Chapter 541 | The Shower Stall Gambit

Chapter 541: 541 | The Shower Stall Gambit

Belle froze. Her lips moved while she divided by eight, subtracted forty percent, added the bonus back in, and arrived at a number. Her shoulders came down, and the red faded from her face at a visible speed.

"Fine. I forgive you for approximately twelve percent of this."

"Only twelve?"

"The other eighty-eight percent is going to cost you, and you’re going to pay it in person."

She turned and walked toward the changing tents, and she added an extra sway to her hips that she absolutely knew I was watching. The torn suit peeled a little further with every step. One of the medics dropped a roll of gauze.

Naomi let go of my hand and bent to wring her hair out onto the grass. The Gold buff still lit her from inside, soft amber glowing at her throat and wrists. The diagonal tear across her chest had widened on the way through, and the neoprene barely held on over one breast now, pinned in place by nothing but surface tension and faith. She caught me looking and didn’t cover up.

"Go get checked out before Misato kills you, and then come find me."

"You’re giving me orders now?"

"I carried you out of the ocean twice this month. I can give you whatever I want."

She said it lightly, but her pink eyes stayed on my face for a long beat, reading every scratch. Then she kissed my cheek, quick and salty, and walked toward the medic tent to have the scratch along her ribs looked at.

A notification slid into my peripheral vision in pale gold.

◆ GATE CLEARED ◆

Hostiles: 61 + 1 Alpha (Silver)

Casualties: 0

Squad Coordination: 94%

Overclock Consumed: 1 Cup (Silver, Belle Fox)

Essence Vault: 3/12 Cups

Lifespan: 17 Days, 9 Hours

Points: +1,200 ℴ

Level progress ticked up another chunk. My Agility bar gained two segments from the vertical nightmare that was climbing on a monster’s face. I dismissed the notification before it could start congratulating me for not dying.

The graft hummed warm and full behind my sternum, pleased with the workout. Eight rings steady. The ninth one burning brighter than it should.

A medic cleared me in four minutes flat. Bruised ribs, a torn shoulder capsule that my B-rank Endurance was already repairing on its own, and a cut on my scalp I hadn’t noticed until she pointed it out. She stuck a patch over the wound and told me to drink water. I said I would. She gave me the look every medic has perfected after years of hunters lying to their faces.

Misato intercepted me halfway to the changing tents. Her lime ponytail had come apart at some point during the fight, and wet strands clung to her cheek. She’d stripped the top half of her suit and tied the arms around her hips, leaving only the grey compression bra. She looked like she wanted to pick a fight in a parking lot and win.

She stopped directly in front of me and poked the patch on my head. Hard.

"You climbed onto its face."

"The face was where the core lived."

"The plan was to hold the shelf and make calls, Monroe. You made one call, and it was to leave."

"I also made a call about Naomi diving. That one worked."

"That’s the only reason I’m yelling at you instead of drowning you in the harbor right now."

Her thumb moved down from my forehead to my jaw. It stayed there. She took two slow breaths through her nose, and her shoulders dropped maybe half an inch.

Behind her, Jordan was sprawled face-down on a cot, telling a medic that he’d seen god and god had tentacles.

Misato’s thumb pressed a little harder into the angle of my jaw, right where the pulse kicks up under the skin.

"You could’ve died up there."

"I didn’t."

"That’s not the point."

"It’s the only point that matters."

"Good call on the dive," Misato muttered, so low I barely caught it. "Don’t let it go to your head, because your head is already too big for the suit."

"The suit is too big for my head, actually."

"Shower. Now. The ferry leaves in forty, and I’m not holding it for you."

She walked away before I could answer, and the lime green ring in my skull stayed warm long after she disappeared into the command tent.

The men’s changing tent was a plastic box full of steam and misery. Javier sat on a bench peeling his suit off with the care of a surgeon, whispering numbers to himself. Jordan had made it inside and collapsed on the floor, still in his wetsuit, with a towel draped over his face like a corpse.

"Leave me here, Monroe. Tell my mother I died doing what I hated."

"You didn’t die, and you killed about twelve of those things."

"Fourteen. I counted, and Javier has it in writing."

Javier nodded without looking up, and I left them both to it.

I got as far as the tent flap before a hand grabbed the back of my collar and yanked me sideways into the gap between two tents.

Belle had changed out of the ruined suit. Or she’d started to, anyway. She stood in the narrow shadow wearing only the black lace set that had been hiding under the neoprene all afternoon and a grey academy towel slung over one shoulder like a cape. Saltwater still dripped from her blue hair down her chest and into the lace between her breasts. Her skin had gone pink from cold, and goosebumps ran down her arms.

"There’s a shower trailer behind the command tent. Two stalls, and one of them has a lock."

"How do you know that?"

"I scouted it before we went in, obviously. I scout everything."

"You scouted a shower trailer before a gate run?"

"I scouted the extraction route, the medical tent, the vending machine, and the shower trailer. One of those things is going to matter to you in the next thirty seconds."

She stepped closer, and her bare stomach pressed against the torn neoprene over my chest. She was freezing. The cold from her skin soaked through the suit, and the graft behind my ribs lurched toward her like it had smelled butterscotch.

"You drank my bottle in front of everyone. That was mine, Jace. That was me in that bottle, and you knocked it back like a shot at a frat party and then went and stabbed a monster in the face."

"It worked, though."

"I know it worked. I watched it work from a rock while a tentacle tried to take my pants off." Her fingers found the zipper at my collarbone and started dragging it down, slow. "You owe me a refill, with interest, and I’ve decided the interest rate is steep."

"How steep are we talking?"

"You’ll find out in the shower."

She tugged the zipper past my sternum, then past my stomach. Cold air hit my bare chest, and her palm followed it, flat and icy against the leopard scars. She traced the top ridge with her thumb, and her amber eyes lifted to mine. They weren’t sharp anymore. They were wet at the edges, and she blinked hard, twice, before the look could turn into something she’d have to admit to later.

"You scared me," Belle whispered. "You climbed onto that thing and I couldn’t see you anymore, and I stood there doing math on whether you’d come back down."

"What did the math say?"

"The math said you were an idiot, and the math was right."

She kissed me before I could answer, hard enough to knock my head back against the tent frame. Her mouth tasted like saltwater and the cherry lip balm she swore she never wore. Her hand fisted in my open suit and dragged me forward, out of the gap and across twenty meters of grass behind the command tent, and I let her because there was no version of this where I fought back and won.

The shower trailer was a white box on wheels, and the stall door stuck until Belle kicked it. The inside held a single showerhead, a plastic bench, and barely enough room for one adult. She shoved me in first, stepped in after, and snapped the lock shut behind her.

The towel hit the floor. She reached past me, cranked the handle all the way left, and hot water crashed down on both of us.

Steam filled the stall in seconds. Belle stood under the spray with her head tipped back and her eyes closed, water running down her throat and over the black lace, turning it sheer and dark against her skin. The cups of her bra clung to her like a second layer. Her nipples pressed hard through the soaked fabric, and a thin bead of white slid from the left one and washed away in the stream.

She opened her eyes and caught me staring. For once she didn’t smirk.

"Take the suit off. All of it, and slowly, because I’ve earned a show."