The door clicked shut behind me and I leaned against it, pressing my palm flat against my chest where my heart was doing its best impression of a jackhammer.

Holy shit.

Holy actual shit.

I’d just spent the last forty minutes alone in a bathroom with Hikaru Tanaka, who turned out to be a woman, who turned out to have the kind of body that compression bandages should be illegal for hiding, and who could have absolutely carved me into sashimi if I’d said literally anything wrong. Her Phantom Edge ability meant she could have separated my head from my shoulders before I even registered the attack. Invisible cutting force. Silent execution. The whole nine yards of "ways to die that would make an open casket impossible."

And yet here I stood, alive and intact, with the image of her burned into my retinas like I’d stared directly at the sun.

Those red eyes, glazed with pain and fear and something almost like trust when she finally stopped fighting me. The way her chest had expanded when the bandages came off, like she’d been suffocating for years and could finally breathe. The curve of her waist above hips that her baggy clothes did criminal work concealing. The way her black hair stuck to her neck with sweat, making her look less like the Ice Prince of Obsidian and more like someone who desperately needed protecting.

I took another deep breath and tried to think about literally anything else.

Baseball. Dead puppies. Vale’s disappointed face. My imminent death via gate monsters.

None of it worked.

My dick was hard.

Of course it was hard. I was eighteen years old with a System that had literally rewired my brain for seduction, and I’d just had an extremely attractive woman half-naked in front of me while she was vulnerable and trusting and looking at me like I might actually be worth something. My body didn’t care about context or appropriateness or the fact that Hikaru could gut me like a fish if she ever found out.

Down. Stay down. Not happening.

I adjusted myself as discreetly as possible and pushed off from the door, dragging my fingers through my hair like that would make me look less like someone who’d just had their entire worldview detonated in a bathroom. The apartment still had that faint copper tang in the air from all the blood, subtle enough that tomorrow I’d need to crack open the windows and let it dissipate properly.

Right now, though, I had a more immediate concern sitting on my couch.

Naomi occupied the far cushion with the kind of rigid posture that telegraphed exactly how long she’d been waiting and how hard she’d been thinking. Her pink eyes locked onto me the second I appeared from the hallway, tracking my movement across the living room with an intensity that made my shoulders tense involuntarily. She’d brought the nurse and then made herself scarce when I’d signaled for privacy, but she hadn’t actually left. That tracked with everything I knew about her. She’d been worrying about me out here the entire time, probably chewing her lip raw while she waited for confirmation that I wasn’t about to collapse from blood loss or magical feedback or whatever the hell else her anxious brain had conjured.

I dropped onto the couch next to her, keeping about a foot of distance that simultaneously felt excessive and nowhere near sufficient given the complicated knot of thoughts still bouncing around my skull.

"Is she going to be alright?" Her voice came out barely above a whisper, like she thought Hikaru might somehow hear us through two walls and a closed door.

"She’ll live. Nurse did solid work." I let my head tip back against the cushion and stared up at the ceiling. "Lost a dangerous amount of blood, needs serious rest, but she’s tougher than she looks. She’ll be functional by Friday."

"Friday." Naomi’s hands twisted together in her lap, fingers knotting and unknotting in a nervous pattern I’d seen dozens of times since moving in. "The gate run. Jace, what I saw in there—"

"You didn’t see anything."

"But I saw—"

"Naomi." I turned to face her fully, letting the weight of the situation settle into my expression. "Whatever you think you saw, you didn’t. Hikaru is a private person with private reasons for how he presents himself, and those reasons are none of our business. The nurse is bound by confidentiality laws. I’m choosing to keep my mouth shut. And you’re going to do the same."

Her pink eyes searched my face for several long seconds. I could practically see the gears turning behind them, the careful assessment of what I was asking and why and whether she could trust my judgment on this. Naomi wasn’t stupid. She’d seen Hikaru’s chest, seen the shape that no amount of compression could have created on a male body. She knew exactly what secret she’d stumbled into.

But she also knew me. Knew that I didn’t ask for things without reason.

"Okay." The word came out quiet but steady. "I didn’t see anything. Hikaru had a training accident and the nurse healed him. That’s the whole story."

"That’s the whole story," I confirmed.

Relief washed through me, loosening muscles I hadn’t realized were tensed. Naomi leaned into my side, her head finding that spot on my shoulder that seemed to have been designed specifically for her. Her hair smelled like vanilla and the lingering traces of that complicated coffee drink she’d been holding before everything went sideways.

"We’re going to be so late," she murmured against my shirt. "Belle is going to be furious."

"Belle is always furious. It’s her default setting."

"She texted me four times while I was waiting. Each message was more threatening than the last."

"What’d the fourth one say?"

"That if we don’t show up in the next twenty minutes, she’s going to assume we’re dead and start dividing up our belongings. She wants your jacket, apparently."

"Bold of her to think she could pull off leather."