t expected to laugh tonight, not after everything I’d learned. Not after sitting in that dusty archive room reading my father’s clinical notes about optimizing his unborn son’s neural plasticity for foreign consciousness integration.

Reyna turned her head and looked at me with an expression I couldn’t quite read. Her emerald eyes had gone soft in the darkness, the usual sharp edge of her gaze dulled by something that looked dangerously close to concern.

"You found something bad, didn’t you?"

"What makes you say that?"

"You came back smelling like old paper and regret." She shifted slightly against me, her leg tightening around my thigh. "Also you laughed like someone trying to convince themselves they’re okay when they’re definitely not okay. I know that laugh. I’ve used it enough times myself."

Perceptive. Another thing I was learning about Reyna Cabana: she noticed everything. Years of being watched, of performing for cameras and crowds and corporate sponsors, had taught her to watch back with equal intensity. She read people the way most Hunters read monster behavior patterns—looking for the tells, the microexpressions, the tiny cracks in the facade that revealed the truth underneath.

"My father experimented on me before I was born," I said. The words came out flat, clinical, like I was reading from one of those same reports. "Used me as a vessel for some kind of interdimensional consciousness transfer. The person I am now is apparently a hybrid of whoever I was supposed to be and whoever got shoved into my head from another reality."

Reyna was quiet for a long moment. Her fingers had stopped their idle patterns on my chest. The only movement was the subtle rise and fall of her breathing.

"That’s... a lot."

"Yeah."

"Is the other person still in there?" Her voice had gone quieter, almost hesitant. "Can you talk to them? Are they trying to take over or—"

"Not exactly. We’re merged now. Integrated." I stared up at the ceiling, trying to find words for something I barely understood myself. "I have their memories and skills and personality traits, but I can’t separate out which parts are mine and which parts are theirs anymore. It’s like trying to unmix paint after it’s already dried. The colors have blended, and now there’s just... this. Whatever I am now."

"That’s horrifying."

"Little bit."

Reyna rolled onto her side and pressed her body against mine. Her leg hooked over my thigh. Her arm draped across my chest. Her head tucked into the hollow of my shoulder.

"Does this help?" she asked.

"Does what help?"

"Physical contact. Veronica used to hold me when I had nightmares as a kid. Before the training got serious and we stopped having time for that kind of thing."

The warmth of her body seeped into mine. The scent of her hair filled my nostrils. The steady rhythm of her breathing synchronized with my own.

"Yeah," I admitted. "It helps."

We lay there in the darkness. Reyna’s fingers traced idle patterns across my chest, avoiding the pendant that had finally settled into a neutral temperature. Natalia was listening but not commenting. Giving me space to process.

"The meeting on Thursday," Reyna said eventually. "You have leverage now?"

"Documentation proving the VHC funded the research that created me. If they try to eliminate me, I release everything. Mutually assured destruction."

"Seraphina won’t like that."

"Seraphina can choke on it."

Reyna snorted. Her breath was warm against my collarbone.

"You’re going to piss off the most powerful woman in Valoria and expect to survive?"

"I’ve done stupider things this week."