Chapter 499 | A Renaissance Painting with Questionable Taste

Chapter 499: 499 | A Renaissance Painting with Questionable Taste

The Sanctum dissolved around us in layers, peeling back stone and torchlight and the faint smell of candle wax until California materialized in its place. Aurora’s living room. Real couch. Real carpet. Real everything, including the three women arranged across the furniture like a Renaissance painting commissioned by someone with questionable taste.

Naomi sat cross-legged on the floor near the coffee table, wrapped in one of Aurora’s oversized sweaters with the collar sliding off one brown shoulder, her pink and black hair a complete disaster from sand and sex and being loved properly on a volcanic beach. She held a champagne flute between both hands and her pink eyes found mine immediately, tracking down to Addison in my arms, and she smiled. That specific Naomi smile. The one that forgave everything before you’d even finished the apology.

Belle occupied the kitchen stool she’d claimed earlier, legs crossed, blue hair retied in a damp ponytail, wearing my stolen grey crew neck over her bare legs because she refused to put pants on after a penthouse experience. She had her phone out. She had been timing something.

"Forty-seven minutes," Belle announced. She did not look up from the screen. "Fourteen minutes longer than Aurora. I want that noted for the record."

"There is no record," I said.

"There is always a record." Belle’s thumb moved across the screen. "I maintain the record. The record is comprehensive."

Aurora sprawled across the couch in the remains of her schoolgirl costume, the white shirt unbuttoned completely and hanging open over the black bra, the grey skirt twisted sideways, one red ribbon still clinging to a ponytail while the other one had been lost somewhere in a dimension that no longer existed. She had a glass of champagne balanced on her stomach and a look of absolute satisfaction on her face, the look of a woman who had orchestrated an entire evening and watched every single piece land where she intended.

"He’s carrying her," Aurora observed. "That’s adorable. Belle, are you getting this?"

"I’m getting everything. I have been getting everything. My phone’s storage is at eighty-seven percent and climbing."

Addison shifted in my arms and spoke into my collarbone. "Put me down before they start taking pictures."

"Too late." Belle’s camera shutter clicked twice.

I lowered Addison onto the couch beside Aurora, and Addison landed with the boneless grace of a cat dropped into a bathtub. She flopped sideways, her legs draped across Aurora’s lap, her leather outfit disheveled beyond repair, her black lipstick smeared to her chin, and her purple-highlighted hair covering most of her face. One combat boot was missing again. I had no idea where it went. The Sanctum probably ate it.

"Well?" Aurora poked Addison’s hip with a bare foot. "How was it?"

Addison raised one middle finger from beneath the curtain of her hair. It trembled.

"That good, huh."

The middle finger wavered and collapsed back to the cushion. Addison made a sound that could have been a word in a language she hadn’t invented yet.

Naomi covered her mouth with one hand. Her shoulders shook. She was trying very hard not to laugh and failing at it completely, which was the most Naomi thing I’d ever seen.

I stood in the middle of Aurora’s living room wearing nothing but my shorts and the accumulated damage of four consecutive sessions. Scratch marks from all four women crossed my shoulders and back in overlapping patterns that would take a forensic team to untangle. The bite mark Addison left on my hip throbbed in time with my pulse. Belle’s contribution sat high on my collarbone, a purple hickey she’d applied with the conviction of someone stamping a property deed. Milk had dried on my chest and stomach in abstract patterns that would sell for six figures at a contemporary art gallery if I framed the right narrative.

The graft hummed warm and full beneath my sternum. Four rings burning steady. The death timer in my peripheral vision read eighteen days and change, the highest number I’d seen since arriving in this world. The doubled multiplier from the resonance quest had stacked with Silver-tier essence from four separate women across four continuous hours of dilated time, and the math had come back generous in a way that felt like a reward rather than a reprieve.

For the first time in six weeks, I was not counting hours. I was counting days. Plural. With breathing room to spare.

"Jace." Belle set her phone face-down on the counter. Her voice had shifted from clinical documentation to something lower and quieter and real, the voice she used in dark rooms when nobody was performing. "Come here."

I walked over and she grabbed my hand and pulled me down to her eye level on the stool. Her amber-brown eyes searched my face for something she seemed afraid to name. Belle Fox, who wrote coroner’s reports at three in the morning and negotiated emotional damages in chip currencies, studied my expression the way she studied everything: looking for the flaw, the angle, the leverage.

"How many days?" she asked.

"Eighteen."

Her grip tightened on my fingers. Her other hand came up and pressed flat against my chest, right over the graft, right over the scars, and I felt her fingers spread against my skin like she was trying to hold something in.

"Eighteen," she repeated. Quiet enough that Addison’s post-orgasmic mumbling covered the word from the couch.

"Eighteen days, six hours, and change."

"That’s the longest you’ve had."

"By a lot."

Belle’s jaw worked. I watched her process the number through every filter she owned: the financial analysis, the risk assessment, the cost-benefit calculation that lived behind those sharp eyes and never turned off. Belle Fox did not cry. Belle Fox had made a deal with herself about that a long time ago, on a day when her mother lost a house and sold iron sconces for forty dollars.

She didn’t cry now either.

But she pressed her forehead against my chest and stayed there for five seconds, and her shoulders dropped like she’d been holding a weight for six weeks and someone had finally told her she could set it down.

"Good," she said into my skin. "That’s good."

I put a hand on the back of her head and held her there. Her hair smelled like the expensive shampoo from the penthouse bathroom, sandalwood and something floral that the Sanctum had stocked because I’d told it to give Belle nice things.

"Group hug," Aurora announced from the couch. "Right now. Mandatory. This is not a request."

"Absolutely not," Addison protested from beneath her hair.

"The woman who got gagged and loved it does not get to refuse a group hug."

Addison’s hand shot up from the cushion and made a grab for Aurora’s throat that missed by six inches due to motor function failure. Aurora caught the hand and kissed the knuckles instead, which made Addison hiss like a wet cat.

Naomi rose from the floor and padded over to where Belle still leaned against my chest. She didn’t insert herself or ask permission. She just settled against my side and put her head on my shoulder and her hand over Belle’s hand over my heart, and the three of us stood like that in the kitchen while Aurora dragged Addison off the couch by the ankles.

"I can’t walk," Addison complained. "My legs are nonfunctional. I’m filing for disability."