Divine Milking System

Chapter 466: 466 | Paperwork Is How Real Things Happen

The worst part was that Vale hadn’t been wrong. That was what she couldn’t look at directly. The thing she kept turning away from every time it tried to surface.

She’d watched her squad die in slow motion over eight weeks. Charles broke formation on the second Tuesday of the semester and she said nothing. She should have. But he’d done it to cover her flank and the coverage felt right, felt solid, felt like someone was actually paying attention to where she was on the field. So when he did it again the following week, she stayed quiet. When he did it in the wolf simulation and completely destroyed Hikaru’s trap setup, she told him he was sloppy. Which wasn’t the same as ordering him to hold position. Which wasn’t the same as fixing the problem.

Then he did it in a forest that shouldn’t have existed, and a thing with no face and no eyes reached through his guard and tore him apart.

She’d been standing eleven meters away. Fire wrapped around both hands, white-blue and screaming hot, more than enough to vaporize whatever that thing was. She had not moved.

Because she’d been afraid.

Nobody knew that except one person. One person had been there when she set a forest older than California on fire because she panicked. One person dragged her off a cliff edge when her legs stopped working. One person held her in a crack in the stone barely eighteen inches wide while something the size of a train tried to dig them out with limbs that bent wrong.

That person was going to be on her roster for five weeks. With a Copper-rank death scythe and a face she wanted to set on fire every time he opened his mouth.

Her phone went off in her blazer pocket.

Blair pulled it out with the intention of turning it off, because if it was her father she needed twenty minutes to build the version of herself that could answer, and if it was Cassandra she needed a full hour and a glass of something.

It was neither.

MONROE, J.

4:11 PM

so does this mean I won the bet

Blair stood on a garden path in the California afternoon and read four words nine times.

Then she read them a tenth time.

Her thumb hovered over the screen. The stone under her other hand made a sound like a knuckle cracking. She pulled her hand away and saw the pale scorch mark spreading across the top course. A Ruby second-year walking past on the lower path saw it too and changed direction entirely.

The bet.

Misato’s kitchen. Eleven at night. Blair had walked in wearing a hoodie and pink shorts with her hair still damp. She’d intended to buy a lottery loser’s compliance for a number with five zeroes in it. Instead the fat kid tied to the couch had looked up at her with amber eyes that didn’t blink and offered her something so stupid she had said yes out of pure insulted reflex.

If the Midnight Foxes fail to finish top five, Monroe leaves the academy, Misato becomes yours permanently, and Monroe becomes your pet for the rest of the semester.

If they somehow make top five, Blair Davenport transfers to the Midnight Foxes. Permanently. And becomes his.

Collar. He had said collar out loud in Misato’s kitchen with flames on her knuckles. She had leaned down until her face was six inches from his and asked him why he would bet everything on a squad of losers.

He had told her that he hated losing more than he hated her.

She had laughed. Not her polite laugh or her dismissive laugh but the real one that came out when something surprised her. Because nobody talked to her like that. Nobody talked to her at all except to agree or apologize or ask for things they thought she could give them.

She had accepted. She had walked out and slammed the door and gone home and stood in her shower for forty minutes with her forehead on the tile.

Winter evaluations were five weeks out. The bet did not resolve until the rankings posted. That was the agreement. That was the term. Vale filing a transfer form was an administrative act performed by a third party with no standing in a private wager between two students, and it had nothing whatsoever to do with the conditions of the bet, and Blair could construct that argument in a paragraph.

She constructed it in a paragraph.

Then she deleted it, because reading it back she could hear exactly how it sounded, which was the sound of a girl who was losing.

BLAIR DAVENPORT

4:14 PM

You didn’t win anything. Vale filed paperwork.

MONROE, J.

4:14 PM

paperwork’s how literally everything real happens

banks. marriages. gate authorizations

you’re a Fox, Davenport

BLAIR DAVENPORT

4:15 PM

I am on a roster. That is not the same thing.

MONROE, J.

4:15 PM

huh

what’s the other half of the bet again

I forget

The heat came up her neck so fast that she felt the burn scar throb with it, and the phone case creaked in her grip, and she had to consciously unlock her fingers before she cooked the screen.

He didn’t forget. He hadn’t forgotten a single thing she said in that cave. She could tell from the punctuation.

Blair had said things in that stone crack. Things about collars and about the floor of her apartment and about what she was going to do to him for an entire semester once she owned him, and she had said them in explicit sentences she had never spoken aloud in her life, sentences assembled out of two hundred and fourteen romance novels she kept in a false-bottom drawer, and she had said them with her thigh between his legs and her hand in his hair while her body did things she had no operational history with.

And he had let her say all of it. And then he had told her that her kissing was mechanical.

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