Divine Milking System

Chapter 432: 432 | The Account That Doesn’t Refill

I sat down on the stool nearest the register and let my legs stop working, because they’d been threatening to for about six minutes and pride only carries you so far.

This was fascinating. I need to explain why this was fascinating.

Vale is the strongest hunter on faculty. He beat me half to death for a week straight in the Summit gym with resistance bands and philosophy. He handed me a fake Platinum crystal, watched my entire squad walk into a federal crime, and then explained that stopping us wouldn’t have been fun. When he takes off his sunglasses, the ice blue eye and the storm grey eye go flat and the temperature in the room drops nine degrees.

And a woman with flour on her chest had just called him a raccoon with a graduate degree, and he was smiling like a man getting exactly what he came for.

"You want cheese on this?" she asked me.

"Yes. Please. All of it."

"Good answer." She glanced at Vale. "He wants cheese. That’s a normal thing to want. You could learn from him."

"I don’t eat dairy."

"You don’t eat dairy," she repeated, to the tomato, in a tone I can only describe as pre-homicidal. "The man survived a Class Four breach in Guadalajara on nothing but energy gels and cigarettes but he doesn’t eat dairy."

"Lactose is a personal betrayal by my own body and I refuse to negotiate with it."

I choked on nothing. Vale doesn’t eat dairy. I extract essence from women’s bodies to survive and my mentor is lactose intolerant. There’s a joke in there somewhere and it’s going to kill me before the gates do.

Frankie caught the choke and misread it as a symptom, which is fair given I’d walked in looking like discount roadkill in expensive clothes. She was around the counter before I registered her moving, and then her palm was flat against my forehead and her other hand had my wrist and two fingers on the pulse point.

Up close she smelled like beef fat and dish soap and something floral underneath that I refused to think about, because she was standing between my knees with her chest at approximately eye level and I have exactly one flaw as a person and it’s currently pressed against a white tank top eight inches from my face.

"Pulse is fast," she said.

"That’s not medical."

"Excuse me?"

"I said that’s not, uh, that’s fine. I’m fine. That’s my normal pulse. My pulse is famously enthusiastic."

Vale, without turning around, said, "Sakura Ito logged a hundred and thirty-eight beats per minute yesterday when a young woman walked into his room. It’s a documented condition."

"How do you know that," I said.

"I read your chart. Riveting stuff. You’ve got a bite mark on your hip that Peterson refused to close out of what I can only assume was moral outrage."

Frankie let go of my wrist and stepped back, and there was a flour handprint on the shoulder of the leather jacket Aurora bought me from inside a B-rank gate, which is a sentence I have to live with now. She looked at me with something new in her expression, and it wasn’t the celebrity thing anymore.

"You’re one of his," she said.

"One of his what?"

"Projects." She wiped her hands. "He does this. Every couple of years he finds someone who’s about to waste themselves and he adopts them without paperwork and puts them through hell and then acts surprised when they come out the other side loyal. You’ve got the look. The dead eyes and the good posture."

"I have good posture?"

"You have the posture of somebody who’s been corrected a lot recently."

She went back behind the counter and flipped both patties and pressed them down with the spatula, and the sizzle jumped an octave. Then she looked at me sideways.

"How many days did he take off you? In the gate."

The question landed in my stomach like a swallowed rock.

Because here’s the thing. Nobody asks it like that. Belle asked about my recovery timeline. Naomi asked me not to die. Addison called me an idiot and then let me nurse from her chest on a chalkboard ledge for forty minutes. Not one of them knew to phrase it as a subtraction.

"What makes you think anything came off me," I said.

"I’ve been in eleven gates with a Platinum and I’ve seen four different people burn themselves for time. There’s a look to it after. Your skin’s too new. Your hair grew wrong at the crown." She pointed the spatula at my chest, where the four pale ridges sat under Aurora’s charcoal henley. "And I saw the footage. Nobody moves like that on borrowed mana. That was structural. You paid for it out of the account that doesn’t refill."

Vale finally turned his head.

Frankie stared him down over the flat-top. "Did you know he could do that?"

"No."

"Did you push him to a place where he’d need to?"

"Yes."

She threw the spatula. It went past his ear at a speed I want to describe as illegal and stuck in the wooden post behind him, three inches deep, still vibrating. Vale did not flinch. He didn’t even move his shoulders, and the space around him had gone strange for a quarter second, thickened somehow, the air behind his head refusing to be air.

"Frankie," he said.

"Don’t." She had both hands on the counter and her knuckles were pale and the steel underneath was groaning. "You keep doing this. You keep finding the one kid in the class who’ll actually pay whatever it costs, and then you build them a room with no door in it, and then you tell yourself you’re saving the species."

"Somebody has to."

"Somebody has to do it with a support structure and an oversight board and a healer on retainer, not you and a Charger and a bag of nihilism."

"That’s what I’m doing."

"That’s what you’re calling it."

Nine minutes, she’d said. It had been about four, and I’d already learned more about Dominic Vale in this shack than in six weeks of getting my spine dismantled in his gym, and I’d learned it because a Gold-rank ex-hunter was willing to throw cutlery at him in front of a paying customer.

She hated him with her whole body. She had also, at some point in the last two minutes, made him a burger without asking, dry, no cheese, and slid it onto a plate.

Which is when I understood the arrangement completely. That’s not hate. That’s a decade of somebody watching a man make the same choice over and over and refusing to pretend the choice is fine.

"Ma’am," I said. "For the record, he didn’t make me do it. The thing with the days."

"Don’t call me ma’am, I’m twenty-six."

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