Chapter 676 | He Has FEELINGS for Eyes!

Chapter 676: 676 | He Has FEELINGS for Eyes!

The black stairs creaked under my oversized boots, kronk, kronk, and the office at the top was exactly as we’d left it. The radiator clanked. The bat stickers on the window had multiplied by two. The skeleton on my desk still held his little sign reading WORK HARDER, and somebody had given him a tiny paper top hat since this morning.

Ophelia sat on top of her desk cross-legged, her black lace parasol open over her head to shield her from the ceiling light, which she had previously described as aesthetically violent.

"You’re late," she said, scrolling her phone. "Mr. Stitches noticed. Minus three points."

"We were at a medical clinic for a child, Ophelia."

"Mr. Stitches doesn’t care about children. He’s a bear." She glanced up, and her grey eyes narrowed at me over the lace edge of the parasol. "You’ve got your thinking face on. Your thinking face is ugly. What’s in your pocket?"

"Nothing is in my pocket."

"You’re touching your pocket right now, liar."

I was, in fact, touching my pocket. That was embarrassing for a man who had beaten a federal director in a conference room nine days ago. I took the card out and held it up between two fingers.

"Some creep was handing these out in the waiting room. Dralun stood up and he ran."

"Dralun stood up," Ophelia repeated. "Wow. Real heroics. Let me see it."

"I’ll read it to you."

"I said let me see it."

She closed her parasol with a hard fwip and slid off the desk. Her platforms hit the floorboards with a heavy clok-clok as she crossed to me, and instead of just taking the card like a normal person she reached for it while I was still sitting in my chair, so I lifted it higher out of reach on pure instinct. That was a mistake. Ophelia Lin did not lose small battles, and she had decided this one was going to be a war.

She put one knee on the seat of my chair, right between my thighs, and stretched up after the card.

"Give it, give it, give it, hnnngh, you have long arms, this is discrimination."

Her chest landed against my face. The corset was velvet over steel boning, and it smelled like baby powder and a dark sweet perfume, and I had a very close, very unwanted view of the top of the square neckline and the silver cross on its black ribbon sitting in the valley there. Her curls fell over my shoulders like curtains. My chair rolled backward on its squeaking casters, eeek, and banged into the desk behind me, and she came with it, both knees on the seat now, her skirt rucked up high enough that the garter clasps were fully on display against her pale thighs.

The interface chimed in my ear. Ecchi logic event. Temptation gauge, Ophelia Lin, eight percent. Note: the host is holding a piece of evidence above his head, which is technically the only thing he is holding.

"You’re breathing on me," Ophelia said into my hair, her voice gone high and furious. "You’re breathing on my sternum, I can feel it, that’s minus fifty, that’s minus a hundred..."

"You climbed on me, so the breathing is technically your fault."

"I did NOT climb on you, I am standing on your chair, there is a difference, mmph," and she lunged one more time, her whole body stretching up against mine, and snatched the card out of my fingers.

She sat back on my knees, triumphant and pink-faced, her chest heaving against the velvet. Then she realized exactly where she was sitting. Her eyes went wide behind the eyeliner, the color climbing from her collarbones to her ears in a single blotchy wave, and she made a small strangled noise, eep, before scrambling backward off the chair and nearly falling over her own platforms. She caught herself on the corner of Dralun’s desk.

Dralun had been sitting at his own desk the entire time, his sister’s mug in one claw, watching us with the expression of a man waiting for a bus.

"I saw nothing," he said. "Log it that way."

"Mr. Stitches saw everything," Ophelia hissed, scooping the bear off her desk and clutching him to her chest like a shield. "You’re at negative three hundred and forty, Belmont, and that’s me being lenient, because the bear is traumatized."

"The bear has stitches for eyes."

"He has FEELINGS for eyes!"

She smoothed her skirt down with one shaking hand and looked at the card at last. Her lip curled. "Ew. Shed material? Gross. Who buys scales, some guy making boots? Disgusting."

"Turn it over," I said.

She turned it over.

On the back, in the same black block capitals, someone had printed a phone number. No name. A local area code, the 323 that covered the river district and half of the Strand.

Ophelia looked at it.

Then she went very still, stiller than I had ever seen her, the parasol forgotten under her arm and Mr. Stitches slipping half an inch in her grip. The bratty pink drained out of her face and left something white and sharp behind. Her thumb moved over the digits once, slowly, the way you trace a word you already know.

"I know this number," she said.

Dralun set his mug down on the desk. It didn’t clink.

"I called it eleven times last spring," Ophelia said, still looking at the card, her voice flat and quiet in a way that made the radiator sound loud. "When Grandma tried to buy back her mother’s bangle. He never picked up, so I left voicemails. Really mean voicemails." She looked up at me, and her grey eyes had gone hard as nickels. "That’s the back office line at Eastside Pawn on Rourke."

She didn’t have to say his name. Every person in that room had read it in Grandma Lin’s ledger, next to a little red knife.

"It’s Kask’s number," she said anyway.