The skybridges connecting the three Imperial Park Royale Towers were large enough to make the word bridge feel like false advertising.

Each one curved between two towers in a broad sweep of steel and glass, suspended hundreds of metres above Aurora Imperial City as though somebody had constructed a four-storey building sideways and then casually hung it in the sky, which was essentially what they had done. Every bridge carried four complete levels, each wide enough for gardens, private streets, restaurants, clubs, lounges, event halls, and businesses that paid obscene money for the privilege of telling customers their address was technically located between two skyscrapers.

No two were built alike.

The Skybridge linking the Left Tower to the Central leaned heavily toward entertainment and hospitality: restaurants and private dining houses on the lowest storey, then lounges and rooftop-style gardens and members-only bars despite the total absence of any actual rooftop, and above those the clubs and event spaces and luxury suites whose signage was discreet enough to make it immediately obvious that whatever happened inside required lawyers, money, and a shared commitment to collective amnesia.

Five major businesses could fit inside a single Skybridge without any of them feeling crowded, because the Imperial Park Royale had not become one of the most dominant structures on the planet by being merely tall. They had built entire economies in the air.

And right now Park was sitting inside one of the largest restaurants on the Left-Central bridge, working very hard not to embarrass himself in front of a beautiful girl.

Jessie had chosen their table, obviously.

The restaurant took up close to half the bridge’s lowest storey, its dining rooms divided by gardens and running water and transparent walls that showed Aurora burning away beneath the afternoon sun.

But the most exclusive seats were not inside the main room at all.

They hung underneath it.

Their private booth they sat in now projected out below the body of the bridge in a rounded glass chamber whose supports had been concealed so thoroughly that Park could not locate a single one from where he sat.

The walls were clear. The sides were clear. The floor beneath the table was clear.

Everything was fucking clear.

It felt like eating inside the world’s most luxurious cable car shortly after somebody had forgotten to attach the cable, and only Park’s dignity was keeping him from visibly shivering:

If it had been him and Emmeline and Quinn alone, he would have pressed both palms flat to the glass, stared down like an overexcited child, and openly asked how many times the booth had fallen.

He might have tested the floor with one foot, on the grounds that dying twice in a single day would have been embarrassing but at least the curiosity would have been settled.

Unfortunately, Jessie was here.

And Park was not going to tremble in front of Jessie.

He kept his spine relaxed against the soft leather and made a serious effort not to think about the several hundred metres of empty air directly beneath his expensive new shoes. Whenever his eyes drifted down, the city simply swallowed the view before it reached anything solid—roads tangled far below in thin silver threads, cars moving like coloured dust, trains slipping between buildings no bigger than toys.

He looked away before his stomach could file a complaint.

Beyond the curved glass, Aurora ran on without end under a blazing sun.

Off to his left he could catch a distant glimpse of the Crown District, its forests and walled estates and controlled green spaces half hidden behind other towers. In every other direction the capital continued unchallenged, city stacked inside city until the skyline dissolved into golden haze.

The scale was, frankly, stupid:

Park could say with confidence that this capital was at least seven times the size of California, and that was not a dramatic teenage estimate. Seven entire Californias could be dropped into Aurora, complain about the traffic, and still leave room for a new financial district.

"What a monster," he murmured.

Emmeline glanced up from the menu. "The city?"

"No, the height. The city is beautiful. The height is trying to kill me personally."

Jessie laughed softly across the table. "Are you afraid?"

Park turned toward her and briefly forgot that the city existed at all.

Jessie was beautiful, though not in the calm distant fashion that sat still and waited to be admired.

She looked playful even doing nothing, as though she had already thought of something inappropriate and was still deciding whether the room deserved to hear it.

Her hair was a deep glossy green, dark enough to read almost black wherever the sunlight failed to reach it:

Most of it fell long over her back and shoulders while a portion had been gathered into a loose bun and pinned with a silver ornament that caught the light every time she moved. Fine bangs framed her small face built around a short pointed chin, a delicate small nose, and deep blue eyes that carried far more quiet authority than the sweetness of the smile underneath them suggested.

Her mouth was small and soft-looking, the colour naturally rich.

Cute was the first word most men would reach for. Then Jessie would smile properly, or shift her weight, or simply breathe, and cute would quietly step aside.

Silver dropped from her ears in dark jewelled points.

Thin rings sat on several fingers, a few of them linked by delicate chains that ran back across the pale skin of her hand, and her nails had been done in a black so glossy it flashed every time her fingers moved. A silver bracelet circled one wrist and a finer chain the other. An ornamental band curved high around her upper arm, turning bare skin into something deliberate rather than something the dress had simply left uncovered.

And the dress had left a great deal uncovered.

She had changed into it somewhere around the ninety-fourth floor, out of a bag she had been carrying since the second boutique.

Park had lost roughly four minutes of his afternoon to the sight of her in the dress and had not managed to reclaim them since.

It began at her throat and the black fabric wrapped high and close around her neck in a halter collar, and that long pale neck looked as if it had been designed for exactly this — unbroken, elegant, completely bare all the way down to the shoulders, with a few strands of dark green hair escaping the bun to rest against it.

Park’s mind had already built a private list of things he wanted to do to her neck.

From the collar the fabric crossed over itself once and then fell away down her chest in two broad strips.

Those strips had been cut with a precision that felt almost architectural.

They covered her nipples and the outer curve of each of her round-shaped breast and nothing else.

Everything between them was open — a long, deep channel of bare skin running from her collarbones down past her chest —

The fabric ended high enough that the full underside of both breasts sat completely exposed above her ribs, soft and heavy, shifting with every small movement of her body whenever she laughed or leaned forward or reached for her wine.

Which she did often, Park had noticed.

He had also noticed, somewhere around the appetisers, that the strips were not secured anywhere below the collar. Two pieces of fabric, one knot at the throat and an ongoing negotiation with gravity with her boobs that Jessie appeared entirely unconcerned about while Park had been quietly, helplessly monitoring it on her behalf for the better part of the lunch.

’Purely out of concern,’ he told himself. ’Someone has to.’

Beneath all that, her stomach was bare from the upperside of her ribs and boobs to the low beginning of the skirt, just below her stomach— a slim waist, flat and carefully maintained, the soft definition across it making it perfectly obvious that Jessie invested both real time and a deeply irresponsible sum of money in keeping her body precisely as she wanted it.

The skirt sat low across her hips, knotted at one side, and fell away from the knot in a soft black drape.

And then there were her legs, which were what finished him.

She had them crossed, and the slit ran the entire length of the upper one, opening from the knot at her hip all the way down so that the whole outer line of her thigh lay bare against the black — smooth, pale, catching the afternoon light through the glass, the top leg draped over the lower and swinging very slightly whenever she moved.

Every time she shifted position the fabric slid another fraction and rearranged what was and was not on display, and every time it did, Park’s brain filed a fresh report he had not requested and could not stop.

’She crossed them again,’ some part of him observed, flat and professional, reading out disaster statistics to an empty room. ’She’s going to keep doing that for the entire meal and she knows exactly what it does and there is no version of this afternoon where I emerge with my dignity intact.’

Elegant and shameless in the same breath.

A dress capable of walking into a room ahead of the woman wearing it and starting three separate arguments without her assistance.

***

A/N: I updated the character sheet, please go and add popularity and your favorite Park personality.

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