Chapter 335 | Two Bells, One Apartment
Chapter 335: 335 | Two Bells, One Apartment
I pocketed my phone while Addison’s capitalized meltdown continued filling the group chat and headed back to Building C with my hands in my jacket pockets and a stupid grin plastered across my face that I couldn’t quite kill. The elevator ride to the fifth floor gave me exactly forty-seven seconds to think about what tonight actually meant in operational terms. Two full extractions.
Vault storage to maximum capacity. Gold-tier buff for Naomi. Silver-tier buff for Belle. Enough banked essence to Overclock twice during tomorrow’s gate if everything went sideways, which it would, because everything always went sideways.
Hikaru’s door was shut when I walked in. No light underneath. The nurse’s clearance appointment was at the medical center across campus, a thirty-minute evaluation that involved blood work, mana circulation checks, and a physical stress test to confirm Hikaru could handle gate conditions without her torso splitting open again. She’d be gone until at least ten.
I showered. Trimmed my nails because Belle would actually check. Found the brown bottle of chocolate body oil in the back of my desk drawer where Aurora had left it last weekend with a sticky note that read "for emergencies and Naomi" in Aurora’s handwriting.
I set out four empty essence bottles on the nightstand, their glass surfaces catching the overhead light like expensive trophies waiting to be filled. Changed into clean basketball shorts and nothing else because anything more would just end up on the floor in approximately ninety seconds.
At 8:56 PM, someone knocked twice. Quick. Impatient. Belle’s knock.
I opened the door and found them standing shoulder to shoulder in the hallway, both wearing oversized hoodies that hung to mid-thigh. Belle’s was black. Naomi’s was grey. They looked like they were headed to a sleepover, which I supposed they were, if sleepovers involved supernatural lactation and interdimensional pocket universes designed for maximum privacy.
Belle pushed past me without waiting for an invitation, her blue hair swinging loose around her shoulders as she scanned the apartment with the reflexive threat assessment she applied to every room she entered. Naomi followed two steps behind, clutching the strap of a small overnight bag and smiling in that way she did when she wanted to appear calm but her pulse was doing something complicated.
"Hikaru?" Belle asked.
"Medical clearance. Gone until ten minimum."
"Good." Belle dropped her hoodie on the couch with zero ceremony and turned to face me. "You’re smirking."
I was. I knew I was. The expression had been building since approximately four-thirty that afternoon when the plan crystallized in my head during a moment of inspiration that I was choosing to attribute to genius rather than horniness.
"Am I?"
"You’re doing the face." Belle crossed her arms beneath her chest. "The one where you’ve figured something out and you’re waiting for the rest of us to catch up. I hate that face."
"Same face I had when I figured out how to kill the alpha."
"Different context. That face saved our lives. This face means you’re about to do something that makes me question every decision I’ve made since meeting you."
Naomi set her bag down by the couch and looked between us with the quiet observation skills that made her the squad’s emotional radar. Her pink eyes tracked my expression, catalogued whatever data she found there, and apparently decided the results were inconclusive.
"Are you two wearing them?" I asked.
The question landed exactly the way I wanted it to. Belle’s chin lifted half an inch, the corner of her mouth pulling sideways into something between a challenge and a promise.
Naomi’s hand drifted toward her shell necklace before she caught herself and redirected the motion to tuck a strand of pink and black hair behind her ear.
Belle didn’t answer with words. She reached down, grabbed the hem of her black tank top, and pulled it over her head in one smooth motion that sent her blue hair cascading across bare shoulders.
The cow-print bra sat against her pale skin like it had been designed by someone who understood exactly how much destruction a single piece of fabric could cause when applied to a 38DD chest. Black and white patches.
Thin straps that dug into the soft flesh of her shoulders just enough to create the impression of fullness that defied the laws of textile engineering.
A tiny silver bell dangled from the center gore, resting in the valley between her breasts with the quiet threat of something that would make noise at exactly the wrong moment.
She popped the button on her jeans next, shimmied them down over her hips with the confidence of someone who’d done this particular show before and remembered exactly how effective it was.
The matching cow-print panties rode low on her hip bones, the waistband sitting in that specific territory between underwear and lingerie that Belle navigated with the ease of a diplomat crossing a border checkpoint.
Black thigh-high stockings completed the set, their lace tops pressing into the soft flesh of her upper thighs in a way that created a landscape I could have stared at for approximately four hours if time permitted.
Belle stood there in the middle of my living room wearing cow-print lingerie and an expression that dared me to comment, her weight shifted onto one hip and her blue hair falling across one eye like an album cover for an album that would absolutely be banned in several countries.
"Your turn," she said to Naomi, without looking away from me.
Naomi’s throat worked around a swallow. Then she reached for the hem of her grey hoodie with both hands and pulled it overhead in a motion that was slower than Belle’s, more careful, but carried the same destination.
The hoodie cleared her head and took some of her hair with it, pink and black strands settling across her dark brown shoulders in messy waves that framed the identical cow-print bra on a completely different canvas.
Where Belle’s pale skin made the black and white pattern look like a fashion statement, Naomi’s warm brown complexion turned the same lingerie into something that shouldn’t legally exist.
Her 36D chest filled the cups without the aggressive overflow that Belle’s frame produced, but the way the fabric sat against her skin, tight enough to create gentle compression without flattening, made the bell at her center gore swing with each breath like a metronome counting down to something inevitable.
Naomi stepped out of her shorts with less grace than Belle had managed, catching one ankle on the fabric and stumbling a half step before recovering with a nervous laugh that turned my chest into something warm and inconvenient.
The cow-print panties matched Belle’s exactly. The thigh-highs matched too, their lace bands pressing into the muscle of her longer legs at a different height than Belle’s, creating a different equation with the same devastating answer.
Two women in cow-print lingerie standing in my living room with their bells catching the overhead light.
If the old man from my dream library could see this moment, his white beard would catch fire.
