novelraw Chapter 87: Punishment Party Part 1
Chapter 87: Punishment Party Part 1
Chapter 87 – Punishment Party Part 1
‘Jin’s on his bullshit. He’s forcing me to host a party. Clean the house, please! Lock the runner room, but clean the stuff inside, too. Just in case.’
A peaceful, peaceful fucking Sunday night. That’s all she wanted.
Where did those peaceful Sunday nights go? If she wasn’t out of the country, raiding foreign corps, then she was playing hostess for a bunch of corpo rat babies crawling around her inner sanctum.
She got up off the couch and let the TV continue playing the N-54 channel. Soon, Gillean Jordan’s segment would air, with David as one of the guests, but she no longer had time to watch that circus show anymore.
She sent a text back, airing out her frustration at yet another day of rest—thwarted.
‘Fuck this, David. Seriously, fuck this. And fuck you.’
She proceeded towards the Netrunner den.
‘Fuck you, too. Just get it done.’
Fuck you, too? Did this fucking bastard even have a shred of sense? She was going to kill him once the dust settled. Wring his stupid, muscly neck. Rip the skin and muscle off his face and make him look like that skull mask he always wore.
But later. Right now, she had to get all the shit together.
‘Fuck. Fuck you. Fine. Good luck, David. And fuck you. Bye.’
She reached the Netrunning room.
‘Fuck you, bye.’
She pulled at her hair in frustration. Asshole.
She looked around the room. It was clean. Lucy preferred a clean station around her silicon. That meant no food, no junk, and everything at its place. At least, before every session. She’d make allowances for eating while still on the keyboard as these things couldn’t really be helped, but she had to draw a line, or the junk would end up building and piling up. She knew from experience, and from seeing the shithole that Pilar liked to pass off for a techie lair. The fucking degenerate could fill a plastic bag with crumbs and dust if he shook his PC tower over it.
The apartment’s ICE was solid. Lucy had supplied the vision and imagination, while David had done the grunt work with utter precision and perfection. The resulting work was practically uncrackable to any of the high-end crypto algorithms on the market, even the black ops cast-offs from the big corps. You needed know-how and expertise to break into it, a human element that was extremely rare, even in NC.
If she hadn’t been a part of the building process, she struggled to imagine how she would have ever been able to crack into it, even given a super cyberdeck and unlimited time.
On top of their self-made ICE, the Grand Rising Plaza’s own electronic countermeasures would ensure that no one would be able to just enter their house from the elevator or any of the other entrances. Not without physically disconnecting a ton of hardware, hacking by way of wires and not ones and zeroes.
The runner den would be similarly fool-proof. Still, she had to prepare in case they got in.
She linked with the computers with her deck and started physically connecting solid state drives to them.
She didn’t touch the corpo data that David was beaming into their network from QianT. Instead, she backed up, and then deleted, all the edgerunner data: chat logs, chrome software, netrunning programs, contact information, any relevant data.
With a start, she saw some of the other screens, data moving on its own.
Then the holo projectors engaged, and right next to her, Nanny manifested. She wore baggy blue jeans and a red high-vis jacket that made her look like a firefighter. She had dark hair that she wore in an undercut, and her eyes looked like they usually did: awkward.
She was an awkward person underneath her façade, Lucy had come to learn over time. That, and the fact that she even was a person. Somehow, that had been easier to accept than she had expected. Though she was an AI, she was nothing like those horrors beyond the Blackwall that she had grown up trying to avoid. Instead, she was distinctly human. She had more in common with a diehard Netrunner that practically lived 24/7 on the data streams than one of those monsters.
“You got anything on when Jin’s coming?” Lucy asked.
Nanny furrowed her brow. “The fucker blocked us. Can you believe that?” Her voice, eerily, came from the speakers built into the monitors, rather than her projected location.
Blocked? “The fuck happened?”
“The young master is dissatisfied, for some reason. Fleshbag hormones, who fucking knows? He said it’s because he was kept in the dark about the TV thing.”
Fifty-five percent on the backups. With Nanny’s help, all they were doing now was waiting. No use standing around. David’s guitar case of murder-toys, and a couple of other cases, did need moving.
She tried to lift the guitar case and nearly threw her fucking back out.
What the fuck?
“Ah, that?” Nanny materialized next to her, patting her on the shoulder and grinning. “That right there’s the combined weight of Soviet steel, American engineering, Pilar swordsmithing, and enough ammo to shoot up Arasaka itself and come out the other end smelling like roses.”
“How the fuck do I move this?”
“There’s a linear frame in one of the boxes,” she said. “One of the lesser toys from Green Farm. It’s a shitty work model, but it’ll be more than enough for this.”
She opened up one of the boxes and found it: a network of interlocking black metallic rods that looked like kink-wear for robots.
She put it on underneath her clothes, and got started on moving everything, snatching the drives with her as she exited the Netrunner den.
The linear frame was bulky, so she had elected to wear a thick hoodie and a pair of baggy pants as she moved everything to the outside of the elevator. Once she had all the boxes of weapons and machines out, she went to fetch her stupid mask-sock thing and gave a heads up to the front desk not to ask if they saw her coming out with a bunch of crap.
They asked for two-factor authentication just to make sure this wasn’t some kind of ploy. She gave it to them quickly, and punched in the elevator button.
[Mind if I hitch a ride on your agent?] Nanny asked. [The TV thing is boring. This is David’s forte, anyway.]
She accepted her intrusion easily, finding it surprising that she even would. “What? Acting the corpo?”
[Forte is… relative, I guess. He’s better than me, at least. The more I learn about human psychology, the less I understand. You see, these things don’t come to me intuitively. And you need intuition. Improvisational skills to tackle all the manifold emergent cases of social interactions, branching out infinitely. You can’t memorize it all and return the perfect output.]
The fact that David of all people was considered the social expert in their partnership… worried her. David was bright, but he really wasn’t all that subtle. He was a wrecking ball that just barely managed to break the right things by the skin of his teeth. Destructive precision, in both his work and in how he carried himself around the suits.
“Then your forte is…”
[Keeping David alive. Giving him fun new features. Reaching towards new heights of ingenuity in the work we do that actually matters: the tech stuff.]
She blinked. “You don’t… care about his dream?”
[Of course I do. It’s an excellent stress test. I’m not emotionally invested in the dream—and before you ask, I do have emotions. I see the upsides to it, of course. I think a better world would allow for more uninterrupted research. Less violence would mean more time to work. I’m totally fine going with our current mission: I just don’t think it matters as much as our shared genius does.]
Well… there wasn’t much harm in thinking that. It was probably best to have this complementary viewpoint to help temper David’s more overeager tendencies.
[I know what you’re thinking,] Nanny said. She did? [David’s so much better than you at programming. You’re falling behind.] She hadn’t been thinking that right now. The elevator door opened, and she started carrying out the boxes. A pair of doormen stood in front of the elevator.
“Do you need help with those, ma’am?”
From the front desk. She nodded, taking the heaviest boxes, and leaving them to take the lighter ones, that wouldn’t have them asking too many questions. All the while, she called a Delamain as they took her stuff to a sitting space next to an indoor café. She’d tried their stuff. Overpriced and kind of bland. You probably paid for the prestige of it: this was a franchised joint that popped up mostly around the City Center and Charter Hill.
She ordered a black coffee from the counter nonetheless. She’d need the pick-me-up for the coming storm.
[Not to worry. I know, I know, D’s been too focused on… boring stuff. But trust me, I haven’t! While working on his body, I’ve also worked on figuring out a way to replicate the current architecture of his brain. It’s difficult, trying to reverse-engineer the accident that led us to have this synergy in the first place.]
She sat down in the sitting area, Styrofoam cup of coffee in hand, and took a surreptitious sip while mumbling, “the brainwipe program from the Balron we fought?”
[Exactly.]
“Why don’t you just read through the files we have? We stole all of Netopia, remember? The Balron’s in there somewhere.”
[It’s not—it’s complicated. I understand Brainwipe’s protocol. I understand the way it used David’s chrome soft to launch its attack. What I don’t have a great understanding of is… the wetware, as it were.]
“Isn’t wetware your whole thing?”
[It is. And it also isn’t. In fact, it’s no one’s ‘thing’, in the sense that they own it properly. The brain is still a black box. Alas. I’m working towards uncovering its inner workings. Mapping the human soul as it were.]
“Secure your Soul,” she mumbled.
[Arasaka’s miles ahead of the competition. And I’m trailing behind, slowly catching up.]
“Aren’t their engrams… pretty much people already?”
[They can control V the soul. They can’t edit. Can’t fiddle around with the parameters. Tweak the stats. Boost attributes. ]
Lucy winced. That sounded… rather horrifying, actually. What she was describing. Toying around with the human brain like it was just another program.
[I sense I’ve lost you.]
She actually sounded saddened by that.
The Delamain’s alert had arrived. It was a couple of minutes out. She got started on lifting the boxes. The doormen came to help her with the others. “No, it’s not that. You haven’t lost me. I’m just… feeling the ick, I suppose.” Which made her kind of a hypocrite, once she thought about it. Part of her brain was machine, and much of her spine was replaced with a pretty beefy neural link as well.
But she never really had much of a choice when it came to those. She thought she had, once upon a time. Now that she was older, she knew one thing: there was no way a child could ever properly consent to such procedures. She’d been used.
[Why? Haven’t you installed chrome as well? Ah. I remember now. You said it hadn’t been your choice.]
She sighed as they reached the Delamain drone cab, a big van type that could hold all her shit. “Right. Let’s go back to fucking around with brains again. So… what’s the progress there?” She couldn’t say that it wasn’t intriguing as hell, the suggestion that she could have a brain strong enough to keep up with David’s. They already worked so well together, but if she could crank up her effectiveness, maybe they could even rival Bartmoss one day?
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Clean up the Old Net, even.
Save the world. She grinned at the thought. A dream like that was a big one. A worthy one.
Too bad she didn’t really feel it.
Maybe… maybe she should try.
[Progress is good. I’ve grown proficient in isolating and enhancing learning capacity. That’s only a fraction of what makes him good, but it’s a start. With some experimentation, I believe we can synthesize and bottle a permanent neurostimulator to improve focus, reasoning skills and learning capacity without any side effects or risk of overdose. That’s only a theory, however, but I’m confident that we have what it takes already. There are some missing pieces, however.]
The doormen finished loading up the van. She got in from the back and they shut the door on her. After Delamain confirmed with her, they took off towards Arroyo. Easiest place to hide contraband, that shithole was. “Missing pieces?”
[Proprietary knowledge.]
Lucy’s eyes widened. “No fucking way, Nanny. You don’t mean—“
[My makers.]
Shit. “You’re worse than David.”
[Rude. And no.]
She’d always known that David was eventually going to butt heads with the mega corps, and not just the subsidiaries based out on the sticks. Biotechnica, however? That was too fucking soon.
[Just a data-raid. Net action only.]
She’d almost have preferred the simplicity of a smash and grab at their physical locations. A net run sounded even more suicidal.
The craziest thing she’d done on the Net thus far had been that thing a couple of days ago, tailing those Netwatch agents as they made their way into the Police Department data fortress.
A megacorp DF was a different beast entirely.
[I’m just spitballing anyway. You don’t have to be so damn dramatic.]
She actually liked listening to Nanny go on about her ideas, but she tended to get way ahead of herself, and that inevitably reminded her of how David thought. They were both cut from the same cloth, and both thought they were more reasonable and sane than the other. Like squabbling siblings, only miles more lethal.
“I appreciate the thing about the learning stims,” she said. “I don’t know if I want to be first in line when human trials roll up.”
[Of course not. We’ll use scavs. For that, and for a cyberpsycho cure.]
Jesus. Somehow, she just knew that the AI wasn’t joking.
[That was a joke.]
“No it wasn’t.”
[By the way, you’re going to have to change your face. You might be expected to eat or drink during this party. Also, I have collected a bunch of contact information for appropriate catering businesses that will do last-minute dinner preparations. I’ll advise that you take this super-seriously. This is supposed to be a punishment. Spend all the money we need.]
Fucking corpos.
And changing her face? Best she could do was make-up and a wig. Maybe some tech prosthetics to alter her face shape. Nothing invasive.
She’d be running around this city all fucking night at this rate, getting everything together.
“Fucking corpos.”
000
Qiang and I met on the roof, the older man smoking and looking out on the city and all the lights, like stars klepped from a sky that was now a blank, dark gray.
“I take full responsib—“ I began.
“No. Not yet,” he said, waving behind himself at me while he looked on ahead. “The N-54 screamsheet editor’s going to play nice. We’ll have good press during the fallout. Let the market open tomorrow and we’ll see what the word is. You’ll take responsibility if things go to shit, and we don’t meet our benchmarks. If this works out to our favor, I’ll take responsibility. As a fuck you.”
I scratched my head. “Aight. Nova.”
“What the fuck happened in there, David? Why’d she go off on you like that?”
“She didn’t like my attitude,” I said. “While we were still prepping.”
“She was bored,” Qiang said. “No D on the news. Just random violence. And she’s married to the menace-story. She wants to ride it however long she can. So she outed you as a spook just to serve that agenda. This probably would have happened no matter what attitude you showed, this line of questions. Then you had to put your ass front and center against a mass-murderer. Martinez. If you die, you won’t get a return on that money.”
I chuckled. “From my work, I’m familiar enough with D’s game to know that I’m not his flavor of target.”
“Really? A Mexican corpo?”
“I’m not in Mexico, am I?” I said. “D’s been laying low ever since Green Farm. No public sightings yet.”
“Let me ask you something, David. Man to man: did you have anything to do with yesterday?” He turned around and dropped his cig on the ground, looking into my eyes.
I answered carefully. “Arasaka isn’t known for sparing the rod against enemies threatening their business interests.”
“And the city block bombing? Was that your side?”
I frowned. “I had no say in that whatsoever.”
He breathed out through his nose. “That’s… par for the course, I suppose. Well. I’ll dismiss you for now. Are you heading back to work?”
“I have to go home now,” I said. “Not by choice. I’ll still be tapped into the workflow, but I’ll be in my house until tomorrow morning. Then I’ll… go to school.”
He snorted.
“Do I even have to, at this point?” I asked. “I mean, I could just drop out.”
He slapped his forehead. “Martinez. You’ll be racking up enemies left and right in this racket, and they’ll dig info on you until they can find the exact date of when you first pissed yourself in kindergarten. You don’t want to give them more ammo by not getting your fucking high school diploma. Or a uni degree. Is that too hard?”
“It’s a time sink is what it is.”
He hummed. “Go ask your counselor about earning extra credits for work experience. QianT will sign off on it. It’ll mean less classes. More time to do real work.”
I didn’t think that would work. I was doing all these college courses already, having hoped to expedite my time in the NCU to reduce my college loan—and frankly, the amount of time I’d have to spend doing classes in general.
I only had two more months until I could do all my exams, for both this semester and the next. Then I’d get my diploma and graduate before my entire year. I was already going as fast as I could.
“I’ll see, I guess,” I said, nodding to Qiang. “Thanks… for everything. See you around.”
Qiang nodded, and left. Still unsure of whether to like or dislike me. I couldn’t blame him. I wouldn’t like me either, not until I had rendered some results at least.
Nakajima sent me a text then.
‘Holy shit. Huerta’s dead. The CCTV cameras captured everything.’
Fuck me running and running.
‘What should I do?’ Nakajima asked.
I called him.
David: You got eyes on the shooter, at least?
Nakajima: No dice. Bro got sniped.
David: Fuck. Fuck. Call it in. Get the pigs on the case. I’ll pull whatever they got from casing the murder with my connect.
Nakajima: Done.
David: Good. Anyway, I’m going home. Something just came up, something I gotta do. You go grab some shut-eye, too.
Nakajima: Sure. Tsai got some mattresses up in the computer room. Just gonna crash here right now. Hah. Mattresses. This is a war, alright.
David: Peace.
I tried to text Jin then.
Finally, the message got through.
‘When are you coming?’
‘Pft. Already on my way. Tell the front desk to let us in or I’ll cut your dick off. No way I’m waiting outside like a fucking chump. And this better be good. I’m talking catering, drinks, entertainment, everything.’
‘Was it really that bad, Jin? I’m being serious.’
‘This shit better be worth my fucking time.’
I growled loudly, stomping the ground. Fucking dick!
000
I fidgeted nervously as I rode the elevator up to my floor.
I was in so much shit.
I’d have to play host for the Arasaka kids, get chewed out by Jin for my minor fuck-up, and miss out on valuable hours I could have spent working before classes ended up claiming my time.
All this, and Lucy’s wrath, awaited me.
And it said a lot about our relationship that I feared that particular consequence far more than the other crap. She was going to kill me.
And I would have had it coming, for involving her in the first place. She fucking hated corpos. She hated them with a passion, and I couldn’t blame her for that at all. There was very little to like about them. I, myself, had only found less than a handful whom I genuinely appreciated. Nakajima, Fei… maybe my lawyer. Tsai. He was great.
But she hated Arasaka more than anything else, and for good fucking reason. Now she would be forced to interact with Jin of all people. Outside of Japan itself, there wasn’t a more well-connected or higher-ranking corpo brat his age. He was at the top of the ladder of the worst motherfuckers that Lucy could imagine.
I had really, really fucked up with her. I didn’t know how I’d make up for it, but I’d try. Dammit, I’d try.
The elevator opened with a ding, and I heard a blast of music as the doors slid to each side. The penthouse apartment’s ground floor was massive, with a mezzanine floor right above the main floor. The main floor had a TV and some couches at the far end that took up about ten percent of the surface. Otherwise, the place was as wide as could be. The TV space was separated from the rest of the room by a wide metal planter containing some plastic shrubbery. On an unseen corner to the far end of the floor, hidden by a wall, was the kitchen. Only a few chairs were visible from there, an auxiliary dining table that sat away from the kitchen like a table at a restaurant.
On the wide, unused space before the TV and kitchen, nearest to the elevator, I saw kids milling about, holding crystal glasses with drinks. A bunch of tables had appeared from the ether, covered in an ocean of snacks and hors d’ouevres, most of which would probably go in the trash by the time night fell, and caterers behind them, standing around and trying not to groove to the music too much. The lights were low, a DJ had posted up by the corner, a wide flat space in front of him now doubling as a dance floor. The space had been flat before he’d gotten there. There was a lot of empty space in this house, on account of how enormous it was, and how little of it therefore needed to be covered in furniture.
I found Jin deeper inside the house, talking to some woman I didn’t quite recognize. They were by the kitchen, and he grinned genially at her, seeming… nice, somehow.
She looked rather neutral, giving him a sober nod—
Wait.
That body-language.
The moment the realization hit, I unraveled her disguise in an instant. Lucy, wearing a wig and facial prosthetics that changed her entire appearance. What’s more, they looked completely normal. A closer look would only reveal that much of her face had chrome on it, but for the standards of Night City, that was completely normal.
I could barely stop myself from running towards them, speedwalking instead. Jin saw me arrive, widened his eyes, and stood up, spreading his arms. He wore a black haori like usual, a black shirt to go with it, baggy black pants and wooden geta. The hem of his haori were patterned with blue circuitry patterns, and his hair was cut shorter than normal, in a corpo quaff that looked perfectly manicured, making him look extra punchable.
His teeth glimmered in the low light as he greeted me with a smile. “Ah, David. Glad you could come!”
I nodded. “I hope everything’s to your liking.”
“Oh, absolutely! For a last-minute get-together, you sure managed to show out, huh? How much did it cost?”
“I probably don’t want to know,” I said, glancing at Lucy, who smirked maliciously. Scratch that: I really didn’t want to know.
“I guess I can excuse the default-ass corpo digs you got,” he went on. “You wouldn’t know fashionable décor, it seems, if it bit you on the end of your dick. Shame. I had high hopes for you, Martinez. But the promised entertainment does ease the embarrassment of being here. How’d you swing Ratboy and Us Cracks?”
How the fuck indeed?
I looked at Lucy. “Us Cracks are fans. In return for being driven around a little by the big racerboy himself, they’ll show up and maybe sing a few songs. It won’t be a real concert, sure, but it’ll be fun.” She was already putting that contact info I had of them to good use.
And getting her due from all this. She was, after all, a huge fan of those girls.
“And Ratboy?” I asked in shock. Ratboy was coming?
“Ratboy’s our neighbor, David,” Lucy grinned. “It was easy to reach him. He watched the race, too, so he said yes to the gig, in return for some cash.”
“Don’t tell me how much.”
‘Fifty thousand,’ she texted me, just to see me suffer.
No fucking way.
Then she sent me the other receipts. And the sum of them all: the total cost of this party.
And I remembered just how fucked out of money we’d actually be for the foreseeable future, while QianT proceeded towards its death spiral.
We were rich, but this sort of spending, on a regular basis, would fuck us.
“Apology accepted!” Jin grinned. “Your girl does good work, Martinez. I get why you’re so fucking loyal now.”
Lucy grinned in satisfaction.
I nodded, and nodded at him. “Can we chat?”
He went over to the kitchen, pulled open the fridge, and tossed me a beer out from it. He grabbed one himself and cracked it open. “Sure.”
We took the stairs up to the mezzanine, where fewer people were, and as I sipped my drink, biting through the frustrating agony of the fizziness, I sighed. “Was it really that bad, Jin?”
“You don’t fucking get it, David. You still don’t.”
“I don’t,” I admitted, looking at him. There was something else in his expression now. As he looked down at the gathering of corpo kids dancing in front of the DJ, I could tell something else lying underneath his overt leer of arrogance. Frustration. “Growing pains, Jin. Things are rough because I don’t know what’s expected of me, yet. I had a long week. Been through some shit you couldn’t even fucking imagine.”
“Oh, you mean the coked out CounterIntel shitting the bed and smearing it across the sheets like it’s fucking Nutella?”
“It’s ugly biz,” I said. “And between that ugly biz, and all the other ugly biz in my docket, like cleaning out the cobwebs in QianT’s cogs, something fell on the wayside.”
“Why didn’t you tell me Qiang was alive?”
“I assumed you’d have known already,” I lied. “That you were playing along—“
“How long,” he growled, turning towards me slowly, “have you known?”
“Since the shooting.”
He closed his eyes. “And you kept it secret for Fei’s sake.”
I nodded.
“Why did she trust you then?” he asked. “Doesn’t make any fucking sense, this thing between you and her. She told you something like that, and you kept the fucking secret, and from what I can tell, you two aren’t a thing—“
“I didn’t think it was a secret-secret,” I said. “Like, it was worth anything to you. Was it? You probably made whatever change you could have after the shitshow, shorting QianT, betting against them, doing whatever. But Qiang wasn’t really your business. If it was, I…”
“You still wouldn’t have told me?” Jin asked, looking shocked. Goddammit. Why was he on my dick so much?
I didn’t want to lie to him, though. I had to be honest. The best lies had a crumb of honesty to them.
And I was already being punished anyway, so what did it matter if I admitted some fault anyway?
“Look at it this way: I don’t sell out my friends,” I said. “No matter how much money is involved. You can’t buy my loyalty. It’s what I’ve been trying to tell you since day one. Fei has that. And do you know why she does? Because she gave me respect when no one else would. She saw me as a human. I appreciate that.”
“Fuck outta here,” Jin muttered, still frustrated.
“Look, I get that the TV thing being a surprise fucked with the program,” I said. “You told me your dad values you being kept informed. I shouldn’t have let that slip my mind. Didn’t realize how important it was to you, but… I do now. So, man to man, sorry I fucked up.”
Jin looked at me with a grimace of annoyance. “You’re annoyingly good at apologizing.”
“I mean it,” I said. And to my surprise, I found that I did.
I didn’t see anything wrong with fucking over a corpo any chance I could. This was different: this hadn’t been done on purpose. This was merely a fuck-up on my part, and nothing else. Dressing it up as sabotage, even just to myself, was idiotic. I couldn’t lie to myself. Not about this, at least.
Jin breathed through his nose, schooling his expression, and then he shrugged. “Aight, choom. I guess I could take into account all those extenuating circumstances of yours as well. It was a rough week after all. I know you didn’t mean to fuck me.”
I rolled my eyes and said, in a stilted tone, “my intent was irrelevant, Jin-sama.”
“You apologized, and that’s good. But if you fuck up again, in the same nature, I’ll assume one of two things: either you’re incompetent, or you’re working against me. Neither is forgivable. Not to me. Got that, choom?”
I could kill him in an instant.
An instant. Twist his neck, or shove my middle finger through his eye and poke his brain out.
Or rip his fucking skull in half at the middle, both index fingers pressed at his skull simultaneously.
He was so weak. So fragile.
I nodded. “Sure.”
“Aight,” he nodded. “Good talk. Let’s get this show on the fucking road.”
Bitch.
No. I had to get back on track.
“Jin, I gotta ask,” I said, frowning. “Of all the ways you thought to punish me, why a party?”
“Oh, that’s easy: everyone likes a party. Everyone except you.”
That made… an annoying amount of sense.
From below, I saw the elevator ding open. Out from it strode Fei, wearing an understated seafoam cheongsam that blended well with her hair.
My eyes widened in sheer panic. It had completely slipped my mind.
This motherfucker had invited Fei over.
Jin chuckled, patting my shoulder. “Let the punishment begin in earnest.”