My Scumbag System Chapter 733: This Is Not My Safe Day

The Ring flared cold. The pendant flared hot. Somewhere in my chest the fifth node pulsed with something that was not pain and was not power but sat in the space between them where every important thing lives.

Natalia kissed me.

Not the bruising claim she had planted in the hallway that morning. Not the performative display she had unleashed in front of twenty thousand people at the tournament. This was slower. Deeper. Her tongue traced the seam of my lips and then she was inside and the taste of her filled my mouth, cold mint and something sweet she must have stolen from Emi’s abandoned tray, and beneath that the copper edge that was purely Natalia, purely mine.

I gripped her hips and pulled her flush against me and the friction drew a sound from her throat that made every neuron in my rewired brain fire simultaneously.

"Off," she said against my mouth, tugging my shirt. I lifted my arms and she stripped it over my head and her eyes dropped to my torso. She traced the place where three ribs had cracked and healed in six hours, her fingertips ghosting across skin that should have been tender and wasn’t.

"You’re different here." Her palm spread flat across my abdomen. "Denser. Harder."

"The integration changed the muscle comp."

"Stop talking like a medical chart and kiss me."

I kissed her. My hands slid from her hips to the clasp of the black lace and I undid it with one hand because some things Kaelen taught me were actually useful, and the fabric fell away and I pulled back far enough to look at her.

Natalia in lamplight, in my shirt stripped to nothing, her full breasts bare and her nipples already peaked from the cold she radiated and the heat she generated, the contrast of temperature playing across her skin in a flush that started at her sternum and spread upward to her throat. Purple hair curtaining her face. Violet eyes dark with want.

Four months ago this woman looked at me like I was vermin living beneath her floor.

Now she looked at me like I was the floor and the foundation and the entire building.

I put my mouth on her. Her collarbone first, the ridge of bone where she tasted like salt and winter, then lower, the swell of her breast filling my palm as my tongue circled one peak and her back arched and her nails dug into my shoulders. She gasped a word in Russian that I had learned to recognize as either a curse or a prayer depending on the octave.

This was the prayer version.

I rolled her onto the mattress and her hair spread across the pillow in a wave of dark purple and white, the Covenant streaks glowing faintly in the dim room. Her legs wrapped around me and she pulled me down and we pressed together from chest to hip, nothing between us but lace and sweatpants and the accumulated weight of everything we had built.

"Satori." My name in her mouth was a different thing than anyone else’s. The way the T clicked against her teeth. The way the vowels softened on her tongue. She had spent months hating that name before she spent months loving it and both versions lived inside the sound. "Don’t be gentle."

"I’m never gentle."

"Liar. You’re gentle with Emi. You’re gentle with Soomin. You were gentle with Cel in a cave and gentle with Reyna on a rooftop. You reserve the gentle for the ones you think will break."

She grabbed my jaw and forced me to look at her.

"I don’t break."

So I didn’t hold back.

I stripped the lace down her legs and she kicked it off the bed and I removed my sweatpants and when I settled between her thighs she sucked in a breath that stuttered at the halfway point. Her hands found me and guided me forward and the wet heat of her swallowed the first inch and her eyes went wide.

"The integration." Her voice was strained. "You’re bigger."

"Sorry."

"Don’t you dare apologize." She hooked her ankles behind my back and pulled me deeper and her mouth opened in a silent O that I covered with my own. The Nectar hummed between us, not the manipulative chemical flood of the old version but something clean, something that simply amplified what was already there, and what was already there was four months of war and worship compressed into a single point of contact.

I moved. Slow at first because Natalia would kill me if I injured her, and then faster because she bit my lower lip and demanded more and the sound she made when I hit the end of her was a frequency that bypassed my ears and registered directly in my spine.

"Harder."

I gave her harder. The headboard knocked against the wall and the Ring on her finger iced the sheets in fractal patterns that spread outward from her clenching fist. Her telekinesis flared and the lampshade lifted three inches off the base and a textbook slid off the desk and hit the floor with a thump neither of us acknowledged.

Through the bond I felt her. Not just the physical sensation but the architecture of her pleasure, the way it built in waves that crested and receded and crested higher, each peak steeper than the last. She was close. I could feel the edge of it in the way her walls gripped me and the way her breathing fractured into pieces that couldn’t reassemble into words.

I pressed my forehead to hers. Her eyes found mine in the lamplight and whatever she saw there made her whole body shudder.

"Inside me," she whispered. "Don’t pull out."

"Nat."

"I told you." Her voice dropped to something raw and unguarded. "It’s not my safe day."

The words hit me like the A-Rank’s tail, a full body impact that reorganized my understanding of what was happening. She wasn’t just reclaiming territory. She was building something.

I kissed her and she tightened around me and I stopped thinking.

Everything narrowed to the place where we met. The rhythm she set with her hips and I matched with mine. The sound of her voice breaking on my name over and over, each repetition losing a syllable until it was just the S and the hard consonant and then nothing at all because her orgasm hit and her power exploded. Ice climbed the headboard. The lightbulb burst. Every object on the dresser lifted two inches and crashed back down and through the wall I heard Maki yowl in protest from the room she had commandeered.

I followed her. The release poured out of me in waves that pulsed in time with the fifth node in my chest, and I felt the Nectar surge between us not as a drug but as a seal, a stamp pressed into hot wax, an affirmation written in biology that said this is real and this is chosen and this will last.

I collapsed against her. Her arms wrapped around me. Her heartbeat hammered against my chest and mine hammered back and between the two rhythms the pendant sat silent for the first time in weeks.

We breathed.

After a long time Natalia turned her head and pressed her lips to my temple.

"Don’t die in that basement."

"I’m not going to die in that basement."

"Promise."

"I promise."