Chapter 495 | Grounds for Homicide

Chapter 495: 495 | Grounds for Homicide

The classroom dissolved behind me as I walked toward the hall, the Sanctum reading my intent and pulling the environment apart in reverse. Chalk dust to nothing. Wooden desks folding inward. The milk-streaked blackboard evaporating like it had never held Aurora against it and rewritten physics with her body.

I stepped through the transition and the Gold-rank fidelity did its thing where the universe grabbed my spine and dunked it in warm static for exactly one second, and then I stood at the mouth of a corridor that had no business existing inside a pocket dimension I’d spent forty-five hundred credits upgrading.

Because the Sanctum had built Addison a dungeon.

Not a metaphor. An actual dungeon. Stone walls slick with condensation that caught red light from somewhere I couldn’t see. A ceiling low enough to feel like a promise. The air smelled like iron and leather and something warmer underneath, and I recognized the aesthetic immediately because Addison had described it to me in a hospital room with the same reverence most people reserve for religion.

Chains hung from the walls. Padded cuffs at wrist height and ankle height. A wooden frame in the center of the room, an X built for someone who wanted to be spread and helpless and completely at the mercy of whoever held the reins.

And leaning against that frame, one boot crossed over the other, arms folded under her chest, was Addison Baxter.

She’d changed.

Gone was the trench coat, gone was the casual party clothes. She wore black leather that hugged every curve like it had been poured on and left to set. A bustier that shoved her 36F chest up into a display that made my brain short out for a full second. Fishnet stockings running up her thighs into a garter setup that connected to nothing practical and everything obscene. Combat boots, because of course. Her black hair with the purple threads hung loose for once, spilling past her shoulders instead of trapped in the usual chaotic bun, and it changed her entire face, made her softer and more dangerous at the same time.

Fresh black lipstick. Heavy eyeliner sharp enough to file a report about. Violet contacts back in place, which meant she’d decided she wanted the armor tonight.

She had a lollipop in her mouth.

Cherry, judging by the color of the stick.

She pulled it free with a wet pop and pointed it at me. "You took forever, milk boy. I was starting to think you forgot about the one who actually walked through a hospital for you."

"I could never forget you." I stepped into the room, and the door behind me sealed with a grind of stone flowing together like water. "You leave dents."

"Damn right I do." Her violet eyes tracked me across the dungeon, and beneath the performance I caught the real thing flickering, the girl who slept with a stuffed bat and read manga about delinquents falling for student council presidents. "You look wrecked. Three girls already?"

"Three."

"And you’ve still got something left for me." She said it like a test, like she expected me to lie, and something in her posture tightened when I didn’t. "Aurora warned me you’d be running on fumes."

"Aurora underestimates me." I stopped a few feet away and let myself look at her properly, the leather and the fishnets and the way she’d built this entire room to hand me the wheel while pretending she was the one in charge. "This is a lot of hardware for someone who claims she doesn’t do romance."

"This isn’t romance." She popped the lollipop back in her mouth and spoke around it, the candy clicking against her teeth. "This is a functional adult arrangement with restraints. Big difference."

"Right." I reached out and hooked a finger through the chain hanging beside her head, testing its weight. Solid. The Sanctum had built it to hold real force. "So which part of you wanted the chains? The part that punches through training dummies, or the part that keeps a stuffed bat named Vlad?"

The lollipop stopped moving.

Her whole body went still, and for a second the violet contacts couldn’t hide what surfaced behind them, that raw exposed thing I’d found in a farmhouse when I put a blindfold on her and made her fall apart.

"Aurora told you about Vlad." Her voice dropped, lost the edge. "That’s classified. That’s grounds for actual homicide."

"Aurora told me a lot of things." I let the chain go and stepped closer, close enough that I could smell the cherry and the leather and the something underneath that was just her. "She told me you cut through four training dummies because you got sharper than you meant to. She told me you write poetry you’ve never shown anyone. She told me you’ve spent two years keeping everyone at arm’s length because letting people in means they can hurt you."

Addison’s jaw worked. The lollipop came out again, held between two fingers now, forgotten. "I’m going to kill her."

"You love her."

"Same thing." But her voice cracked on it, and she looked away, and I watched the goth reaper try to rebuild her walls in real time and fail because I’d already seen underneath them.

I reached up and cupped the side of her face, thumb brushing along her cheekbone the way I’d learned she liked when she thought no one was paying attention. "You built a dungeon so you’d have an excuse to be tied down. So you could stop being the strong one for an hour."

"Don’t." The word came out strangled. "Don’t do the thing where you say the true stuff. I hate the true stuff."

"I know." I leaned in and pressed my mouth to the corner of hers, catching the edge of the black lipstick. "That’s why I keep doing it."

She made a sound low in her throat, half snarl and half something that had no defense against it, and then her free hand fisted in my shirt and yanked me the rest of the way in and she kissed me like she wanted to draw blood.

She did draw blood, actually. Bit my lower lip hard enough that copper flooded my mouth and mixed with the cherry off her tongue, and I let her because Addison Baxter needed her violence acknowledged before she’d let herself be soft, and Euphoric Feedback ran passive in the background and turned the sting into something that made my whole spine light up.

I broke the kiss and pushed her back against the wooden frame. Her breath hitched.

"Cuffs," she said. Demand, not question. "The wrist ones. Now. Before I chicken out and start acting tough again."