My Scumbag System Chapter 732: Now, You Will Think About Me

I sat on the edge of the bed. She didn’t look up from the paper.

"Start from the cabin. Everything your father said. Every word, every pause, every time he looked away when he should have been looking at you. I want the version you haven’t told anyone."

"I told you most of it."

"You told me the version that made you sound like you had it under control. I want the version where you didn’t."

So I gave it to her.

I talked for four hours. Natalia wrote in her small tight handwriting that covered every line and left no margin, filling page after page while the Ring on her finger pulsed blue in rhythm with my words. She stopped me eleven times. Twice for clarification. Three times for timeline discrepancies. Six times because I had unconsciously softened a detail to protect her from the weight of it, and she caught every single one.

The woman had a forensic mind wrapped in a body that could freeze a river solid, and she used both with equal lethality.

When I reached the part about my mother being the original candidate, Natalia’s pen stopped moving. Just for a beat. Then it resumed.

"She never told you."

"She didn’t remember."

"But she knew something was wrong."

"She always knew something was wrong. She just thought it was her."

Natalia set the pen down and looked at me for the first time in two hours. Her violet eyes held something I had seen exactly once before, in the Necropolis, right before she screamed my name and tore reality in half to stop a beam of pure death from coring my skull.

"Your mother is the strongest person I have ever met," Natalia said. "Including you."

"Including me."

"Good. Don’t forget it."

She picked the pen back up.

By eleven she had filled thirty-seven pages and my throat was raw. Natalia organized the pages into three stacks, annotated each stack with a header, and placed them inside a folder she pulled from her desk drawer. The folder already had a label on it. She had labeled it before I arrived.

It said PROMETHEUS in Natalia’s handwriting, and beneath that, in smaller letters: FOR WHEN HE FINALLY TELLS ME THE TRUTH.

She had known I was holding back. She had known for weeks. She had simply waited until I was ready, and then she built the infrastructure to contain whatever I gave her.

I stared at the folder. "How long have you had that label."

"Since the Gala."

"The Gala was four months ago."

"I am a patient woman."

"You threatened to freeze my blood solid yesterday."

"Patience and violence are not mutually exclusive." She tucked the folder into a locked drawer and turned the key. "I need to ask you something and I need you to answer without deflecting."

"I don’t deflect."

"You deflect the way Emi bakes. Constantly, compulsively, and with results that are either wonderful or terrible depending on the day."

I couldn’t argue with that.

Natalia stood from the bed. The shirt, my shirt, rode up her thighs as she crossed the distance between us. She stopped close enough that I could smell her shampoo and the cold mineral scent of the Ring and something else underneath, something warm and entirely Natalia.

"The lattice," she said. "The channels building inside you. The shape that matches the formation Jacob mapped in Sector Twelve."

"Yeah."

"You are becoming a Gate."

"That’s what the data says."

"And in six days you plan to walk into a hidden basement beneath the most powerful woman in the country, carrying a body that is actively constructing a dimensional bridge, armed with a baseball bat and a skeleton key that recharges once a week."

"When you say it like that it sounds irresponsible."

"It is irresponsible."

"Sure. But nobody else can do it."

Natalia placed her palms on my chest. Her fingers found the sternum node, the spot where the fifth junction sat beneath my skin, and the cold of her Ring spread through me like winter finding a cracked window. Not painful. Grounding.

"What if you open," she said quietly. "What if whatever is building in you finishes, and you become the door, and something comes through."

"Then you close me."

Her hands pressed harder.

"You heard me. If something comes through, if I stop being me, you shut it down. You and the Ring and every ounce of ice you can pull from the air. You freeze whatever I become and you don’t hesitate and you don’t stop to check if I’m still in there."

"No."

"Nat."

"No." Her voice cracked on the word and she caught it and swallowed it and when she spoke again the crack was sealed over with something harder than ice. "I will not be the person who kills you. Find someone else for that job. Isabelle. Raphael. Your cat. Not me."

"There’s nobody else strong enough."

"Then I will be strong enough to keep you from opening in the first place." She pulled my shirt over her head and stood in front of me in nothing but black lace, her purple hair falling across her shoulders and the white streaks at her temples catching the lamplight. The bruise on her jaw had darkened to a rich purple that matched her eyes. She looked wrecked and furious and so beautiful my chest physically hurt, though that might have been the sternum node.

"Seventy-two hours," she said. "No fighting. No training. No running into buildings that might kill you."

"Braxton said the same thing."

"Braxton is smarter than you."

"Debatable."

She climbed onto my lap. One knee on each side of my hips, her weight settling against me with the gravitational pull of someone who had decided where she belonged and refused to entertain alternatives. Her hands found the back of my neck and her fingers threaded through my hair and she tilted my head back until I was looking up at her.

"I have spent five days watching you through this bond," she said. "I felt you kiss Reyna on a rooftop. I felt you inside her in a room three hundred miles away. I felt you come home carrying secrets that could end the world, and I stood in a kitchen and made breakfast because that is what queens do when their kings are busy being suicidal."

She leaned down until her lips hovered an inch from mine.

"Now you are going to stay in this bed with me. And for the next twelve hours you are not going to think about Gates or entities or your father or Sublevel Eleven or the fact that your body is building something neither of us understands."

"What am I going to think about."

Her mouth found my ear.

"Me," she breathed, and the single syllable went through me like voltage.