I let her stay.
Mistake number twelve hundred of the week, but I'd stopped keeping count somewhere around the time my father signed paperwork beneath the most powerful woman in Valoria while I slept three hundred miles away with no idea that Tuesday at five a.m. was when I got played like a fucking fiddle.
Maki's body temperature sat at a hundred and two on a good day. Right now, with her draped across me like the world's most expensive fur coat decided to go human, it was closer to a hundred and five. The heat bled through my shirt and into the lattice, and the thirty four channels hummed at a frequency that almost felt good if you ignored what it was building toward.
"Master is thinking too loud."
"Master is thinking the right amount."
