Chapter 578 | She Brought Her Father

Chapter 578: 578 | She Brought Her Father

I pulled on compression shorts, a training shirt, and the leather boots Aurora bought me. The silver ring Yumi gave me sat warm on my right middle finger, humming its steady monitoring frequency to a copper-haired woman in Santa Barbara who kept dead birds in jars and wanted to take me apart for science. I laced the boots and headed for the door.

Hikaru’s bedroom was dark, but her mug was already on the rack when I passed the kitchen. Dry. She had been up and gone before I woke. On a normal morning, she would be at the gym already, running through forms with a focus that made other students switch training rooms. But today the mug sat further back on the rack than usual, pushed almost to the wall, and a single protein bar waited on the counter with a sticky note attached in Hikaru’s handwriting.

The note said: Eat this.

Two words. No signature. No greeting. No emotion visible anywhere in the clean strokes of a pen that cost fourteen dollars because Hikaru Tanaka did not buy cheap pens and could not afford expensive ones.

I ate the protein bar and pocketed the sticky note.

The campus at five-twenty in the morning looked the way it always did: empty, beautiful, and completely unaware that the people walking across it were slowly going insane. Dew clung to every surface. The path toward the Summit gym curved through the sculpture garden where I had crashed into Aurora six weeks ago, and the bench near the retaining wall still bore a faint scorch mark from the time Blair lost control of her temperature while arguing with her own feelings about my existence.

The scorch mark was darker today. She had been back.

I kept walking.

The gym door was locked, which meant Vale had not arrived. I checked my phone: five twenty-four. Vale’s training sessions began at five-thirty, but the man operated on a personal timeline that treated punctuality as a suggestion designed for lesser beings. Standing outside this door in the cold every morning had taught me that the lock would click at some arbitrary moment between five twenty-eight and five forty-seven, depending on how many restaurant reviews Vale read over his coffee. The man had once been six minutes late because he found a disagreement about ramen broth in the comments section and felt morally obligated to weigh in.

I leaned against the wall and waited. The California air carried salt from the cliffs below, and somewhere to the south, a ferry horn sounded its first note of the morning run.

My phone buzzed.

Belle, at five twenty-five in the morning: She called me at 2:11 after you hung up. She was wearing your sweater. She asked me if Clause 11 was legally enforceable and then I told her what kindness costs. I told her the truth. Then I asked her what she wants if she wins.

I read the message three times.

Belle again: I told her to ask you herself. She said something I am not going to repeat in writing because it would damage both our reputations. Then she said goodnight and her voice cracked on the word night. That is not in the spreadsheet. That is just for you.

I stared at the screen until the letters blurred.

A third message: Thursday at seven. Summit House. I’m bringing chips. Naomi’s bringing tea. You’re bringing whatever face you make when you’re about to ruin someone’s life by being honest at them. Davenport is bringing nine pages and a sweater that smells like you.

And then, because Belle Fox never leaves a conversation without establishing who owns the last word: Don’t be late. My spreadsheet has a column for it.

I put the phone in my pocket and tipped my head back against the gym wall. Above me, the sky had shifted from deep blue to the pale grey that preceded sunrise, and a single star hung stubborn near the horizon, refusing to yield to the light.

The heaviness was not going away. It would sit on my chest through Vale’s training, through breakfast, through drills, through Cross’s lecture about transition biomes, through the afternoon session where Misato would run us through formations and Blair would stand at the left support and pretend she could not feel me looking at her and Naomi would hold my hand under the desk and Belle would document everything in a spreadsheet that had become the most complete record of human disaster in the western hemisphere.

It would sit there until Thursday at seven, when Blair Davenport would walk into Summit House with a contract and a stolen sweater, and I would have to decide what I wanted if I won.

The lock clicked.

I pushed off the wall and walked inside. The gym was empty. The lights were already on. The resistance band station had been calibrated, the mats laid out in the pattern Vale preferred. His coffee mug sat on the chair at the far end, steaming.

No Vale.

I checked the time. Five thirty-one.

On the far wall, taped to the mirror at eye level in handwriting I recognized because it belonged to the strongest hunter in California, a single sticky note read:

Run.

I looked at the note. I looked at the empty gym. I looked at the resistance bands, the mats, the coffee mug, and the general absence of a man who could fold space with his mind.

Then I heard it. Footsteps. Not from inside the building. From outside, moving fast, getting louder, and accompanied by the sound of a woman’s combat boots hitting pavement at a dead sprint.

The gym door slammed open behind me.

Misato Ayame stood in the doorway, breathing hard, her lime green ponytail crooked, her captain’s hoodie zipped to her throat. Her tablet was missing. Her eyes were wide.

"Monroe."

"Captain."

"Where is Vale?"

"Gone. Left a note. It says run."

Misato looked at the sticky note on the mirror. Her face went through four separate expressions in two seconds, none of them good. She pulled her phone from her hoodie pocket, checked a message, and her entire body went rigid.

"We need to go. Now."

"What happened?"

"Cassandra Davenport just landed on the island." Misato’s voice dropped low enough that I felt it in my sternum. "She brought her father."