Chapter 669 | Without Me

Chapter 669: 669 | Without Me

The croissant station on the Spine had a line six people deep by the time I got there, which meant I was going to be late for the handoff if I didn’t cut somebody. I considered it. The guy in front of me was wearing a blazer with the sleeves rolled up like he’d seen it in a magazine and decided that counted as a personality. I could take him.

But Sloane would know. That was the thing about the Emotional Duplex. Every petty victory, every small cruelty, every moment of satisfaction that came from being an asshole in a breakfast line would hit her like a contact high the second I crossed into her fifty-meter radius. And today was day three of the punishment, which meant I was still working off the debt from Tuesday night, and showing up to the handoff radiating smug was not the play.

So I waited. Like a normal person. Like someone who hadn’t spent the previous night on a rooftop with a snake girl in a wetsuit who kissed like she was trying to win an argument.

The cashier recognized me by now. She had my order rung up before I finished opening my mouth, and the total came to eight dollars and seventy-three cents, which was a dollar fifty more than the actual cost because I kept telling her to keep the change. Sloane was going to yell at me for the overpay again. She was going to say I was trying to buy my way out of emotional accountability with croissant-based bribery, and she was going to be completely correct, and I was going to keep doing it anyway because watching her eat breakfast while being mad at me was one of the few pleasures I had left.

The walk from the Spine to the 1-A homeroom took four minutes if you didn’t stop to talk to anyone, which I didn’t, because talking to people required a version of Lukas Belmont that had slept more than five hours and hadn’t spent the last forty-eight cataloging all the ways his life had become structurally unsound. The fog had lifted overnight, and the campus looked too clean in the morning light, all white stone and eucalyptus and the distant hum of the WARDEN pillars running their passive scans. I passed three different students who looked at me too long. One of them whispered something to her friend that I chose not to hear.

Badge 138 was famous now. Or infamous. The distinction mattered to the Commission and to nobody else.

Sloane was waiting outside the homeroom with Koda, same as yesterday, same as the day before. She wore her blazer open over a white shirt that probably cost more than my entire wardrobe, and her pink hair was pulled into the high combat ponytail that meant she was planning to train after class. Her arms were crossed. Her foot was tapping. Her blue eyes found me the second I rounded the corner, and I felt the bond snap open between us like a door someone had kicked in.

She knew something was wrong before I took another step.

I watched her face change. The annoyance that had been sitting there since Tuesday flickered and died, replaced by something sharper, something that looked a lot like the expression she wore before she broke furniture. Her foot stopped tapping. Her arms uncrossed. She said something to Koda that made the big guy glance at me with the expression of a man who had seen this particular weather pattern before and was choosing to evacuate.

Koda patted Sloane on the shoulder, gave me a nod that communicated both solidarity and the deep certainty that I was about to have a very bad morning, and disappeared into the homeroom. The door closed behind him with a soft click.

Sloane and I stood there in the empty hallway, ten feet apart, the croissant bag growing warm in my hand.

"You have something to tell me," she said. Not a question.

"I do."

"Something you’ve been sitting on since last night."

"Also yes."

Her jaw tightened. I could feel her pulse through the bond, fast and getting faster, and underneath it was the specific flavor of Sloane Fitzgerald preparing to be hurt and deciding she was going to be furious about it instead. She took three steps toward me, close enough that I could smell the lavender dryer sheets and the mint toothpaste, and she grabbed the front of my jacket with one hand and pulled me down until our foreheads touched.

"Tell me."

So I told her.

I told her about Wednesday night at the office, about Dralun leaving to fix a railing bolt and Ophelia making threats about lattes. I told her about the Faceless Veil and the rooftops and the girl in the neoprene suit who called herself Lamia and smelled like strawberry lip gloss. I told her about the pawn shop and the jade hairpin and the reflection problem I’d spotted that she’d missed, and the way we’d turned a theft into an inventory relocation, and how Dralun had known the whole time and let it happen because he was teaching both of us something without saying a single word about it.

And then I told her about the kiss.

Sloane’s grip on my jacket tightened. Her knuckles went white. I felt the amber sparks crawl up her arm before she suppressed them, hot enough to singe the fabric, and the bond between us flooded with something that tasted like battery acid and burned sugar.

"She kissed you."

"She did."

"On a roof. At midnight. After you helped her commit a crime."

"Technically it was inventory management."

"Lukas."

"Yes. She kissed me. On the mouth. For about three seconds. And then she said it was her reward for being an idiot and disappeared into an alley."

Sloane’s teeth were gritted so hard I could hear them grinding. Her blue eyes had gone dark, the color of deep water before a storm, and her breathing was shallow and fast. Through the bond I could feel every layer of what she was processing, the jealousy and the anger and the territorial instinct that she’d never fully admit to, all of it braided together with something else, something that scared her more than the kiss itself.

"You went on a roof," she said, very quietly. "At midnight. With a criminal. Without me."