Chapter 668 | This is Your Problem Now

Chapter 668: 668 | This is Your Problem Now

The Sadism trait stirred at the base of my skull, interested and hungry, and I told it to sit down. This wasn’t the night for teeth.

She was so wet that every slow grind made a soft slick noise between us, and her inner walls fluttered around me each time I pulled her down onto my lap. Her nails dragged lines down my shoulder blades. When I tilted my hips to change the angle, she gasped and bit my collarbone, right next to the yellow bruise Sloane had left, and I felt my control slip a notch.

"You’re shaking," I murmured against her temple.

"Shut up, you’re shaking too."

She wasn’t wrong about that. Her hips started to lose their pace, slow rolls turning into short desperate grinds, and her breath came out in hot bursts against my skin. I held her tighter and met her downstrokes with my own, deep and steady, until the bed frame tapped the wall in time.

"I’m close," she gasped. "I’m so close, don’t let go, Lukas, don’t you dare let go of me."

"I’ve got you."

She came apart in my arms. Her whole body seized, thighs clamping around my waist and walls squeezing down on me so hard I saw white, and she cried my name into my shoulder in a long, shattered wail. The fairy lights pulsed gold three times in a row, bright enough to throw our shadows across the far wall.

Feeling her pulse and clench around me dragged me right over with her. I buried my face in her hair and came hard and deep inside her, my arms locked around her back, while she kept shuddering and whispering my name in little gasps that made no sense together.

For a long while neither of us moved.

She stayed wrapped around me, her face hidden in my neck, her breathing evening out in slow waves that rocked us both. I could smell vanilla shampoo and sweat and the expensive candle on her desk. My fingers traced idle lines along her spine, counting vertebrae because my brain needed something to count.

The interface opened in the corner of my vision.

? Temptation Gauge: Felicity Hardy, 60%. Status: DEVOTED (Confirmed). ?

? Milestone Reached. Gold Gacha Pull queued for Host. Claim now? ?

I looked at the gold frame floating over Felicity’s shoulder, all shimmer and promise, and thought about every time I’d jumped at one of those like a raccoon at a dumpster. This time I closed it.

? Deferral logged. The Host has never declined an available pull. Noted with interest. ?

It could note whatever it wanted. The gacha would keep, and the girl in my arms had just shown me the loneliest room of her life by accident.

Felicity lifted her head after a while. Her face was a wreck, eyeliner smudged into dark wings down her cheeks and lips swollen and pink from biting them. She looked younger than eighteen and older than me at the same time, and she was smiling, a small, crooked smile with nothing staged in it.

"That was recital night," she told me, voice rough. "Second grade. I did the whole show with an illusion because I froze, and then I sat at that table until Marisol, our housekeeper, went home at nine. Nobody else came."

"I figured."

"I’ve never shown that to anyone." She poked my chest, right over the second heartbeat. "And now Mr. Whiskers has seen it too, which is honestly worse."

I glanced over at the stuffed rabbit, who was still wearing her pink bra across one ear like a hat. "He’s handling it with dignity."

"He is a professional." She laughed, a real one, and dropped her forehead back to my shoulder. "Okay, real talk, bestie. You have Combat Theory in, like, twenty minutes, and if you show up looking like this, Dravid is going to write it in a file, and Sloane is going to explode a vending machine."

"She said I can’t show up hurt."

"You’re not hurt, you’re devastated, that’s different." She pulled back far enough to look me over, and her mouth twitched. "Your hair looks unhinged. You have mascara on your shoulder and a bite mark next to her bite mark. It’s giving war crime."

"You did that."

"I know, and I’m so proud of me." She kissed my jaw, soft and quick, and then she climbed off me in one slow slide that made us both inhale through our teeth. She flopped onto her back across the mattress, arms flung wide, staring at Gerald like he owed her money. "Go shower in your own room. If you use mine I’ll keep you here till dinner and we’ll both get expelled."

I found my jeans under her desk chair and my shirt draped over the lamp again, which seemed to be where my shirts went to die in this building. I was halfway through buttoning it when my phone vibrated on the nightstand.

Felicity rolled over and grabbed it before I could, because boundaries had never been one of her personal brand pillars. She squinted at the screen. "Who’s gloomswarm dot official and why is she texting you a picture of a door?"

She handed it over. The message thread with Ophelia showed three new texts, all lowercase, all radiating the energy of a girl typing from behind a parasol.

ophelia: dralun is making the grunt that means he wants to bite someone

ophelia: we went back to moss st to check on mateo’s mom and found this

ophelia: mr stitches says this is ur problem now. -5 pts for not being here

Below that sat a photo taken under the yellow hallway light of the walk-up on Moss Street. It showed Mateo’s apartment door, the one that had blown outward when his Aspect surfaced, still leaning against the wall where the landlord had dumped it. The wood was splintered and scorched along the edges. A pale curve of bone stuck out of the center panel, snapped off at the base, right where Mateo’s first spur had punched through.

Somebody had taped a sheet of printer paper beneath it. The handwriting was neat block capitals in black marker.

$300 CASH FOR THE DOOR. THE ONE WITH THE BONE IN IT.

There was no name, just a phone number with a local area code underneath.