Chapter 646 | Casualty of War [CASTLE BONUS]

Chapter 646: 646 | Casualty of War [CASTLE BONUS]

Felicity fell asleep eleven minutes later, which I know because I counted them on the ceiling plaster while Gerald the rabbit judged me from his sticker.

Her breathing went slow and heavy against my neck, and her fingers stopped tracing circles on my chest and curled into a loose fist over the spot where the second heartbeat lived. Every few seconds her thumb twitched against my skin, like she was still checking that it was there even after her brain had clocked out for the night. The fairy lights had settled back into a steady gold after she broke them twice, and the acoustic guitar track on her speaker had looped back to the start for what I guessed was the fourth time.

I lay there longer than I needed to. Part of that was strategy, because moving too early would wake her and she would make me stay until three, which my body could handle but my Wednesday absolutely could not. The other part had nothing to do with strategy, and I decided not to look at that part directly because it would want to have a conversation.

When her breathing hit the deep slow pull of real sleep, I started the extraction.

Getting out from under Felicity Hardy turned into a full tactical operation. Her leg had hooked over my hip at some point and locked there with a grip that made me rethink her Strength rating, and her arm had migrated across my ribs to settle under my shoulder blade. I lifted her knee first, slow enough that the mattress barely shifted, and slid my hip out from under her thigh while her skin stuck to mine and peeled free in small stubborn inches. She made a soft annoyed noise and burrowed her face deeper into the pillow I had just vacated, and I froze in place for six full seconds while she decided whether to wake up.

She stayed asleep, though she reached out one hand and grabbed a fistful of blanket to drag over her shoulder.

The blanket slid down her back when she moved, and the fairy lights did the rest of the work. Her spine curved in a long pale line from her neck to the dimples at the base of her back, and below that the sheet had tangled around one thigh and left the rest of her completely bare. A row of faint pink marks ran across her hip where my fingers had been, and two more sat on the soft curve of her ass where I had grabbed her hard enough that she screamed about it in a good way. Freckles scattered across her shoulders and down her ribs in a pattern I had never seen before tonight, and I had the stupid urge to trace them and see where they ended.

I pulled the blanket back up to her shoulders before my body could form an opinion about any of it.

My clothes had ended up in four different corners of the room. My shirt hung off the edge of her desk lamp, my jeans lay crumpled by the door, and I found one sock wedged between her mattress and the wall where it had no business being. I could not find my boxers anywhere, and after ninety seconds of silent searching with my phone screen turned down to its dimmest setting, I gave up and wrote them off as a casualty of war.

Dressing in the dark took a while because my Dexterity stat apparently stopped working on zippers after midnight.

I stood by the door with my jacket over my arm and looked back at her one more time. She had rolled onto her side facing the spot where I had been, her hair spilled across the pillow in a mess of gold, her mouth slightly open and her lashes resting on cheeks that still carried a faint flush. The bear she called Mr. Whiskers sat on her nightstand watching me with button eyes, and I swear the thing looked disappointed in my exit strategy.

I grabbed a sticky note off her desk and wrote on it in the faint glow from my phone.

Went back to my room so you could have the whole bed. Gerald knows where I am. Breakfast is on me.

I stuck it to her phone screen where she would see it before she saw anything else, then opened the door slowly enough that the hinges did not complain.

The hallway on the third floor of the West Tower stood empty and dim under the night lights, and the industrial carpet swallowed my footsteps. I made it four doors down before Room 303 opened and Maribelle Kennedy leaned out into the corridor like she had been waiting with her ear against the wood.

She probably had been waiting with her ear against the wood.

She wore an oversized black sleep shirt that hung off one crimson shoulder and stopped right at the top of her thighs, and nothing else that I could see from where I stood. Her honey-gold eyes caught the night light and glowed in the dark like a cat that had found something to play with. Her horns curved back from her temples in two smooth black arcs, and her tail swayed behind her in slow lazy loops that told me exactly how much she was enjoying this.

"Belmont, look at you doing the walk of shame through my hallway."

"I’m calling it the walk of mild inconvenience."

"You’re carrying your jacket on your arm at one in the morning, and your shirt is inside out again." Maribelle stepped fully into the hallway and leaned her shoulder against the doorframe, crossing her arms under her chest in a pose that pulled her shirt tight across everything. "That’s a full shame walk, babe, and I’m proud of you for owning it."

I looked down at my shirt. The Halloran crest tag stuck out of the collar at a jaunty angle, mocking me in a language only clothing labels spoke.

"You owe Felicity money, from what I heard."

"I owe her nothing, because I paid her already through a mobile app." Maribelle held up her phone and showed me the transfer screen, which read twenty dollars, memo field, respect. "Three minutes and twelve seconds out of pure spite is the most inspiring thing I’ve heard this semester, and I’ve heard Eden try to sing in the shower."

"You heard all of it through the wall?"