An unfortunate encounter, drunken mistakes, and a sort of (definitely) stalker lead to Sim Jaeyun 'dating' his best friend's childhood crush!
or, your life gets intertwined with a rich boy’s in an attempt to not get sued by his crazy personal fangirl and like with all good cliches, sex overcomplicates things.
pairing — trust fund baby!jake x college student fem!reader
word count — 35.5k (ongoing)
genre — college au, frat boys!enhypen, (failed) fake dating trope, SMUT MDNI
content — sort of strangers to fuck buddies to lovers pipeline, childhood best friend!jay, mentions of oc!yeji as your best friend, curly haired reader, rich nepo baby!jake, 02z are rich in general, lots of kissing, fake dating turning into fwb real quick, totally way too into it for it to be fake early on, reader is hot and she knows it, per usual – fat ass, bigger tits that jake’s obsessed with, reader described as smaller than jake, smut smut smut!, partying and alcohol use, slight violence, he fell first and harder trope, stem bf & writer gf, (kinda overly) possessive jake, some angst to spice things up, daddy issues, hyper independent reader who struggles with her feelings, fluff and happy ending cause im terrible at angst!!
note — another basic fake dating trope bc they will always be like crack to me! kinda straight forward, i’m mostly talking out of my ass about the rich boy aspect (my sources are crazy rich asians and xo kitty atp) so dont think about it too much. i honestly dont know if this was originally supposed to be based in korea in my head when i first started writing it but lets make up a pretend land thats not “the west” where they have frats at their universities for plot sake. okay that’s it, any necessary warnings will be posted at the start of each chapter, pls make sure to like, repost, comment and interact !! tysm and enjoy :D
Pairings: Scooby!Hybrid!Jake x Fem! Fred! Reader
Wordcount: 23k+
Summary: You and Jake retired from mystery-solving to do absolutely nothing with your lives together, and it was going great until a gold-embossed invite dragged the old gang back in for one last case. Turns out the resort is real, along with the totems curse, and the FWB arrangement you two swore was casual has a lot less time left to hide than either of you thought.
Warnings: Scooby-Doo au but with my inputs,FWB dynamic, jealousy, mild violence/blood, injury, hurt/comfort, found family, crude/comedic humor throughout, Smut (fem!reader x hybrid!Jake), piv, switch!Jake but he’s subby, switch!reader.
A/N: Hiii so I wanted to write something light and funny and this came to mind, it has actually been in my docs for a min but I finally had the energy to finish it. Like always Please Like, Reblog and Comment!They are very appreciated.Aurr??
[Masterlist]
The elevator dinged open on the lobby floor, and the smell hit you before the doors even fully parted — hibiscus, sunscreen, and the specific brand of chlorine that means rich people pool. You’d barely had time to shove your suitcase into a corner of the room and kick off your shoes before Jake was already bouncing on his heels by the door, practically vibrating with the kind of energy that meant if you didn’t move fast, he was going to start whining. Actually whining. Out loud.
“We just got here,” you said, stepping out into the lobby, blinking against the light pouring in from the floor-to-ceiling windows. “You’ve been in this hotel for eleven minutes.”
“And I’ve spent ten of them staring at a pool through a window,” Jake said, adjusting the brim of his baseball cap with one hand, tail giving an impatient swish behind him. “That’s basically torture. That’s a violation.”
“It’s not a violation, it’s called unpacking, which you did none of, by the way—”
“I hung up one shirt.”
“You threw one shirt at a hanger and missed.”
“Details.”
You gave up arguing on principle alone and let him tow you across the lobby by the sleeve, past the aggressively tropical fountain — actual flamingos, standing in it, looking personally offended by their circumstances — and out through the sliding doors into the full assault of the resort proper. Steel drums somewhere to your left. A woman doing yoga on a paddleboard with more confidence than the activity probably warranted. And the pool itself, sprawling and turquoise and absolutely packed with people who all, at some point, looked at Jake and did a polite little double-take.
You were used to it by now. The hat covered his ears well enough — soft golden fur tucked down flat under the brim, sunglasses doing the rest of the work up top — but the tail was a lost cause and always had been. Too long, too obvious, no good way to hide it that didn’t look worse than just letting it hang out. So you didn’t. He didn’t. And it turned out that if you just let a guy walk around a resort with a very convincing dog tail swishing behind him like it was the most normal thing in the world, people’s brains just… filled in the blank themselves.
“Oh my god, is that a fursuit tail? That’s so well made,” a woman murmured to her friend as you passed, not even bothering to lower her voice.
“Furries at the pool, love that for them,” someone else said, entirely unbothered, already looking back down at their phone.
Jake gave the woman a little wave, tail wagging harder, delighted. You elbowed him.
“Don’t encourage it.”
“It’s free cover,” he said under his breath, grinning. “Less explaining for you. You’re welcome.”
“I didn’t ask for this specific brand of welcome.”
“Too late, it’s already the plan. I’m a very committed furry now. It’s my whole personality.” He said it with such cheerful conviction that you had to bite down on a laugh, which only made him look more pleased with himself, which was somehow the most annoying part of the entire exchange.You found two loungers near the edge of the pool, and Jake dropped into his with the boneless enthusiasm of someone who had, in fact, been mentally preparing for this exact moment since the plane took off. Sunglasses on, hat tugged low, tail hanging off the side of the chair and thumping lazily against the tile whenever the breeze picked up. From a distance, he looked exactly like every other overenthusiastic tourist on the property. Up close, he looked like every other overenthusiastic tourist on the property who also happened to have a tail, which, apparently, resorts like this had learned to just roll with.You let yourself have about eleven minutes of actual peace. Sun on your face, ocean somewhere past the infinity edge doing its ocean thing, the drums finally landing on a song you liked.
Then you made the fatal mistake of picking up the drink menu.
“Nineteen dollars,” you said, out loud, to no one in particular. “For a smoothie. Nineteen. Dollars. For fruit. And ice.” Beside you, Jake’s ears — flat under the hat, but you could tell, you could always tell — gave a small, interested twitch.
“This is a scam,” you continued, spiraling gently. “This whole place is a beautifully landscaped scam and we walked right into it with our little roller bags like idiots.”
At the word scam, Jake sat up. He looked at you. Then he looked, very deliberately, toward a set of gleaming double doors near the far end of the pool deck — the kind with a small laminated sign that said STAFF ONLY in the specific font that always meant do not enter, unless. You looked at the doors too. You looked back at him.
“No,” you said.
His tail thumped once against the lounger, hopefully. “Absolutely not. We are not doing a kitchen heist twenty minutes after arriving. We haven’t even been swimming yet.” He put his chin in his hand and heaved a sigh so theatrical it startled the man on the next lounger over, somehow managing to convey fine, starve then, see if I care using nothing but posture and one deeply aggrieved eyebrow, visible even over the sunglasses. You lasted four more minutes. “Okay but think about it,” you said, already leaning in, already lowering your voice like the flamingos might be listening in from all the way over there. “It’s not stealing, it’s reclaiming. We paid for this vacation. Well — someone paid for this vacation, mysteriously, via gold-embossed mail, which we genuinely should think more about later — but that’s not the point. The point is there’s a whole kitchen back there and I refuse, on principle, to pay nineteen dollars for ice.”
Jake was already pulling his hat down tighter, already sliding off the lounger. “Say less.”
“I mean it, though — lookout only. You blend in fine out here with the whole—” you gestured vaguely at the tail, the hat, the general vibe “—furry at the pool thing you’ve got going, but the second we’re in a back hallway with actual staff, one loose ear and we’re having a very different conversation with hotel security.”
“Lookout only,” Jake agreed, already grinning, tail doing an excited little swish that he had to physically will still. “You’re the brains, I’m the extremely handsome, extremely covert muscle.”
“That is not a real job description.”
“It’s on my resume.” The plan, such as it was, involved you slipping along the hedge line toward the staff door while Jake “kept watch” from a spot that offered approximately zero sightlines to anything useful, mostly because he’d gotten immediately distracted by a kid’s inflatable flamingo float and was now watching it bob across the pool with an intensity usually reserved for national security threats. You made it to the door. The handle turned easy, no keycard needed, which in hindsight should have been a warning sign rather than a stroke of luck. Behind it: a narrow concrete hallway smelling like bleach and, faintly, promisingly, garlic. “Almost there,” you whispered to yourself, edging deeper.
There was another door ahead, unmarked, slightly ajar. You nudged it open with two fingers, already picturing trays of appetizers, glorious and free and not nineteen dollars. You did not, in fact, find the kitchen. You found darkness, and then the sudden, sickening absence of floor, and then you were airborne for one deeply undignified half-second before hitting something less like landing and more like controlled catastrophe — a slick metal chute, total blackness, gravity having a great time at your expense — and somewhere above you, a door swung shut with a soft, final little click.
You came to a stop in a heap on packed dirt.
“Ow,” you said, to the void. The void didn’t answer, but something heavy hit the ground a few feet away with a startled “OOF” and Jake’s voice, muffled and immediate, said, “Okay, so, small update — I don’t think that was the kitchen.”
“You followed me?!”
“I heard a scream! I’m muscle, muscle responds to screaming, it’s basically in the job description—”
“That was my scream, you—” You fumbled your phone out with hands that were shaking slightly more than you’d like to admit and thumbed the flashlight on, sweeping it around. Dirt walls. A ceiling that had clearly not been designed with structural integrity as a top priority. Jake, a few feet away, hat knocked sideways, tail dusty and slightly crooked, blinking at you in the harsh little light with the specific offended expression of a man who felt this whole situation was, somehow, not his fault. “This is fine,” you said, mostly to convince yourself. “Very normal amount of trouble for day one.”
“Very normal,” Jake agreed, pushing himself up and immediately cracking his head on a low support beam. “Ow — this cave has personally wronged me—”
“It’s not a cave—” You looked around. It was, extremely, a cave. “Okay. It’s a cave.”
“You said kitchen. You said appetizers. I was promised appetizers.”
“I made an educated guess—”
“An educated guess,” Jake repeated, brushing dirt off one shoulder with exaggerated patience, “based on a door that led to a pit. You know, if only your brain was as big as your appetite, we’d be eating dinner right now instead of this.”
“Excuse me—”
“Just an observation. Big appetite. Smaller plan.” You were fully prepared to throttle him — had, in fact, already taken a step forward with exactly that intention — when the dark above cracked open with the groan of old hinges, and two more bodies came plummeting down in quick, undignified succession, hitting the dirt with twin thuds and a chorus of coughing. You swung the flashlight up. For a second, nobody said anything. Jay blinked back at you through a haze of disturbed dust, resort linen shirt streaked with dirt, hair — previously, you were sure, perfectly gelled — now sticking up at an angle that suggested violence had been done to it. Beside him, Daphne pushed herself up onto her elbows, squinting into the flashlight beam, one hand already going to smooth her hair on pure reflex before she seemed to remember there was dirt in it too.
“…Jay?” you said, and your voice came out smaller than you meant it to.
He stared at you for a second like he was checking his own eyes were working right. “It’s — wow. Hi.” A short, disbelieving laugh. “Wasn’t expecting to fall into a hole and find you in it.”
“Yeah, well.” You gestured vaguely, taking him in — older around the eyes somehow, same stupid perfect posture even covered in dirt. “Wasn’t really planning on being found.”
“You cut your hair,” Daphne said, sitting up properly now, studying you with the same critical, not-unkind once-over she used to give everyone, like she was pricing you for resale. “It looks good. Different. Good-different.”
“Thanks. You look—” you gestured at all of her, dirt and all, “—still terrifying, somehow, even like this.”
That got a small, surprised laugh out of her. “I try.” Jake, for his part, had gone very still beside you, staring at Jay like he wasn’t entirely sure he was real. Then his tail started up — slow at first, then faster, thumping hard against the dirt — and he was moving before you could grab his sleeve, launching himself across the pit and tackling Jay in a full-body hug that sent them both sprawling back into the dirt.
“Jay!” His voice cracked with the sheer volume of how happy he was, muffled against Jay’s shoulder. “Hey — hi — it’s been forever, man, how — I can’t believe — this is awesome—”
“Get off—” Jay wheezed, though there was something in his voice that wasn’t actually annoyed, not really, underneath the dirt-in-mouth complaints. “I missed you too, I did, can you — the dirt is going in my mouth—” Jake’s ears were right there, tucked in his messy hair, tail going a mile a minute against the ground, and neither Jay nor Daphne so much as blinked at it — just old, familiar, of course he’s still got them, the same way you’d clock a friend’s haircut and move on. “It’s been what,” Daphne said, once Jay had extracted himself and was sitting up, picking twigs out of his collar, “three years? Four?”
“Something like that,” you said. It felt like both no time at all and an entire different lifetime, looking at the two of them covered in dirt in a hole in the ground, like no time had passed and also like you were meeting strangers wearing familiar faces.
“I knew it,” Jay said suddenly, apropos of nothing, tipping his head back to address the ceiling, some new thought visibly landing. “I knew that flight was too good to be true. Free, no strings, five-star — should’ve known the second I got the mail.”
“You got one too?” you asked.
“Gold envelope. Wax seal. The whole dramatic bit.” Jay dusted off his sleeve, expression souring. “Figured it was a fluke. A nice one. Clearly not.”
“Where’s Velma?” Daphne asked, brushing off her shorts, glancing around the pit like she might spot her tucked into a corner.
“No idea,” you said, checking your phone — no signal, nine percent battery, fantastic. “Wasn’t on our flight.”
Daphne shrugged. “Didn’t expect her, honestly. Wasn’t expecting any of you. Thought this was a solo trip.”
“Same,” Jay muttered, finally getting his feet fully under him, brushing more dirt off a shirt that was, at this point, beyond saving. “Which, in retrospect, should’ve been the first red flag. Nobody sends four separate ‘solo, all-expenses-paid’ invitations to four people who all used to—” he stopped, glanced at you and Jake, cleared his throat. “Know each other.”
There was a beat there, small and a little too long, that you decided not to examine. “Well, whoever sent it,” you said, standing, dusting off your knees, “clearly didn’t think it through, because there’s a grate up there—” you pointed your phone light at the rectangle of slightly-less-dark above “—and if we get someone up to it, they can yell for help. Statistically someone up top hears eventually.”
“Statistically,” Jay repeated.
“There are hundreds of people twenty feet above us paying nineteen dollars for smoothies. Someone will hear a scream.”
“Comforting.”
“I’ll do it,” you said, already moving to the wall beneath the grate. “I’ll fit through easiest…well I hope.Boost me.”
“I’ve got it,” Jay said, already crouching, lacing his fingers into a step.
Jake was there before he’d finished the sentence, wedging himself bodily between you and Jay with all the subtlety of a golden retriever body-checking another dog off a tennis ball. “Nope. Nope, I’ve got this one, thanks Jay, appreciate it though—”
“I was just going to—”
“I know what you were going to do.” Jake’s hands were already at your waist, hoisting you up with a strength that still, somehow, managed to catch you off guard every single time. “Not happening. Not on my watch. Not those.”
“Those what—” you started, and then you were airborne, scrabbling for the grate’s edge, fingers finding metal, so close, the opening right there, cool air hitting your face for the first time in what felt like an hour—
“HELLO?” you bellowed, up through the grate, into the very distant, muffled thump of pool music. “ANYBODY? WE’RE STUCK DOWN HERE—”
Which was, of course, exactly when Jake’s hand — meant to be steadying you, bracing you, being a responsible lifting surface — slipped.
Right onto your left cheek.
He squeezed.
“Excuse me—” you shrieked, hand shooting down on pure reflex, closing around the nearest ear — hat long gone, when had that happened — and yanking, hard. Jake let out a yelp that echoed off every wall in the pit as his grip gave out and you both went down in a heap, you landing mostly on dirt, him landing mostly underneath you.
“Pervert,” you hissed, scrambling off, face burning.
“It was an accident!” Jake protested, rubbing his ear, entirely unrepentant. “You try having a pair of — of those — directly in your face for ten seconds and not grab! It’s a reflex! It’s basic anatomy!”
“It is not basic anatomy, it’s a crime—”
“This,” Jay said, from behind you, flat with the exhaustion of a man watching his friends make terrible decisions in real time, same as he always had, “is going to be a very long trip.”
“Try having a pair of buns in your face and not grab them,” Jake muttered again, mostly to himself, aggrieved, still rubbing his ear like he was the wronged party —
You were fully winding up to hit him a second time when a soft voice cut through the dark from somewhere above.
“Hello? Is anyone down there?”
Everyone froze.
“YES,” you yelled up, scrambling to your feet, “OVER HERE, WE’RE STUCK—”
“Hold on,” the voice said, calm in a way that felt almost eerie given the circumstances. “Give me a second.”
Footsteps retreated. A stretch of time passed that felt considerably longer than it probably was. Then the soft clank and rattle of metal, and a long ladder unspooled down through the grate, thudding into the dirt at your feet. You climbed first, then Daphne, then Jay, then Jake — who took the opportunity to “accidentally” step on Jay’s hand on the way up, earning a hissed “seriously?” — and finally you were all standing in a narrow concrete corridor, blinking against actual light for the first time in what felt like forever, dusting dirt off yourselves with the particular indignity of people who’d just, in no uncertain terms, been dumped.
You looked up to thank whoever had saved you.
And paused.
“…Velma?”
She stood a few feet away, glasses thick as ever, but everything else about her looked different. Her hair was longer, loose instead of pulled back, catching the light in a way that made you do a full second take before your brain caught up with your eyes. “You look—” you started, and didn’t finish, unsure different was a compliment you were allowed to hand out without more context. Velma didn’t seem bothered by the scrutiny. If anything, there was something a little too composed about the way she stood there, arms crossed, watching all four of you dust dirt out of your hair like she’d been expecting this exact scene for some time. “Why are you here?” you asked, once your brain caught up enough to form a sentence.
“I have a better question,” Velma said, and something in her tone made the back of your neck prickle, made the whole cheerful, sun-drenched, flamingo-adjacent resort suddenly feel a lot less like a vacation. “Why were all of you stuck down there?”
Nobody answered. Somewhere above, muffled through several feet of concrete, the steel drums kept playing, bright and oblivious, like nothing in the world had gone wrong at all. Velma didn’t say anything else. She just turned, gestured once with two fingers — follow me — and started walking, her sneakers silent against the concrete in a way that felt almost unnervingly practiced for someone supposedly just vacationing. Nobody moved for a second. “Are we following her?” Jake whispered, tugging his hat back into place, ears tucking down under it. “Because it kind of feels like we’re about to get led into a second hole.”
“We already fell in one hole today,” you whispered back. “Statistically we’re due for a normal hallway.”
“That’s not how statistics work.”
“I don’t know how statistics work, Jake, I make it up as I go, same as everyone else in this hallway.”
“Comforting,” Jay muttered, echoing himself from ten minutes ago, and fell into step behind Velma anyway, because — really — what else was there to do. Daphne trailed after him without a word, arms crossed, eyes doing a slow, assessing sweep of the corridor like she was cataloguing exits out of pure habit.
The hallway sloped downward, gently at first and then not so gently, concrete giving way to older stone, the air changing from bleach-and-dust to something cooler and mustier, tinged with machine oil. Every twenty feet or so, a bare bulb flickered overhead, buzzing faintly, casting everything in the specific sick-yellow light that horror movies used right before something bad happened. “This feels like the part of the movie where the group splits up and everyone individually regrets it,” you said. “We’re not splitting up,” Velma said, without turning around, without breaking stride. “I need all of you together for this.”
“For what, exactly,” Jay said, “is the question I think we’re all circling.”
Velma didn’t answer that either. She just kept walking, until the corridor opened up into a wider room — low ceiling, exposed pipework running along one wall, a bank of old monitors stacked against another, half of them dark, a couple flickering with grainy black-and-white footage of pool decks and lobby corners. In the middle of it all sat a folding table absolutely buried under paper: printouts, photographs, a corkboard leaned up against one leg with red string running between pushpins in a pattern that made your stomach drop a little just looking at it. “Oh no,” Jake said, very quietly, beside you. “Yeah,” you agreed. “That’s a — that’s a conspiracy board, that’s an actual, real-life conspiracy board, I thought those were just a TV thing—”
“Apparently not.”
“Velma,” Jay said, slow and careful, in the voice of a man choosing every word like it might detonate, “why do you have a crime board in the basement of a five-star resort.”
Velma finally turned around to face all of you, and for the first time since the grate, something in her composure cracked — not much, just a flicker, there and gone, but you caught it. She crossed her arms tighter. “I need to explain some things,” she said, “and I need you to let me get through it before anyone starts yelling.”
“No promises,” you said.
“That’s fair.” She took a breath. “I sent the invitations.”
Silence. The kind that has weight to it, that presses down on a room.
“You—” Jay started.
“All four of them. The flights, the gold envelopes, the wax seals, all of it — I know how that looked, I designed it to look expensive and mysterious on purpose, because I needed you all here and I knew none of you would come if I just called and said ‘hey, drop everything and fly out, I need help with something.’” She said it fast, like ripping off a bandage, like if she slowed down she might not get through it at all. “So I didn’t call. I made it look like a prize. A vacation. Something you’d want to say yes to before you had time to think about whether you should.”
“You scammed us,” Jake said, sounding more impressed than upset, tail giving one confused thump against his leg.
“I recruited you,” Velma said. “Poorly. I’ll own that it was poorly done.”
“You rigged the trap door,” you said, the pieces clicking together with an unpleasant clunk. “That wasn’t — we didn’t just stumble into that, did we. You put us in a hole. On purpose.”
Velma had the decency to wince. “Not — not exactly on purpose, no. The kitchen door leads to a maintenance access point that’s been unstable for months, it wasn’t supposed to drop anyone, I just needed a reason to get you away from the crowds without staff noticing, and I may have… loosened a support beam. As a contingency. In case anyone got curious about that hallway.”
“You booby-trapped a kitchen in case we got curious,” Jay repeated, flat.
“It was a calculated risk.”
“I hit my head on a beam!”
“I said I’d own it,” Velma snapped, and then visibly reeled herself back in, pressing two fingers to the bridge of her nose under her glasses. “I’m sorry. Genuinely. I didn’t expect four people to fall in at once, I was aiming for maybe one of you finding it and I’d walk you all through this more gently after. This has not gone the way I planned it.”
“Nothing about today has gone the way anyone planned it,” you muttered, and Jake, beside you, made a small noise of agreement that was mostly just breath.
Daphne, who had said nothing this entire time, finally spoke, arms still crossed, gaze fixed on the corkboard behind Velma rather than on Velma herself. “What’s the string for.”
Everyone turned to look at the board properly.
Up close, it was worse than the general shape had suggested from across the room. Photographs — grainy, telephoto, the kind taken from a distance without the subject knowing — of shipping crates on a dock somewhere, of men in resort staff uniforms unloading them at odd hours, of a walk-in freezer door that looked like it led somewhere it shouldn’t. In the center, pinned with more care than anything else on the board, was a single image: an object, small, dark, intricately carved, sitting in what looked like a padded velvet case. It didn’t look like much. A totem, maybe, or a fetish carving — the kind of thing you’d walk past in a museum gift shop without a second glance.Except every single thread on the board ran back to it. “That’s what this is about,” Velma said, following your eyes to the center pin. “That’s why I needed you. All of you. Not — not a vacation, not a reunion, though I’ll admit some part of me wanted that too, badly, more than I meant to. But mostly that.”
“What is it,” you asked.“It’s called the Aramoth Totem. Pre-colonial, originally from a private collection two states over — well documented, well insured, extremely well guarded, or it was, until about four months ago when it stopped being any of those things.” Velma tapped the photograph once, gently, like she didn’t fully trust herself to press harder. “It went missing during a transport between exhibitions. No forced entry, no alarms tripped, nothing on camera except eleven seconds of static that shouldn’t have been possible with the equipment they were running. I got pulled in as an outside consultant because the insurance company wanted someone who understood the — the unconventional angle of the case.”
“The unconventional angle,” Jake repeated slowly, ears twitching under his hat like he already didn’t like where this was going.
“It’s not just a carving,” Velma said. “It does something. I don’t fully know what, not yet — the historical accounts are inconsistent, half of them contradict each other, which is either bad record-keeping or very deliberate obfuscation, and I lean toward the second. But every account agrees on one thing. It’s not something you want in the hands of someone who knows how to use it. And I think whoever stole it does.”
“Okay, hold on,” Jay said, holding up both hands like he was physically trying to slow the conversation down. “Back up. You’re telling us there’s a — a cursed object, stolen, currently here, in this specific resort, and your solution was to fake four vacation invitations and drop us in a hole.”
“When you say it like that it sounds bad.”
“There is no way to say it that doesn’t sound bad, Velma!”
“I panicked!” Velma’s voice cracked up half an octave, the calm finally slipping properly, and something about seeing her rattled — actually rattled, not performing composure the way she had been since the grate — made the whole room go a little quieter. “I traced it here three weeks ago. I’ve been staying in a staff dorm since, going through inventory logs at two in the morning, and I am one person, and every lead I follow just makes the timeline shorter, and I couldn’t — I didn’t know how to just call and ask you all to drop your lives and come help me chase something this dangerous on a hunch. So I made it easy to say yes. I made it look like something you’d want. I know that’s not — I know it wasn’t fair. But I didn’t know what else to do.”
Nobody said anything for a second.
Jake’s tail had gone still — not wagging, not even the nervous half-swish it did when he was uncomfortable, just flat and quiet against the back of his leg, and when you glanced at him, his jaw was doing something tight and thoughtful that didn’t usually show up on him this fast.
“Why us, though,” you asked, gentler now. “There’s — there’s people who do this professionally. Actual security consultants. Why drag four people who haven’t done this in years?”
Velma looked at you like the answer should have been obvious. “Because you’re good at it. Because none of you have ever needed a manual for this — you just do it, all of you, differently, and it works, and I have spent three weeks watching very expensive professionals miss things that any one of you would’ve caught in an afternoon.” She pushed her glasses up, and for a second, under the buzzing yellow light, she looked younger than you remembered her being, and tireder. “And because I missed you. All of you. And I didn’t know how to say that part on its own, so I buried it under a totem and a five-star hotel and hoped nobody would notice.”
“We noticed,” Jay said, but there wasn’t any real heat in it anymore.
“I noticed,” Jake said, quieter, and something in his voice made you glance over — he wasn’t looking at Velma, he was looking at the corkboard, at the little velvet case with the totem sitting dark and unassuming inside it, ears low, expression doing something you didn’t quite have a name for.
“So what,” you said, into the quiet, “we just — help you find it? Steal it back from actual smugglers, us, four people who were stuck in a hole?”
“I’m not asking you to steal anything,” Velma said. “I’m asking you to help me figure out where it is and who’s using it before someone gets hurt. That’s all. And I know I have no right to ask after — everything—” she gestured vaguely at the ceiling, the pit, the whole disastrous morning “—but I’m asking anyway. Because I don’t have anyone else who’d believe me.”
Jake’s tail gave one small, uncertain thump against his leg.
“I mean,” he said, glancing sideways at you, something soft under the joke he was clearly trying to make, “we already fell in a hole for free. Might as well get a mystery out of it.”
“That is not a ringing professional endorsement,” Jay muttered, but he was already looking at the board again, at the red string, jaw tight in the specific way that meant his brain had already started working the problem whether he’d agreed out loud yet or not.
Daphne uncrossed her arms, finally, and stepped closer to the board, tilting her head at the photograph of the freezer door. “That’s the east wing kitchen prep freezer,” she said, matter-of-fact, like she was identifying a shoe brand. “I walked past it twenty minutes ago. There’s a padlock on it that doesn’t match the ones on any of the other units.”
Velma turned to look at her so fast her glasses nearly slid off.
“You noticed that in twenty minutes?”
“I notice things,” Daphne said, unbothered, already turning back toward the corridor like the decision had been made for the whole group without anyone needing to formally vote on it. “You said you had inventory logs. I want to see them.”
Velma looked, for one unguarded second, like she might actually cry, and then visibly decided against it, clearing her throat and gesturing everyone toward the folding table instead. “Okay. Okay — yes. Logs. This way.”
You caught Jake’s sleeve as the others started moving, holding him back half a step.
“You good?” you asked, quiet, just for him.
He glanced at the corkboard one more time — at the totem, small and dark and radiating something that felt, even through a photograph, faintly wrong — and then back at you, and whatever had gone tight in his expression eased, just slightly, into something more familiar.
“Yeah,” he said. “I mean — smugglers, cursed antique, evil totem, sure, whatever, we’ve had weirder Tuesdays.” He bumped your shoulder with his, tail giving one real wag, finally, small but real. “Besides. Somebody’s gotta keep an eye on you so you don’t try to lead another tactical assault on a kitchen.”
“That was one time.”
“It was today.”
“Today doesn’t count, today has been cursed since the flamingos.”
“Everything’s been cursed since the flamingos,” Jake agreed solemnly, and followed you toward the table, ears twitching once under the hat, tail swishing easy again behind him, like whatever had unsettled him a moment ago had already folded itself back down into something he’d carry quietly instead of out loud.
Ahead of you, Velma was already spreading logs across the table, voice picking up speed the way it always used to when she got excited about a lead, Jay leaning in over her shoulder with his arms crossed and Daphne pointing at something on the page with one sharp, manicured nail.
Somewhere above you, muffled through concrete and stone, the pool music kept playing, bright and oblivious, completely unaware that four hundred feet away, the vacation had officially become something else entirely.
Morning came in wrong.
Not wrong like bad — wrong like heavy, like your limbs had been swapped out overnight for someone else’s, weighted down and slow to respond, and it took you a solid ten seconds of blinking at the ceiling to remember why. Right. Logs until two a.m. Velma’s increasingly unhinged handwriting on printouts that all started to blur together around midnight. The walk back up from the basement that had felt like scaling a mountain by the end of it.You’d collapsed into your bed — your bed, the one on the left, the one you’d specifically claimed the second you’d checked into the room, because two beds meant two beds, that had been the entire point of asking for two beds — and you distinctly remembered falling asleep alone.
You were not currently alone. There was an arm slung heavy over your waist, and a whole warm wall of a person pressed up along your back, and — you did a slow, dawning inventory — a tail. Draped over your leg. Currently giving one slow, unconscious thump against the sheets like it was dreaming about something pleasant.
“Jake.”
No response. Just breathing, even and deep against the back of your neck, warm enough that you could feel it stirring your hair.
“Jake.” You tried to wriggle forward, put some distance between yourself and the furnace currently using you as a body pillow, and his arm just tightened, pulling you back flush against him with a small, sleepy, entirely unbothered noise, like your escape attempt was cute but ultimately irrelevant. “Five more minutes,” he mumbled into your hair, voice wrecked with sleep, rough in a way that did something unhelpful low in your stomach that you were choosing, very deliberately, to ignore.
“This is my bed. You have your own bed. Your bed is right there, it is four feet away, I watched you fall asleep in it—”
“Yours is warmer.”
“That’s not — that’s not a real category of bed, Jake, they’re identical, they’re literally the same mattress—”
“Yours has you in it,” he said, like that settled the entire debate, and burrowed his face further into the back of your neck, and you felt the specific soft huff of his breath against your skin and had to bite down hard on the urge to just… let it happen. Let the five more minutes happen. It would be so easy. It was always so easy with him, that was half the problem.
You tried to pry his arm off instead, mostly on principle, and he made a wounded little noise — an actual whine, pitiful, betrayed, the exact sound he made when someone took a fry off his plate — and pulled you back in even tighter, tail curling further around your calf like a physical argument against your leaving.
“You are a menace,” you told him. “You are a menace who somehow migrated across an entire room in his sleep, that’s not normal, that’s not a thing normal people do—”
“’M not normal,” he mumbled, entirely unrepentant, “‘m a dog, dogs migrate, it’s instinct—”
“That’s not what instinct means—”
You lifted your hand, fully prepared to smack him with a pillow, roll him right out onto the floor if that’s what it took — and that was the exact moment you registered, with sudden and undeniable clarity, exactly what else had migrated across the room along with him. Pressed against your lower back. Unmistakable. Very much not a sleepy accident. You went very still. Behind you, Jake went still too, a half-second behind you, like his own brain was only just catching up to the situation his body had already fully committed to.
“…Okay,” he said, into the silence, voice suddenly a lot more awake than it had been thirty seconds ago. “Okay, so, in my defense—”
“Jake.”
“—it’s morning, it happens,you know, it’s a whole biological—”
“Jake.”
“I’m not — I didn’t do this on purpose, I was asleep—”
You should have gotten up. That was the correct move, the obvious move, the one every rational cell in your body was screaming at you to make — untangle yourself, put four feet of very necessary distance between you and this exact situation, go brush your teeth, reclaim some dignity. That was the plan. Instead you stayed exactly where you were, feeling the slow, familiar press of him against the small of your back, the heat of it seeping through the thin fabric of your sleep shirt. His breathing had gone shallow against your neck. The arm around your waist hadn’t loosened; if anything it had tightened, fingers curling lightly into the soft give of your stomach like he was already hoping you’d decide the same way you usually did.
You didn’t shove him off. You rolled, slow and deliberate, until you were facing him. The morning light filtering through the half-drawn curtains painted everything gold and soft. Jake’s eyes were open now, wide and a little hopeful under the sleep-haze, the soft fur of his ears half-flattened against his head. His tail had gone still against the sheets, the tip twitching once, twice, like it was waiting for the verdict.
“You’re hard,” you said, quiet, almost conversational. A flush crawled up his throat, visible even under the light dusting along his jaw. “Yeah. Noticed. Sorry. I can—” You shifted closer, one knee sliding between his, and felt the full length of him twitch against your hip. His breath hitched. The sound he made was small, involuntary, something between a gasp and a soft, aborted whimper — the same one you’d heard a dozen times before when you got your hands on him like this.
“Don’t,” you murmured. “Don’t apologize.”
His ears flicked forward, then back again. “You’re not… kicking me out?”
“I’m considering my options.” You let your hand drift down, palm flat against the warm plane of his stomach, feeling the way the muscle jumped under your touch the way it always did. “You’re already in my bed. Seems inefficient to waste the morning.”
Jake’s laugh came out shaky and familiar. “That’s the most romantic thing you’ve ever said to me.”
“Shut up.”
You kissed him the way you always did when it was like this — slow, lazy, unhurried, the kind of kiss that belonged to early mornings and nowhere to be for another hour. His mouth opened under yours with a soft, practiced sound, and his hands found your waist like they’d been waiting for the green light. The tail, still draped over your leg, gave a single, eager thump against the mattress. You pushed him gently onto his back. He went without resistance, ears pinned, eyes half-lidded, the picture of someone who had decided somewhere between the first kiss and the second that he was perfectly content to let you set the pace, same as every other time. When you straddled his hips the solid heat of him pressed up against you through the thin barrier of fabric, and the low, helpless noise that escaped his throat made something warm and possessive unfurl low in your gut. “Look at you,” you murmured, rolling your hips once, slow, just enough friction to make his fingers dig into your thighs. “All that talk last night about being muscle, and here you are again.”
“I’m — still muscle,” he managed, voice rough. “Just — currently being used as a mattress. Very willing mattress. Extremely—”
You rolled your hips again, firmer this time, and the sentence dissolved into a soft, punched-out moan. His tail flicked hard against the sheets. Clothes came off in stages — sleep shirt tugged over your head, his shorts shoved down just far enough, the soft golden hair of his thighs warm under your palms. When you finally sank down onto him the stretch was familiar and perfect, a slow, deliberate slide that pulled a broken sound from both of you. Jake’s hands flew to your hips like he needed something to hold onto, ears flat, mouth open on a quiet, continuous stream of soft noises he clearly couldn’t stop.
“Easy,” you breathed, settling fully, feeling him throb deep inside you. “I’ve got you.”
“I know — fuck — I know, just—” His voice cracked. One of his hands left your hip to cover his own eyes for a second, like the sight of you above him was still somehow too much even after all this time. “You feel — you’re so—”
You started moving, slow and unhurried, the lazy rhythm of a morning that didn’t need to be anything more than this. Every downward roll of your hips drew another soft, punched-out sound from him — little half-whines, aborted moans, the kind of noises that lived somewhere between pleasure and surrender. His tail had started a restless, continuous sweep against the sheets, the tip occasionally brushing your calf like it couldn’t help seeking contact.
You reached back and closed your fingers around the base of it.
Jake’s whole body arched. The sound he made was pure, unfiltered reaction — a sharp, high whimper that cracked into something lower and more desperate as you gave the soft, sensitive base a firm squeeze and kept riding him in that same slow, deliberate pace. His hands scrambled for purchase on your thighs, then your waist, then finally settled on your hips again like he needed the anchor.
“Please,” he breathed, eyes glassy, ears trembling. “Please, I — you can — harder, or — just don’t stop, don’t—”
“I’ve got you,” you repeated, softer this time, and leaned down to kiss the side of his throat while your hand kept working the base of his tail in slow, rhythmic squeezes that matched the roll of your hips. Every time your fingers tightened he made that same helpless little sound, hips twitching up to meet you even as he stayed pliant beneath you, letting you take exactly what you wanted the way he always did when it was like this. The pace stayed unhurried. No urgency, no race to the finish — just the slow build of heat and friction and the quiet, continuous stream of soft noises spilling from Jake’s mouth every time you sank down or gave his tail another firm stroke. His hands roamed your sides, your back, the curve of your ass, but never tried to take control. He just held on, breathing hard against your collarbone when you leaned close, whispering half-formed words that dissolved into whimpers whenever you clenched around him or squeezed again. You felt the shift in him first — the way his thighs tensed, the way his tail went rigid in your grip, the way his breathing turned ragged and desperate.
“I’m — close,” he managed, voice barely there. “Can I — please, I want to—”
“Inside,” you said, and watched the way the word landed, the way his eyes fluttered shut and a full-body shudder rolled through him. “That’s what you want, isn’t it?”
He nodded, frantic, almost shy about it even now. “Yeah — yes — please—”
You rode him through it, steady and deep, hand never leaving his tail. When he came it was with a broken, punched-out moan and a full-body tremor, hips jerking up as he spilled hot and deep inside you. The sudden flood of heat triggered your own release a few seconds later — a slow, rolling wave that left you trembling above him, fingers still tight around the base of his tail as aftershocks flickered through both of you.Even after, he kept making soft, dazed little sounds, ears flat, tail limp and twitching weakly in your grip. You stayed seated for a long moment, feeling the slow pulse of him still buried inside you, the warm mess of it already starting to slip down your thighs. Then you leaned down and kissed him properly — slow, deep, tasting the leftover tremor in his mouth the same way you always did when he got like this.When you finally lifted yourself off him the evidence of what you’d done was impossible to miss: the thick, white spill of him streaked across the soft skin of your inner thighs, and higher — deliberate, possessive — the places he’d marked you in the last minutes before he finished. Faint bruises already forming where his mouth had found the curve of your breast, the side of your neck, the soft skin just above your collarbone. He’d left them without thinking, half-asleep and desperate, same as he always did when you let him, and the sight of them in the morning light made something warm and satisfied settle in your chest.
Jake looked up at you with heavy-lidded eyes, ears still half-pinned, expression soft and wrecked and a little smug underneath the daze.
“Morning,” he rasped.
You huffed a quiet laugh and collapsed beside him, sticky and warm and entirely unwilling to move for at least another thirty seconds.
“Morning.”
By the time you actually made it into the shower, the water had gone from hot to lukewarm to actively hostile, and you didn’t even care, standing under it with your forehead against the tile for a solid minute just trying to remember how words worked.“You used all the hot water,” Jake called from the other room, entirely too pleased with himself for someone who’d contributed directly to the problem.
“You caused the reason I needed the hot water—”
“I contributed positively to your morning, I don’t see the issue—”
You emerged ten minutes later to find him already dressed — mostly — hopping on one foot while he wrestled a sandal on, hat sitting crooked on his head, tail doing a happy, unhurried swish behind him like the whole morning had gone exactly according to some plan only he’d been aware of.“You look smug,” you said, digging through your suitcase for something that wasn’t a swimsuit, because apparently you’d need actual clothes today, actual pants, for a day that involved a basement full of red string and stolen cursed artifacts.
“I feel smug.”
“You should feel tired, it’s barely eight—”
“I feel both,” he said, cheerfully, tugging his shirt down, ears twitching once under the hat like they were settling into place. “It’s a whole range of feelings. I’m a complex guy.”
“You’re a golden retriever with a mortgage-sized ego.”
“I don’t have a mortgage.”
“It was a metaphor, Jake.”
“I know what a metaphor is,” he said, aggrieved, and then ruined it completely by tripping over his own suitcase on the way to the door, catching himself on the frame with a muttered curse that you were absolutely going to bring up later, at length, probably in front of Jay.You laced your shoes on, checked your reflection in the mirror by the door — you looked, you decided, fine, completely normal, nothing about your face said anything had happened, good, excellent, that was exactly the energy you needed to bring into a room with Velma’s conspiracy board and Jay’s ability to read a room like it owed him money — and grabbed your bag off the desk.“Ready?” Jake asked, already holding the door, tail giving one last easy swish, entirely too pleased with the whole morning for someone about to walk into a briefing about a dangerous stolen totem.
“No,” you said honestly, “but let’s go anyway.”
The hallway outside was already busy with early risers heading for the breakfast buffet, the smell of coffee and something fried drifting up from the lobby below, and you fell into step beside Jake toward the elevator, his shoulder bumping yours once, easy, familiar, like nothing at all had shifted between you overnight except, very obviously, everything.The elevator doors slid shut. Down, past the lobby, past the pool, down into the part of the resort that didn’t show up on any brochure — back toward the basement, back toward Velma and her red string and the small dark object at the center of it all, waiting.
The basement, in daylight — or what passed for it down here, filtered through a single grimy skylight someone had apparently forgotten existed — looked marginally less ominous than it had at two in the morning. Marginally. The corkboard was still there, red string and all, but Velma had added to it overnight: new photographs, a hand-drawn floor plan of the resort’s service areas, a timeline scrawled across three separate index cards taped end to end because apparently one card hadn’t been enough for the sheer volume of her paranoia.“Morning,” Velma said, not looking up from the table, already three sentences deep into whatever she was explaining to Daphne, who was nodding along with the patient, unbothered expression of someone who’d apparently decided last night that this was just her life now.
“You look like you didn’t sleep,” you said, dropping your bag onto an empty corner of the table.
“I didn’t.” Velma didn’t seem bothered by this. “I cross-referenced the staff rotation logs against the freezer’s access records. There’s a four-hour window every Tuesday and Thursday night where the east wing kitchen has zero staff scheduled, which is not normal for a resort this size, and definitely not normal for a unit with a mismatched padlock.”
“So somebody’s using that window,” Jay said, arms crossed, already leaning over the table like the crime board had personally challenged him to a duel.“Somebody’s using that window,” Velma confirmed. “Which means today, we split up and cover ground. I want eyes on the freezer’s exterior access, I want someone checking the dock where the original photos were taken, and I want—” she glanced at the floor plan “—someone in the east wing storage corridor, because there’s a supply room back there that doesn’t show up on the resort’s public blueprints. It’s not on the guest map. It’s not on the staff map either, technically, which means whoever built it wasn’t trying to hide it from guests.”
“They were hiding it from staff,” Daphne said.
“Exactly.”
“I’ll take the storage room,” you said, mostly because it sounded like the least likely place to run into an actual smuggler mid-crime, which felt like a reasonable metric for choosing an assignment on day two of this.
“I’ll go with you,” Jake said immediately, tail giving one decisive swish, like the matter had never been up for debate in the first place.“Somebody should probably watch the dock,” Jay said, “since that’s where the actual photos of actual crimes were taken, and somebody should probably not be alone for that.”
“I’ll take the dock,” Daphne said. “I’m better at looking like I belong places I don’t.”
“That’s terrifyingly true,” you said.
“I know.”
Which left Jay standing there for a half-second too long, clearly recalibrating, before he said, with the forced casualness of a man pretending the seating chart hadn’t just rearranged itself without his input, “I’ll come with you two, then. The storage corridor’s a big area. Extra hands.” Jake’s tail slowed, just slightly, the swish going from decisive to thoughtful, but he didn’t say anything, just nodded and grabbed a flashlight off the table like that settled it.The east wing storage corridor turned out to be exactly the kind of forgotten, unglamorous space you’d expect from a resort that spent all its money on the parts guests actually saw. Bare concrete floor, water-stained ceiling tiles, a long row of numbered doors that hadn’t been repainted in at least a decade. It smelled like old cardboard and industrial cleaner, and every fourth light fixture buzzed in a way that suggested it was actively dying.
“This is romantic,” Jake said, flashlight beam bouncing off a stack of folded pool loungers. “Really glad we upgraded from cave to worse hallway.”
“Nobody said resort espionage was glamorous.”
“I was promised a vacation.”
“You were promised appetizers, and then a totem, and now you’re getting neither,” you said, “so maybe manage your expectations going forward.”Jay, a few steps behind, said nothing, methodically checking door numbers against a hand-copied list from Velma’s floor plan, expression unreadable in the buzzing half-light. You’d almost forgotten what it was like, doing this with him — the specific quiet focus he brought to a search, the way he catalogued a space instead of just walking through it. It used to drive you a little crazy, honestly, back when this was your whole life instead of a thing you used to do. He’d correct your pace, your angle, your grip on a flashlight, and you’d bristled at all of it back then, young and certain you already knew everything you needed to know.It felt different now. Not annoying, exactly. Just — old. Familiar in a way that sat strangely in your chest.“Door twelve,” Jay said, stopping in front of an unmarked one near the end of the row. “This isn’t on the list. Velma’s floor plan skips straight from eleven to thirteen.”
“That’s not ominous at all,” Jake said.
“It’s extremely ominous.”
“I said it wasn’t. I was being sarcastic.”
“I know you were being sarcastic, I was agreeing with the underlying—” Jay pinched the bridge of his nose. “Can we just open the door.”
The handle was unlocked, which felt like it should’ve been reassuring and somehow wasn’t. Inside: more of the same industrial nothing, shelving units loaded with cleaning supplies and spare linens, a single bare bulb on a pull-string that Jake yanked to life with a soft, tired click.Nothing looked immediately incriminating. No red string, no padded velvet cases, no ominous carved totems glowing menacingly from a shelf. Just dust, and boxes, and the low hum of a building doing exactly what buildings do when nobody’s paying attention to them.
“Well, that’s anticlimactic,” Jake said, poking at a box labeled TOWELS — WHITE with the toe of his sandal.
“Check behind things,” Jay said, already moving toward the back shelving unit, running a hand along the underside of a shelf like he expected to find a hidden switch, because apparently three years hadn’t changed his taste in dramatics eitheYou started on the opposite wall, working your way down a row of boxes that all turned out to be exactly what their labels claimed — towels, extra pool floats, a genuinely staggering quantity of tiny shampoo bottles — until you reached the far corner, where a stack of crates sat slightly askew from the rest, like they’d been moved recently and not put back quite right.You crouched to get a better look, reaching for the top crate to shift it aside, and your foot caught on something — an uneven seam in the concrete, or a loose floor tile, you didn’t have time to tell which — and your ankle rolled out from under you with a sharp, ungraceful lurch.
You didn’t hit the ground.
Jake was there in a blur of motion you didn’t even fully register happening, one hand closing firm around your waist, catching you mid-stumble and hauling you upright against him before your knee even grazed the floor. His other hand came up on instinct, thumb brushing along your jaw, wiping away a smudge of dust you hadn’t even noticed was there, and for a second neither of you moved, his amber eyes doing that thing they did sometimes — going quiet and soft and a little too intent, like the rest of the room had briefly stopped existing. “You good?” he asked, low, and it wasn’t the joking tone he used for almost everything else. This one was different. Quieter. The one that only came out when he thought nobody else was listening.“Yeah,” you said, and your voice came out a little rougher than you meant it to. “Yeah, I’m — thanks.”
His thumb was still on your jaw. You hadn’t stepped back yet. Neither had he.
“Wait.”
Jay’s voice cut through the quiet from the doorway of the back shelving unit, and you both startled apart like the room had suddenly gotten several degrees colder, Jake’s hand dropping from your waist a half-second too slow to look natural.Jay was standing there with a dusty crate lid in one hand, forgotten, staring at the two of you with an expression that was somewhere between confused and doing math in real time.“When did this happen?” he asked.Your stomach dropped somewhere near your shoes.
“What?” you said, and heard immediately how bad it sounded — too fast, too high, the exact vocal register of someone who had absolutely nothing to hide, definitely, one hundred percent. “Nothing happened. What are you talking about.”
“You just—” Jay gestured vaguely at the space where Jake’s hand had been, at the general shape of the moment he’d walked in on. “That wasn’t nothing, that was — I’ve known you two for a long time, that was not nothing.”
“I fell,” you said. “He caught me. That’s — that’s just what he does, he’s got the reflexes, it’s a whole hybrid thing, it doesn’t mean—”
“I’m not talking about the catching,” Jay said, slowly, like he was choosing to be generous and lay it out for you. “I’m talking about the — the look. You guys had a look.”
“We don’t have looks.”
“You just had one. I watched it happen. In real time. Just now.”
Beside you, Jake’s ears had gone flat under his hat, tail utterly still, and when he spoke his voice came out with the particular strained cheer of someone building a sentence one panicked word at a time. “Yeah, man, nothing, we’re just — we’re just close. We share a van. Van-sharing does things to a friendship. Proximity stuff.”
“You don’t have a van here,” Jay said. “You’re at a resort. There’s no van.”
“Metaphorically,” Jake said. “We share a metaphorical van. It’s — it’s a state of mind.”
“That doesn’t even make sense.”
“It makes sense to us.”
You could feel your face doing something you didn’t have full control over — heat crawling up your neck, into your ears, and you focused very hard on the crate you’d originally been reaching for, using it as an excuse to turn away and drag it fully out of the shadow of the stack, buying yourself two full seconds where you didn’t have to look either of them in the eye.
“There’s nothing in here anyway,” you said, too loud, gesturing at the now-visible crate, which was — you registered with a fresh wave of relief so intense it was almost dizzying — actually empty except for packing straw. “See? Empty. Dead end. We should check the other room.”
“We are not done talking about the—”
“There’s nothing to talk about,” you said, standing up too fast, brushing dust off your knees with more force than strictly necessary. “You’re seeing things. Basement’s got bad lighting. Makes everyone look like they’re having a moment, it’s an optical thing, it’s the buzzing bulbs, they’re doing something to your eyes—”
“I don’t know, I’m not an electrician, Jay, maybe it does, weirder things have happened this week—”
“Weirder things are currently happening, that’s my point—”
“Guys,” Jake said, weakly, in the tone of a man trying to referee a fight he’d personally started.Jay looked between the two of you for a long moment, arms crossed, expression settling into something that wasn’t quite a smile but was definitely, unmistakably, not buying it, not even a little. “Okay,” he said finally, slow and deliberate, clearly deciding to let it go for now purely out of some strategic patience rather than actual belief. “Fine. Bad lighting. Optical thing. Sure.”
“Thank you.”
“I’m just saying.” He turned back to the shelving unit, already moving on, voice pitched just loud enough to make sure you both heard it clearly. “I’ve known you for a long time. Both of you. I know what I saw.”
Jake opened his mouth — probably to argue, possibly to make it worse, it was genuinely a coin flip with him — and you grabbed his sleeve and yanked, hard, dragging him a step back toward the door before he could commit to whatever sentence was forming.
“We’re checking the hallway,” you announced, to nobody in particular, voice several notches too bright. “For clues. Real ones. Not — not lighting-related ones.”
“Copy that,” Jake said, entirely too fast, and let himself be towed out of the room without further comment, which was somehow more suspicious than if he’d just kept talking. The hallway outside was empty, quiet except for the low hum of the dying light fixtures, and you didn’t stop walking until you’d put a solid twenty feet between yourselves and the storage room door, at which point you rounded on Jake with your arms crossed and your face still uncomfortably warm.
“He knows,” you hissed.
“He doesn’t know know,” Jake said, though he didn’t sound entirely convinced of it either, ears still sitting low and flat under his hat. “He suspects. There’s a difference. Suspecting is — suspecting is nothing. People suspect things all the time. I suspect Daphne’s secretly, like, extremely rich and just doesn’t mention it. Doesn’t mean it’s confirmed.”
“That’s not the same thing at all.”
“It’s a little bit the same thing.”
“It is not, Jake, one of those is a harmless guess about Daphne’s finances and the other one is Jay finding out we’ve been—” you cut yourself off, glancing down the empty hallway on reflex even though there was genuinely nobody around to hear you, and dropped your voice anyway. “You know. That.”
“We haven’t confirmed anything,” Jake said, and there was something underneath the joking now, something a little more careful, like he was picking his way across ground he wasn’t sure would hold. “I mean — we don’t have to. Confirm anything. If you don’t want to.”You looked at him — really looked, past the crooked hat and the dust still on his shoulder and the specific hopeful uncertainty sitting behind his eyes that he was doing a genuinely terrible job of hiding — and something in your chest did an uncomfortable little twist, the kind you’d been very carefully not examining for weeks now.“It’s not that I don’t want to,” you said, before you could stop yourself, and then immediately backpedaled, because that felt like it had revealed more than you meant it to. “I just — we said this was easy. Uncomplicated. The second people start knowing, it stops being uncomplicated, it becomes a whole — a whole thing, with expectations, and Jay giving us looks every five minutes, and—”
“Right,” Jake said quickly, nodding along, tail giving one small, unconvincing swish. “No, yeah, totally, uncomplicated. That’s — that’s the goal. Keep it uncomplicated.”
“Right.”
“Right.” Neither of you moved. The hum of the dying light fixture filled the silence where a better sentence should’ve gone, and you had the distinct, uncomfortable sense that you’d both just agreed to something neither of you actually wanted, purely because it was easier to say out loud than the alternative. “We should,” you said, finally, gesturing vaguely down the hallway, “keep looking. For the — the clue thing. The mystery.”
“Right. Yeah.” Jake pushed off the wall, falling into step beside you, close enough that his shoulder brushed yours with every other step, same as always, except it didn’t feel like always right now, it felt loaded, weighted down with everything you’d both just very carefully not said. Behind you, faint through the door, you could still hear Jay moving boxes around, muttering something under his breath that was almost certainly still about the two of you, and you picked up your pace slightly, like you could outwalk the conversation you’d both just narrowly avoided having. You didn’t manage it. Not really. It followed you the rest of the hallway, quiet and unspoken, the specific kind of thing that doesn’t go away just because you both agreed not to look at it directly.
The corridor deeper into the east wing narrowed considerably, concrete giving way to a section that looked older and less maintained, the kind of space that made you understand exactly why it hadn’t made it onto any official floor plan. The walls here were unpainted cinderblock, damp in patches, and the buzzing fluorescents gave way entirely to a scatter of bare bulbs strung along exposed wiring that looked like it predated the resort’s last three renovations combined. You’d been walking for what felt like ten minutes without finding anything, the tension from the storage room still sitting heavy and unspoken between you and Jake, both of you talking a little too much about nothing in particular just to fill the silence that kept threatening to turn into something neither of you wanted to name out loud.
It was Jake who heard it first — his ears, still hidden under the hat but clearly doing something useful underneath it, twitching sharply enough that you noticed the movement even through the fabric, and he went still mid-sentence, one hand shooting out to grab your wrist and haul you back a step before you’d even registered there was anything to react to. “Voices,” he murmured, barely audible, tail gone rigid and flat against his leg. “Coming from ahead. Two, maybe three people.” You strained to listen and caught it a half-second later, the low murmur of conversation drifting up from somewhere around the next bend, punctuated by the metallic scrape of something heavy being dragged across concrete, and every instinct you had went from mildly curious to actively alarmed in the space of about one breath.
You didn’t have time to fully process a plan before the voices got louder, footsteps falling into a rhythm that meant whoever it was, they were headed your way, and there was nowhere obvious to go — the corridor stretched straight in both directions with nothing but blank cinderblock and the occasional locked door, no side passage, no convenient shadow to melt into. Jake’s grip on your wrist tightened, and his eyes swept the hallway with a speed that didn’t match his usual easy, unbothered pace, landing on a narrow door set slightly into an alcove a few feet ahead, unmarked, the kind of door you’d have walked right past under any other circumstances. He didn’t ask. He just pulled you toward it, twisted the handle — thankfully unlocked, thankfully quiet on its hinges — and hauled you both inside a half-second before the voices rounded the corner, easing the door shut behind you with a care that felt almost surgical for someone whose default setting was golden retriever chaos.
The space you found yourselves in was, generously, a linen closet, and even that felt like an overstatement — a narrow vertical slot of a room lined with shelving on either side, stacked with folded towels and spare pillowcases that left barely enough floor space for one person to stand comfortably, let alone two. There was no light except the thin gray seam bleeding in under the door, and no room to maneuver, which meant that within seconds of the door clicking shut you were pressed back against the shelving with Jake crowded in directly in front of you, close enough that you could feel the warmth radiating off him, close enough that every breath he took stirred the air against your face. Outside, muffled through the thin door, the voices grew louder, resolving into actual words — something about a shipment, a timeline, a name neither of you recognized — footsteps slowing as they passed, close enough that you could hear the specific scuff of a boot sole against concrete directly outside the closet door.
Neither of you moved. Neither of you breathed, not really, not in any way that made sound, and you were acutely, overwhelmingly aware of every single point of contact between your bodies in that cramped dark — his chest a hair’s breadth from yours, his hand still loosely circled around your wrist from the hallway, his breath, unsteady now, ghosting warm against your temple. His ears, you realized distantly, had come untucked from under the hat at some point in the scramble, brushing soft and warm against your cheek every time he shifted his weight, and you could feel the fine tremor running through him — not fear, exactly, or not only fear, something more complicated than that, something that had been building since the storage room and had nowhere left to go in a space this small.
The footsteps outside slowed further, paused directly outside the door for one long, agonizing stretch of seconds during which you were certain, with total and complete conviction, that you were about to be discovered, and Jake’s hand came up on instinct to cover your mouth — not roughly, just enough, just in case the sound of your own held breath somehow escaped anyway — and the two of you stood frozen like that, chest to chest in the dark, his palm warm against your lips, his heartbeat hammering hard enough that you could feel it where your bodies were pressed together, until finally, mercifully, the footsteps resumed and faded back down the corridor the way they’d come, the murmured conversation dissolving into distance and then silence.
Neither of you moved right away. The adrenaline was still thick in the air between you, sharp and electric, the kind that doesn’t just switch off the second the danger passes, and in the close dark of that closet, with his hand still resting against your mouth and his body still crowding yours against the shelves, the frantic banter that usually filled every silence between you simply didn’t come. There was only breathing, and heat, and the sound of his heartbeat, and the particular charged stillness of two people who have spent an entire day very carefully not naming the thing sitting between them, now trapped somewhere with absolutely no room left to keep pretending it isn’t there.
The footsteps faded. The silence that followed was thicker than the dark.
Jake’s hand was still over your mouth. His body was still pressed flush against yours, the heat of him searing through the thin fabric of your shirt. You could feel every ragged breath he took, the hard line of his chest, the unmistakable press of his cock against your hip—already fully hard, straining against his shorts like the near-miss had flipped some switch he couldn’t turn off.
Neither of you spoke. Then his hand slid away from your mouth, fingers dragging slowly across your lower lip, and the sound he made was low, rough, almost a growl.
He didn’t say a word.He just kissed you—hard, open-mouthed, desperate—shoving you back into the shelving so roughly that towels tumbled to the floor around your feet. One hand slammed into the metal shelf beside your head for balance; the other yanked your shirt up under your arms, baring your breasts in the dark. His mouth dropped to one immediately, sucking hard, teeth scraping just enough to make you gasp. A low, continuous growl vibrated against your skin.You reached for him, shoving his shorts down just far enough to free his cock. He was burning hot in your palm, already slick at the tip. The second you stroked him he made a sound like he’d been punched and shoved your shorts and underwear down in one rough motion until they hung off one ankle.
He hooked one of your thighs up against his hip, lined himself up, and sank into you in a single hard thrust.
The stretch was sudden and deep. You both froze for half a second—him buried to the hilt, forehead pressed to yours, breathing like he’d just run a mile—before he started moving.There was nothing slow about it. Short, brutal strokes that shoved you up the shelves with every snap of his hips. The metal rattled. More towels fell. His mouth stayed on your neck, open and wet, alternating between soft bites and low growls that vibrated straight through you.
You managed a breathless, shaky laugh against his ear.
“Jesus— are you in heat or something—”
Jake’s hips snapped especially hard, driving a sharp little sound out of you. He pulled back just enough to look at you in the dark, eyes glassy, ears pinned flat, tail trembling tight around your calf. “Shut up,” he growled, and kissed you again—deep, messy, passionate, all tongue and heat and the sharp edge of whatever instinct was riding him. He kept fucking you through it, pace never slowing, one hand braced on the shelf, the other locked under your thigh to hold you open.
A few thrusts later he tore his mouth away, breathing hard, and clapped that same hand over your mouth—firm but careful, palm warm against your lips, muffling the soft, punched-out sounds you couldn’t quite swallow.“Quiet,” he rasped against your temple, hips still driving into you in that same frantic rhythm. “Gotta be quiet—”
You nodded against his hand. He didn’t take it away.
He fucked you harder instead—short, desperate strokes, the wet sound of it loud in the tiny closet, his growls muffled against your shoulder every time he bottomed out. His control was fraying by the second: the grip under your thigh tightened, claws pricking faintly at your skin; his tail lashed once against your leg before curling tight again; every thrust punched a soft, broken noise out of him that he tried (and failed) to swallow.You came first—clenching hard around him, thighs shaking, the sound of it trapped against his palm. The feel of it dragged him over right after. He slammed in deep and stayed there, hips grinding in tight little circles as he spilled hot inside you with a long, muffled growl that vibrated against your collarbone.
For a long minute the only sound in the closet was the two of you trying to remember how lungs worked.Jake’s forehead stayed pressed to yours. His hand slowly slid away from your mouth. His cock twitched one last time inside you, still half-hard, still buried deep. One of his hands had migrated to the small of your back, fingers splayed like he wasn’t quite ready to let go of the contact yet.
By the time you both remembered how to breathe normally, the linen closet felt about four degrees hotter than it had any right to, and neither of you had said a word in what felt like a very long time. Jake’s forehead was resting against yours, his breathing still ragged, one hand splayed flat against the small of your back like he wasn’t quite ready to let go of the contact yet, and when you finally found your voice it came out smaller than you meant it to, barely above a whisper even though the danger had clearly passed.
“We should,” you started, and didn’t finish, because you weren’t entirely sure what the end of that sentence was supposed to be — go, probably, or find the others, or pretend this didn’t just happen, except that last one felt like a lie the second it formed, sitting wrong in your chest in a way none of your other close calls with him ever had.
“Yeah,” Jake murmured, not moving, tail curled loosely around your ankle in the dark, uncharacteristically still. “We should.”
Neither of you reached for the door handle. The gray seam of light underneath it seemed very far away, and for one long, suspended moment, the two of you just stood there in the dark among the folded towels, foreheads together, breathing each other’s air. It was Jake who finally moved first, pulling his bottoms back on and helping you pull yours up, pressing one soft, lingering kiss to your forehead before pulling back just enough to find the door handle by feel, his voice rough and low when he finally spoke again. “For the record,” he said, “I don’t think bad lighting explains that.” You let out a breath that was half laugh, half something shakier, and didn’t have an answer for him, because he wasn’t wrong, and you both knew it, and the door creaking open into the empty, quiet hallway felt like stepping back into a world that hadn’t changed at all on the surface, even though something between the two of you very clearly had.
You emerged from the linen closet into a hallway that felt unbearably normal after everything that had just happened inside it — same buzzing bulbs, same damp cinderblock, same faint smell of bleach and dust — and the ordinariness of it all made the last twenty minutes feel almost unreal, like something you’d imagined rather than lived through. Jake fell into step beside you without a word, which was, in itself, unusual enough to register; normally by now he’d have filled the silence with something, a joke about the closet, a comment about your hair, anything to keep the air moving between you the way it always did. Instead he reached up and adjusted the brim of his hat, a small, restless motion that had nothing to do with hiding anything and everything to do with needing somewhere to put his hands.
You didn’t say anything about it right away. There wasn’t an obvious way to bring it up that didn’t sound like you were reading too much into a hat adjustment, and besides, you had bigger, more pressing things to not-talk-about at the moment, chief among them the fact that neither of you had said a single real word about what had actually happened in that closet beyond his one soft comment about the lighting. The corridor stretched on ahead of you, quiet and empty, and you found yourself walking a few inches further from him than usual, not on purpose exactly, just some instinct telling you that closing the gap again wasn’t going to feel as easy as it usually did.
“We should find Jay,” you said finally, mostly because the silence had gone on long enough that filling it with literally anything felt necessary. “See if he found anything after we left.”
“Yeah.” Jake’s voice was quieter than usual, missing its usual bounce, and when you glanced over at him his jaw was doing something tight, his eyes fixed straight ahead down the hallway instead of finding yours the way they usually did without even trying. “Probably a good idea.”
You walked the rest of the way back toward the storage corridor in a silence that stretched thinner with every step, the kind that used to be impossible between the two of you — you’d spent an entire eleven-minute stretch by the pool yesterday in comfortable, easy quiet, and now you couldn’t manage thirty seconds without the air between you feeling like it had weight to it. You kept sneaking glances at him, trying to read whatever was going on behind that carefully blank expression, and every time you did, he seemed to notice, and every time he noticed, his hand drifted up toward the brim of his hat again, an anxious little tic that hadn’t been there twenty minutes ago.
Jay was exactly where you’d left him, still cataloguing the contents of the back shelving unit with the same dogged focus, though he looked up the second you both walked back in, his eyes doing a quick, assessing sweep over the two of you that made your stomach drop straight back to where it had been the first time around. Whatever he saw on your faces — and you had no idea what that was, exactly, given how hard you were both apparently failing at looking normal — made something shift in his expression, a flicker of oh that he was tactful enough not to voice out loud, though the look he gave Jake lingered a beat too long to be nothing.
“Find anything?” you asked, too brightly, before he could say whatever was clearly sitting on the tip of his tongue.
“A lot of empty crates,” Jay said slowly, still watching Jake, who had drifted over to the far wall and was very intently studying a stack of folded pool towels like they contained the secrets of the universe. “And some packing straw that doesn’t match anything the resort actually uses — their standard packing material is shredded paper, this is straw, which means whatever came through here wasn’t resort inventory.” He held up a fistful of it as evidence, then set it back down, attention flicking between you and Jake again with the patience of a man who had decided, apparently, that he was going to let this play out rather than push. “You two good?”
“Fine,” you said, at the exact same moment Jake said, “Great,” and the overlap made both of you wince slightly, which did nothing to help your case.
“Right,” Jay said, in a tone that made it very clear he didn’t believe either syllable of it, but he let it drop, turning back to the shelving unit instead, which you were grateful for even as it made the unspoken thing between you and Jake sit even heavier in the room.
You busied yourself checking a row of boxes you’d already technically checked once, just to have something to do with your hands, and out of the corner of your eye you watched Jake do the same on the opposite wall, moving through the motions of searching without any of his usual commentary, without a single joke about the smell or the dust or the general indignity of resort espionage. It went on like that for another twenty minutes — the three of you working through the room in near silence, Jay occasionally calling out something he’d found, you and Jake responding only when directly addressed, the easy rhythm you usually had together conspicuously absent.
By the time you’d finished the room — turning up nothing else useful beyond the mismatched straw and a half-melted candle stub that Jay pocketed for reasons he didn’t explain — the tension between you and Jake had settled into something almost unbearable, present in every small interaction: the careful few inches of space you both maintained without discussing it, the way neither of you reached for the other’s sleeve the way you normally would have a dozen times over by now.
“I’m gonna go check in with Velma,” Jay said, once the room had been thoroughly picked over, clearly reading the room well enough to know that whatever was sitting between the two of you needed space he wasn’t going to provide by lingering. “You two coming?”
“In a minute,” you said, before you’d fully decided you wanted to have this conversation, and Jay’s eyebrows lifted slightly, but he didn’t argue, just gathered his notes off the shelving unit and headed for the door, throwing one last look over his shoulder — not suspicious this time, just quietly, carefully neutral — before he disappeared down the corridor and left the two of you alone with the buzzing lights and the smell of old cardboard.
“Jake.” You watched him for a second, working up to it. “Are you okay?”
He didn’t turn around. “Yeah,” he said. “I’m fine.”
That was it. No elaboration, none of the usual spiral of nervous jokes he’d normally bury a real feeling under, just the flat, clipped shape of the word. You waited for more and didn’t get it.
“There’s nothing down here,” he said instead, already moving toward the door, tail giving one stiff, unconvincing swish. “We should go find them.”
He was past you before you could get another word out, footsteps already fading toward the corridor, leaving you standing alone in the buzzing half-light with the sentence you’d been about to say still sitting unused in your throat.
You sighed, long and heavy, and gave it a minute before you followed.
The walk back toward the basement proper took longer than it should have, mostly because you kept slowing down without meaning to, some petty, stubborn part of you refusing to catch up to him even though you both knew exactly where you were headed. Jake didn’t wait for you either, not really, though he didn’t get so far ahead that the distance between you stopped being deliberate — just enough space to make a point neither of you were saying out loud, close enough that if either of you decided to close the gap, it wouldn’t take more than a few steps.
You didn’t close it. Neither did he. You made the whole walk that way, five feet of silence between you, the buzzing overhead lights the only thing filling the quiet, and by the time the corridor opened up into the wider basement room your jaw ached slightly from how hard you’d been keeping it clenched.
You noticed the stillness before you noticed anything else. Velma, Jay, and Daphne were all clustered around the folding table, and none of them were moving — not searching, not talking, not doing any of the low-grade productive fidgeting that had characterized every version of this room you’d seen so far. They were just standing there, all three of them, staring down at something small held in the flat of Velma’s palm, and the quality of the silence around them had a weight to it that made the hair on your arms stand up before you’d even crossed the threshold.
“What’s wrong?” you asked, and your voice came out louder than you meant it to in a room that quiet.
Nobody answered right away. Jay looked up first, and whatever expression he was wearing made your stomach drop a full inch before he’d said a single word.
“Come look at this,” he said, which wasn’t really an answer, but you were already moving, Jake falling into step half a pace behind you, the earlier tension between you both apparently shelved for the moment in favor of whatever new thing had sucked all the air out of the room.
Velma’s hand was shaking, just slightly, the object resting in her palm small enough that you had to lean in to properly see it — a compact, boxy handheld device, matte black, with a small greenish-gray screen set into the top of it. The screen was covered edge to edge in jagged, spiking lines, red against dark green, climbing and falling in a pattern that looked less like data and more like something screaming.
“What is that,” you asked.
“An EMF reader,” Velma said, and her voice had lost the crisp, controlled cadence it had carried through every conversation since the grate — thinner now, faster, fraying at the edges in a way you hadn’t heard from her yet, not even during the confession about the invitations. “A specialized one. Calibrated for artifact resonance specifically, not general electromagnetic interference — I had it running passively in my bag this whole time, background monitoring, mostly out of habit at this point.”
“And it’s reading that,” Jake said, nodding at the chaotic red spikes, ears flat under his hat.
“It’s reading that because something changed.” Velma’s thumb hovered over the screen without touching it, like she was afraid contact might make the numbers worse. “Baseline readings on something like the totem are low and steady. Present, detectable if you know what you’re looking for, but quiet. This isn’t quiet. This is—” she exhaled, sharp. “This is active use. Someone is using it. Right now. Not testing it, not moving it, using it.”
The room went very still again.
“Okay,” Jay said slowly, in the voice of a man trying to keep a lid on something before it boiled over, “back up. How do you know what baseline readings for a cursed magic totem look like. That’s not a normal thing to know the baseline for.”
Velma didn’t answer immediately, and the pause stretched a beat too long to be nothing.
“Velma.”
“I’ve had this device longer than three weeks,” she said, finally, and something about the flat, resigned way she said it made it clear this admission had been sitting behind her teeth for a while, waiting for the wrong moment to force its way out. “I’ve been tracking artifact activity like this for close to a year. The totem isn’t the first thing I’ve traced. It’s the first thing I couldn’t handle without backup.”
“A year,” you repeated, and it came out sharper than you meant it to, all the earlier tension with Jake momentarily forgotten in favor of this new, much larger thing sitting in the middle of the room. “You’ve been doing this for a year and you told us three weeks.”
“I told you three weeks because three weeks was when it became about this totem specifically,” Velma said, and for the first time her composure cracked properly, voice climbing, hands closing tight around the device like she needed something solid to hold onto. “The rest of it — the other cases, the smaller things, the stuff I handled alone because it never got dangerous enough to need anyone else — that wasn’t relevant, I didn’t think it was relevant, I didn’t want to walk in here and lead with by the way I’ve secretly been doing this the whole time we were apart, because that felt like it would make the invitations look even worse than they already did, and they already looked bad enough—”
“Velma.” Daphne’s voice cut through, quiet but firm, the first thing she’d said since you walked in. “Breathe.”
Velma breathed. It didn’t seem to help much.
“Why now,” Jake said, quieter than the others, and when you glanced at him his expression had gone tight and focused in a way that pulled you fully out of your own irritation and back into the room. “Why’s it active now. We’ve been here two days. Nothing happened yesterday.”
“I don’t know,” Velma admitted, and that seemed to scare her more than anything else she’d said. “The timeline I built said we had at least another day, maybe two, before whoever’s using this had the confidence to actually test it rather than just study it. That’s what all the surveillance photos showed — study, preparation, no activation. This is a jump. Something changed. Either they got braver, or they got desperate, or—”
The lights strung along the pipework guttered, all at once, every bulb in the room dimming to a weak amber flicker before steadying again, and the temperature in the room dropped hard enough that you felt it directly against your skin, a cold that had nothing to do with the basement’s usual damp chill — sharper, wronger, the kind of cold that made your breath catch instead of just making you shiver.
“Or that,” Velma said, very quietly, staring at her own device as the red spikes on the screen climbed even higher.
“Okay,” Jay said, and his voice had gone flat and fast in the specific way it used to get right before he started barking assignments at people, an old rhythm you hadn’t heard from him in years and recognized instantly anyway. “What does active use actually mean. What’s it doing. What are we looking at.”
“I don’t know exactly,” Velma said. “The historical accounts are vague on the specifics — visual distortion, temperature anomalies, localized weather effects, in the worst accounts something closer to mass hallucination or panic response in anyone nearby. I don’t know which version we’re getting. I’ve never seen one active before. I’ve only ever gotten to them before activation.”
“So we’re the control group,” Jake said, with a thin, humorless attempt at a laugh that didn’t land the way his jokes usually did. “Great. Love that for us.”
Somewhere above you, muffled through several feet of concrete and stone, the ever-present pool music — steel drums, endlessly cheerful, the soundtrack to the entire trip so far — cut off mid-song, replaced almost immediately by a rising wash of sound that took your brain a second too long to properly parse: not the ordinary chatter of a crowded pool deck, but something with an edge to it, voices overlapping, pitching upward, the specific texture of confusion tipping into alarm.
Everyone in the room went still.
“That’s not normal pool noise,” Daphne said, arms wrapping tighter around herself.
Velma was already moving toward the bank of old monitors along the wall, the ones that had been flickering black-and-white footage of pool decks and lobby corners since the first night, and she grabbed the nearest one, tilting it, fingers working at a dial you hadn’t noticed until now. The static cleared, resolved into a grainy overhead shot of the main pool deck, and for a second nobody said anything at all.
The water was steaming.
Not the gentle, ambient haze you sometimes got off a heated pool on a cool morning — an aggressive, roiling plume of white vapor pouring off the surface in thick sheets, the kind of steam you’d expect off a pot left on the stove too long, and even through the grainy black-and-white feed you could see guests scrambling back from the edges, a few people still standing waist-deep in it, visibly confused, one man gesturing wildly at the water like he couldn’t decide whether to get out or whether the whole thing was some elaborate resort special effect.
“It’s boiling,” you said, disbelief flattening your voice.
“Not boiling,” Velma said, squinting at the feed, “not actually — the temperature reading I’m getting off this doesn’t support boiling, it’s producing the visual of it without the corresponding thermal reality, which is somehow worse, because that means whatever’s doing this isn’t limited by normal physics, it’s just—” she stopped herself, jaw tight. “It’s performing. It wants to be seen.”
“That’s a deeply unsettling way to describe a magic curse,” Jake said.
“It’s not wrong, though,” Jay said, low.
On the monitor, the crowd around the pool was thickening, more people drawn by the commotion, phones out, several of them laughing, clearly assuming it was some kind of resort stunt, a special effect, a show — and you had the sudden, sick understanding that whatever was about to happen next, most of the people up there had no framework at all for taking it seriously until it was already too late to get away from it cleanly.
“We need to move,” Velma said, and all the fraying panic in her voice had condensed suddenly into something harder, more decisive, an old version of her competence reasserting itself under pressure even as her hands still weren’t quite steady. She grabbed her bag off the folding table, sweeping the EMF reader and a fistful of loose printouts into it in one motion, red string trailing off the corkboard behind her, forgotten. “Whoever’s using it is close. Has to be — this kind of active manifestation doesn’t project far from the source, not based on anything I’ve read. Which means the totem itself is somewhere in this resort, right now, being actively handled.”
“The freezer,” Daphne said immediately. “The mismatched padlock. That’s where this started.”
“That’s my best guess too,” Velma said. “But we need to move now, because whatever this escalates into next isn’t going to stay contained to a pool deck for long, and there are a few hundred guests up there who think this is a show.”
“Hold on,” you said, and something about the sheer scale of what she was describing made you plant your feet instead of immediately following the room’s momentum toward the door. “A few hundred guests. Velma, if this is as dangerous as you’re saying, shouldn’t there be — I don’t know, an evacuation, actual authorities, someone with more resources than four people who fell in a hole two days ago?”
“I called,” Velma said, and something in the flat, exhausted way she said it made it clear this wasn’t the first time she’d tried. “Three times. To the number the insurance company gave me for exactly this kind of escalation. Nobody’s picked up since yesterday morning. I don’t know if that means they’re already dealing with something else, or if it means something worse, and either way I don’t have the luxury of waiting to find out while that thing sits in a freezer getting more active by the minute.”
“So it’s just us,” Jake said.
“It’s just us,” Velma confirmed, shouldering her bag, and for a second something passed behind her eyes that looked almost like an apology — for the invitations, for the year of secrecy, for all of it landing here, in this cold, half-lit basement, with a totem-shaped emergency and no cavalry coming. “I know that’s not fair. I know none of you signed up for this to be real. But it’s real, and it’s happening right now, and I would rather have the four of you underprepared than go up there alone.”
Nobody argued.
The structural groan came again, longer this time, rolling through the floor under your feet in a way you felt more than heard, dust sifting down from a ceiling tile somewhere overhead, and above you, muffled through concrete, the confused, overlapping shouting from the pool deck had started to sharpen — losing its edge of amusement, tipping fully into something with real fear in it.
Jake’s hand found yours before you’d fully processed reaching for him, quick and automatic, some old instinct overriding whatever careful distance you’d both been keeping since the storage room, and when you glanced at him his expression had none of the earlier tightness left in it — just focus, sharp and immediate, the kind that showed up on him whenever something mattered enough to burn through everything else.
“Whatever’s happening between us,” he said, low, just for you, “we’re figuring it out later. Right now I need you with me. Actually with me. Not three feet away.”
“I’m with you,” you said, and meant it, squeezing his hand once before letting go, because whatever was still unresolved between the two of you would still be there once you’d gotten a few hundred confused tourists away from a boiling pool that wasn’t actually boiling.
“Touching reunion,” Jay said, already moving toward the corridor, voice tight with adrenaline rather than any real irritation, “but can we table it, there’s a crisis.”
“We’re tabling it,” you confirmed, falling into step behind him, Jake at your side, Daphne and Velma close behind.
The five of you moved out of the basement together, back up toward the stairwell, the air growing colder and stranger with every step, the shouting overhead growing louder, and somewhere above you, past several feet of concrete and stone and a resort full of people who had no idea their vacation had just stopped being staged, the sky had gone the color of a fresh bruise.
Getting Jake up and moving took both you and Jay working together, one of his arms slung over each of your shoulders, his weight dragging heavier than it should have as you half-carried, half-dragged him away from the reception desk and toward the service corridor Daphne had cleared a path to a few minutes earlier — narrow, dim, but blessedly out of the totem-bearer’s line of sight, the sounds of the lobby’s chaos muffling as you went, dulling into something distant and underwater.
The corridor opened into what looked like it had been a staff break room once, now packed with maybe a dozen guests who’d fled there during the first wave of panic — huddled against the walls, some crying quietly, a couple of them pressing shaking hands over each other’s on instinct, all of them flinching hard when you three came through the door.
“It’s okay,” Jay said immediately, hands up, breathless. “We’re not — we’re trying to help. Can someone make room, he’s hurt—”
They made room. You eased Jake down against the wall in the space they cleared, his breathing ragged, the wound at his hairline still sluggishly bleeding, and something in the sight of him laid out like that — pale, fractured, barely holding his own shape together — made your chest cave in all over again.
“Okay,” you said, more to yourself than anyone, pressing your hands flat against your knees to keep them from shaking. “Okay, you’re safe here. This is — this is good, this is safer—”
“Where are you going.” Jake’s hand found your wrist before you’d even fully registered standing back up, grip weak but insistent, his eyes tracking you with a focus that cut through the haze of pain clouding them. “Don’t. Stay — it’s safe here, you said it yourself, just stay—”
“I can’t.” Your voice cracked on it, and you crouched back down in front of him, taking his face in both hands, careful of the gash at his hairline. “Jake, I can’t, there’s still — Jay and Daphne can’t handle that thing alone, and I have to help them, I have to—”
“I don’t care about the totem right now,” he said, low, raw, none of his usual deflecting humor anywhere in it. “I care about you walking back out there. I just watched you run through actual weapons fire to get to me, I can’t — I can’t do that in reverse, I can’t sit here and watch you go back into it—”
“You don’t have a choice,” you said, gentler than the words probably deserved, pressing your forehead to his for one brief, grounding second. “Neither do I. I’m not letting that thing keep tearing this place apart while you’re the only reason I’d even consider staying still. I have to go. I’ll come back. I promise you I’ll come back.”
His jaw worked, some argument dying half-formed behind his teeth, because he knew — you could see him know it — that there wasn’t a version of this where you didn’t go, same as there hadn’t been a version where he didn’t throw himself in front of that little girl.
You made yourself stand, made yourself turn toward the room instead of him, scanning the huddled guests until your eyes landed on a young woman near the back — maybe college-aged, pale but steady, one arm already curled protectively around a younger kid beside her, the kind of person who looked like she’d hold together under pressure even scared out of her mind.
“Hey,” you said, crossing to her, crouching down to her eye level. “Can you stay with him? Just — keep an eye on him, make sure he stays sitting, tell someone if the bleeding gets worse.”
Her eyes flicked past you to Jake — to the half-shifted ear, the fur bleeding across skin that should have been just skin, all of it clearly, obviously not something a normal hotel guest should be looking at — and you watched her take a full second to process it, something wary and startled crossing her face.
You didn’t explain. You didn’t apologize for it, didn’t soften it, didn’t have a single spare second to manage anyone else’s shock right now. You just held her gaze, steady, and waited.
“Okay,” she said finally, quiet but firm, something settling in her expression that looked almost like resolve. “Yeah. I’ve got him.”
“Thank you.” You meant it more than the two words could really carry, and you were already turning back to Jake, back to the wall he was propped against, back to the last few seconds you had before you had to walk out of that room and into whatever was still waiting in the lobby.
He was watching you, glassy-eyed and pale and fighting to stay upright, and when you leaned down to say something — some last reassurance, some I’ll be right back — his hand shot out and caught your arm instead, weak but sure, and pulled.
You went down half off-balance, catching yourself against the wall beside his head, and he kissed you — clumsy, off-center, tasting faintly of blood and dust, nothing like the slow mornings or the frantic closet or any version you’d had of him before, just something stripped down to its rawest shape, desperate and certain all at once. You kissed him back without thinking, one hand fisting briefly in the front of his ruined shirt, and for one suspended second the whole tearing-apart lobby outside simply didn’t exist.
He let you go before you had to be the one to pull away, his hand sliding from your arm like it cost him everything he had left to release it.
“Come back,” he said, voice barely above a whisper.
“I will.” You stood, forcing your legs to hold, forcing your eyes away from him before you lost the nerve to actually leave. “I promise.”
You didn’t look back again — you couldn’t, not if you wanted to make it out that door — and you fell into step beside Jay in the corridor, wiping your face with the back of one dust-streaked hand, and by the time the noise of the lobby rose back up around you, sharp and violent and waiting, something in you had gone hard and clear and singular, all the fear compressed down into one simple objective.
“You good?” Jay asked, low, already scanning the corridor ahead for the fastest way back toward the fight.
“No,” you said honestly. “But let’s go end this anyway.”
You’d left Jake in that break room maybe ninety seconds ago, and already the lobby felt like a different world — smoke-hazed, debris-strewn, the totem-bearer and his two remaining men fanned out near the ruined fountain, backs to the shattered doors, clearly regrouping rather than retreating.
“There,” Jay said, low, pulling you both into cover behind an overturned luggage cart. “He’s favoring his left side — Daphne must’ve clipped him before we pulled back. That’s our opening.”
“What opening,” you said. “He’s got a magic weapon, Jay, there is no clever flanking maneuver that beats a magic weapon—”
“There is if we stop thinking about it like it’s a weapon and start thinking about it like it’s a guy holding something heavy,” Jay said, and something in the flat, focused certainty of it steadied you more than it probably should have. “Daphne’s already moving. Watch.”
Across the lobby, half-hidden behind a collapsed section of ceiling, Daphne had shed her ruined resort cardigan somewhere in the last few minutes, and she moved now with an economy you hadn’t seen from her since you were all nineteen and reckless and convinced you were invincible — low, fast, silent across the wreckage, closing the distance behind the totem-bearer’s two subordinates while his attention stayed locked on the doors.
She hit the nearer one first — a hard strike to the back of the knee that dropped him instantly, followed by a controlled twist that had him face-down and disarmed before he’d even finished falling. The second man spun toward the sound, and that was the mistake, because it meant he wasn’t watching Jay anymore, and Jay closed the last fifteen feet at a dead sprint and put him into the wreckage of the fountain with a tackle that would’ve made your old training sessions proud.
Which left the totem-bearer alone, exposed, and finally, fully aware that his backup wasn’t coming.
He turned toward you, and the totem in his hands flared brighter, violet light crawling faster along its carved grooves, and you felt the pressure of it building in the air the same way you had right before it hit Jake — that sick, electric wrongness gathering toward release.
“MOVE—” Jay shouted, and you threw yourself sideways behind a column as another bolt tore through the space you’d been standing in, close enough that the heat of it singed the ends of your hair.
You came up scanning for anything — anything at all — and your eyes landed on Velma, emerging from a side corridor at a dead run, a fire extinguisher clutched in both hands like a weapon she’d genuinely never held before in her life.
“VELMA, HIS FACE—” you screamed, no time for a better plan than that, and Velma, God bless her, didn’t hesitate — she closed the distance at a sprint, yanked the pin, and unloaded the entire canister directly into the totem-bearer’s face at point-blank range just as he was raising the artifact for what would have been a killing arc.
He staggered, blinded, coughing, the totem’s aim swinging wide, and that half-second — that single, ridiculous, fire-extinguisher-purchased half-second — was all Jay needed. He closed the last few feet and drove his shoulder into the man’s chest, knocking him backward off his feet, and as they went down together Jay’s hand closed around the totem itself and wrenched, tearing it free.
The instant it left the man’s grip, the violet light died.
Not faded — died, all at once, like a plug pulled from a wall, the carved grooves going dark and inert as the totem skittered across the marble floor and came to rest against an overturned chair leg, suddenly nothing more than a small, ugly carving that could have sat forgotten in a museum gift shop.
The building itself seemed to exhale. The low structural groan that had been rolling through the floor for the better part of an hour simply stopped. Through the shattered atrium windows above, the bruised purple color bleeding through the sky began, slowly, to soften back toward the ordinary gray of an overcast evening.
Daphne had the second man zip-tied before he’d fully processed being tackled. Jay pinned the totem-bearer’s wrists behind his back with a grim, practiced efficiency that made you wonder, again, exactly what the last three years of his life had actually looked like. Velma stood over all of it, empty extinguisher still clutched in both hands, chest heaving, staring at the dark, harmless totem like she couldn’t quite believe it was really over.
And then, cutting through the ringing quiet that followed, sirens. Real ones, close now, and beneath them the crackle of radios, the thud of boots through the shattered front entrance, red and blue light sweeping across the wreckage as actual authorities finally, finally arrived to take a situation off the hands of four exhausted amateurs and one apologetic mastermind.
“Local PD,” Jay said, breathless, staring toward the doors. “And — is that a federal vehicle behind them—”
“Remember , I called in a favor,” Velma said, sagging back against a cracked column, extinguisher still in her white-knuckled grip. “I didn’t actually think they’d got my voicemail or that they’d get here in time to matter.”
“They got here in time,” Daphne said, kneeling to finish securing the second man’s restraints. “Barely. But in time.”
You didn’t stay to watch the officers pour in, didn’t linger for the shouted instructions or the careful, hazmat-suited containment of the now-dark totem into a case that looked far too flimsy for something that had just torn a five-star lobby apart. You were already moving, already running back through the corridor toward the staff break room, toward the promise you’d made with someone else’s blood still drying on your hands.
Jake was exactly where you’d left him, and when you came through the door his head snapped up, eyes finding yours, and something in his whole battered body seemed to unclench at the sight of you standing there — upright, mostly unscathed, and finally, finally done running toward danger instead of away from it.
By the time it was actually over, you almost didn’t register the stillness as real.
Getting Jake up to speed took about thirty seconds and one very indignant “you fought a magic terrorist with a fire extinguisher and I missed it” before the paramedics finally got to him properly — checking the gash at his hairline, wrapping a bandage around ribs that had taken more of the pillar’s weight than he’d let on, murmuring something about a concussion watch that made you grip his hand a little tighter. He still hadn’t fully settled back into himself — the trauma of the hit had pushed him further toward his full dog shape than you’d ever seen him slip outside of choice, muzzle lengthening slightly with every wave of pain, more of his usual hybrid frame going soft and four-legged at the edges before he visibly wrestled it back, jaw clenched, sweat at his temple, holding himself in the hybrid shape through sheer stubborn will because he didn’t want to be carried out of there on four legs in front of a lobby full of strangers.
It was well past dark by the time the five of you — because it was five now, Jake bandaged and upright and leaning only slightly on you as you walked, tail held low but steady behind him, ears no longer flattened in pain the way they’d been an hour ago, Velma trailing behind with her ruined corkboard tucked awkwardly under one arm like she couldn’t bear to leave it — were finally cleared to gather in what remained of the lobby, a corner that hadn’t been reduced to rubble, roped off with police tape and lit by the harsh white glare of portable work lights.
Velma stood in front of all of you for a long moment before she said anything, and when she finally spoke, her voice had none of the careful composure it had carried even through the worst of the confession three nights ago. It just shook, openly, unguarded.
“I need to say this properly,” she said. “Not the version I gave you in the basement, half-defensive, still trying to justify it. The real version.”
“Velma, you don’t—” you started.
“I do,” she said, cutting you off gently. “Please. Let me.”
You let her.
“I lied to all of you,” she said. “Not just about the invitations, or the trap door, or the year I’d been doing this alone. I lied about why. I told myself it was strategic — that I needed you here, that manipulation was the only way to get people who’d moved on with their lives to drop everything for something this dangerous. And maybe that part’s even true. But underneath it, the real reason, was that I didn’t think any of you would come if I just asked. I didn’t think I mattered enough to any of you anymore to be worth dropping your lives for. So I made it easy. I made it a prize instead of a plea, because a prize doesn’t require anyone to say yes to me specifically.” Her voice cracked properly on the last word, and she pressed the back of her wrist hard against her mouth for a second, visibly fighting to hold herself together. “And that almost got all of you killed today. Jake almost—” she couldn’t finish it, just gestured helplessly at the bandage at his hairline, and Jake’s hand found yours, squeezing once.
“Velma,” Jay said, quiet, stepping closer. “You should have just asked.”
“I know that now.”
“You should have known it then.” But there was no real anger in it, just tired, honest exasperation, the kind reserved for someone you’d clearly forgiven before she’d even finished apologizing. “You really think any of us wouldn’t have come? After everything? You think three years of not talking erased that much?”
“I didn’t know,” Velma said, small. “I genuinely didn’t know. That’s the truth of it. I didn’t trust that I still mattered enough to find out.”
Daphne, who had been quiet through most of this, finally stepped forward and did something that visibly startled everyone in the group, including — judging by her expression — herself: she pulled Velma into a hug, brief and slightly stiff, but real.
“You matter,” Daphne said, simply, releasing her after a few seconds like the gesture had cost her something to make and she wasn’t planning on repeating it soon. “Idiot.”
Velma laughed, wet and surprised, wiping at her eyes with the heel of one hand. “That’s — thank you, I think.”
“No more of this,” you said, and everyone turned to look at you, and you found, once you’d started, that you meant it with your whole chest. “No more lying to protect each other from disappointment. No more disappearing for three years without a word because it’s easier than staying in touch and risking it not working out. Whatever we are now — whatever this weird, scattered, mostly-retired version of the group is — I don’t want to lose another three years to all of us being too scared to just say things.”
Jake’s hand tightened around yours at that, tail giving one slow, deliberate sweep against the marble behind him, and you didn’t look at him, but you felt the significance of it land between you anyway, a promise stacked quietly on top of the one you’d made him back in that break room.
“Agreed,” Jay said.
“Agreed,” Daphne echoed.
“Agreed,” Velma said, voice still thick, “and — for what it’s worth, thank you. All of you. For coming, even manipulated into it. For staying, once you knew the truth. I don’t think I deserved that, but I got it anyway.”
“You’re stuck with us now,” Jake said, finally speaking up, his voice rough but steady, ears perking slightly for the first time since the fight. “Group chat and everything. I’m making one tonight. Full quality control, emoji reactions mandatory.”
“That is a genuinely terrifying threat,” Jay said.
“It’s a promise,” Jake corrected, and despite everything — despite the bandages, the exhaustion, the ruined lobby glowing under harsh work lights around you — something eased in the whole group at that, a tension you hadn’t fully realized you’d all been carrying finally loosening its grip.
The authorities put you all up in a hotel across town for what remained of the night — the resort itself closed indefinitely, crawling with federal agents and hazmat teams and a small army of very confused insurance adjusters — and by mid-morning the next day, a car arrived to escort the five of you to the airport, courtesy of an agency that seemed, per Velma’s muttered aside, extremely eager to get you all safely on separate flights and out of their jurisdiction before word of any of this reached actual media.
You sat pressed against Jake’s side in the back of the car the whole ride, his uninjured hand loosely laced with yours, his tail curled contentedly against your leg, ears fully upright again, all traces of the near-shift from the night before smoothed back into his usual settled hybrid shape. You watched the resort’s palm-lined entrance shrink in the rearview mirror behind you. Somewhere in that building, in an evidence locker guarded by armed federal agents, the Aramoth Totem sat contained and dark, and you found you didn’t feel much of anything about leaving it behind except relief.
“You know,” Jake said quietly, watching the same view you were, “if that car had gotten to Velma’s contact ten minutes later — if backup had been that much slower—”
“Don’t,” you said, softer than a command, more like a request. “Don’t do the math on how close it was. I did that math already, at like three in the morning last night, and it didn’t help anything.”
“Fair.” He was quiet for a second, then huffed something that was almost a laugh. “For the record, though — worst vacation. Zero out of ten. Would not recommend.”
“You got a free trip, a mystery, and you saved a kid’s life,” you said. “That’s not zero out of ten.”
“I got a concussion and a pillar dropped on me, and I almost turned into a full dog in front of a lobby full of strangers.”
“You also got—” you started, and stopped yourself, glancing at him sideways, something warm curling in your chest despite the exhaustion sitting heavy in every limb.
“Got what,” he said, watching you now instead of the window, ears tipping forward, something soft and expectant in his expression.
“Later,” you said. “When we’re not in a car with three other people and a government driver who’s definitely listening.”
“I’m definitely listening,” the driver confirmed, without turning around, and the whole car dissolved into tired, relieved laughter that felt, after everything, like the first real exhale any of you had gotten in two days.
Jay caught your eye from the front passenger seat, something knowing in his expression, and you just shook your head at him, warning, and he held up both hands in mock surrender, grinning.
The airport rose up ahead of you, ordinary and gleaming and utterly unaware of everything that had happened forty miles away, and somewhere in the middle of the exhausted, bandaged, thoroughly alive group piled into the back of that car, you let yourself finally believe it was actually over — the totem, the danger, the running from things instead of saying them out loud.
One conversation left. You could feel it sitting there, patient, waiting for the quiet of an airport parking lot and a familiar van and nowhere left to hide behind a crisis anymore.
You were, for the first time in longer than you wanted to admit, not scared of it at all.
The flight home passed in a haze you’d only half remember later — a connector to a connector, Jake’s head heavy on your shoulder somewhere over three different states, the specific exhausted silence of five people who’d survived something together and didn’t have the energy left to talk about it anymore, not yet, not until there was distance between them and the wreckage. Jay slept sitting bolt upright, arms crossed, the way he always used to on stakeouts, like his body had never unlearned the habit of resting without ever fully powering down. Daphne read a magazine she clearly wasn’t absorbing a single word of. Velma kept her ruined corkboard wedged under the seat in front of her the entire flight, one hand resting on it periodically like she needed to confirm it hadn’t vanished.
You didn’t remember landing, not really — just the general blur of gate agents and moving walkways and Jake’s hand never quite leaving yours through any of it, tail giving the occasional slow, worn-out swish whenever you squeezed his fingers, like even exhausted down to the bone he still had that much left to give you. Goodbyes with Jay and Daphne and Velma happened somewhere in the terminal, hugs a little longer and tighter than any of you would’ve allowed three days ago, a promise from Jake about the group chat repeated twice for good measure, Velma’s eyes going wet again before she waved you both off toward the parking garage.
And then it was just you and Jake, walking out through the automatic doors into the cool, ordinary night air of home, and something in your chest cracked open at the simple, unglamorous relief of it — no gold envelopes, no wax seals, no violet light crawling through carved wood, just parking garage fluorescents and the distant hum of traffic and the smell of asphalt after rain.
The van was exactly where you’d left it four days ago, battered and faithful and utterly unbothered by everything that had happened since, and the sight of it hit you harder than you expected — some tightness in your throat you hadn’t seen coming, dumb and overwhelming, at the simple fact of it still being there, still yours, still waiting.
“There she is,” Jake said, voice rough with exhaustion but warm, tail giving its first real wag since the plane touched down. “Missed you, you beautiful disaster.”
“You’re talking to a van.”
“I’m talking to home,” he corrected, and something about the easy, unthinking way he said it settled somewhere deep in your chest, quiet and certain.
You dug the keys out of your bag, and the metallic clunk of the door unlocking felt disproportionately significant, some final exhale after four days of holding your breath without fully realizing it. You popped the glovebox first, pulling out the battered first-aid kit that had lived in there since roughly the dawn of time, and gestured Jake toward the open passenger side.
“Sit. Let me look at that cut properly before it scars into something permanently ugly.”
“It’ll look rugged.”
“It’ll look like you lost a fight with a shelf.”
“I did lose a fight with a shelf. Technically a pillar. Semantics.” But he sat anyway, perched on the edge of the seat, long legs stretched out onto the pavement, tilting his head obligingly toward the dome light so you could see what you were doing. You climbed half up onto the seat beside him, knee braced against his thigh for balance, and got to work cleaning the gash at his hairline with careful, unhurried hands — antiseptic wipe, then a fresh bandage, his eyes never leaving your face the whole time.
His tail thumped once, slow and rhythmic, against the side panel of the van with every few seconds that passed, a steady, patient sound underneath the quiet of the parking garage, and you focused on that instead of the very obvious fact that neither of you had said anything real yet, not since the airport, not since the promise of later you’d both been sitting on since the back of that government car.
“There,” you said finally, smoothing the last bit of tape into place, hands lingering a beat longer than strictly necessary against the side of his face. “Good as new. Mostly.”
“Thanks, doc.” He didn’t move, didn’t lean back, just stayed there with your hands still half-cupped against his jaw, watching you with something quiet and expectant in his amber eyes, and you understood, with sudden and total clarity, that you weren’t going to get through this parking garage without finally saying the thing.
So you said it.
“My plans are terrible,” you said, and it came out smaller than you meant it to, but steady. “I want that on the record before anything else. I have never once, in my entire life, had a good plan. I led a tactical assault on a kitchen. I got us dropped into an actual pit within eleven minutes of arriving somewhere. I am, statistically, the worst person to have as your travel companion, or your — whatever it is we’ve been calling this.”
“Casual,” Jake said, quiet, watching you carefully now. “We’ve been calling it casual.”
“I’m done calling it that.” Your hands hadn’t left his face yet, and you didn’t pull them back now, needing the contact, needing something solid to hold onto while you said the rest of it. “I’m done with casual, Jake. I don’t want to be your travel companion. I don’t want to be the person you happen to share a van with, the person you happen to end up in bed with because it’s easy and nobody has to say anything real about it. I watched a pillar fall on you three days ago and the only thought in my entire head was not him, not him, anyone but him, and that’s not — that’s not a casual thought. That’s not a friends-with-benefits thought. I want the whole complicated, messy, official thing. I want the label. I want to be able to tell people you’re mine without doing the whole we share a metaphorical van bit.”
Jake didn’t say anything for a second, and the silence stretched just long enough that a flicker of doubt shot through your chest, cold and fast — and then his eyes went wide, properly wide, amber catching the dome light in a way that made them look almost lit from within, and his ears — which had been relaxed, settled, exhausted-flat against his hair for the entire drive up from the gate — snapped to full, rigid attention like something in him had just fully rebooted.
“You—” he started, and then stopped, and then his tail, which had been giving that slow, steady thump against the van’s side panel, erupted into motion, a frantic, deafening wag that hit the metal so hard and fast it actually rattled, loud enough that it echoed off the concrete parking structure around you. “You want the label.”
“I want the label,” you confirmed, half laughing now at the sheer, unguarded joy visibly overtaking his entire face. “I want the boyfriend, girlfriend, whatever we decide to call it, label. I’m asking. For real. Out loud. No metaphors.”
“I’ve been in love with you for months,” Jake said, all at once, like the words had been sitting dammed up behind his teeth for so long they came out in a single unbroken rush. “Since — I don’t even know exactly when, there wasn’t a moment, it was just there one day and then it kept being there every single day after, and I didn’t say anything because I was terrified that if I said the actual real version of it out loud you’d bolt, you’d decide casual was safer and I’d lose even the version of you I already had, and I would rather have had some of you forever than risk asking for all of you and getting nothing—”
“Jake—”
“I’m not done, I’ve been sitting on this since approximately the seven a.m. incident, let me finish—”
“You can finish after you kiss me,” you said, laughing properly now, tears threatening at the corners of your eyes for reasons that had nothing to do with exhaustion anymore.
He didn’t need telling twice.
He hauled you the rest of the way against him, one hand cradling the back of your head, the other braced against the small of your back, and kissed you like he’d been holding it in for exactly as long as he’d claimed — deep and desperate and a little clumsy with how badly he wanted it, tasting of stale airport coffee and something underneath that was just entirely, achingly him, his tail still going a mile a minute against the van, thudding out a rhythm that felt less like an accident now and more like the physical shape of everything he’d just said out loud. You kissed him back with everything you had left after four exhausted days, one hand fisted in the front of his shirt, and for a long, suspended moment the parking garage and the airport and the totem and the entire disastrous vacation simply ceased to exist, narrowed down to nothing but the press of his mouth against yours and the frantic, joyful thump of his tail against battered metal.
“Well,” said a familiar, deeply unimpressed voice from somewhere off to the side. “Finally.”
You broke apart, breathless, to find Jay standing a few feet away, dragging his own ruined suitcase behind him on a wheel that had clearly given up somewhere around baggage claim, staring at the two of you with an expression that managed to be simultaneously fond and utterly exasperated.
“How long were you standing there,” you demanded, face going hot.
“Long enough to hear the whole speech about your terrible plans,” Jay said, entirely unbothered, resuming his walk toward the parking structure’s exit without breaking stride. “Which, for the record, accurate. And long enough to witness whatever that was, which was, frankly, overdue by several months, possibly years, and extremely loud. The whole garage heard the tail thing.”
“The tail thing is a natural biological response,” Jake called after him, entirely unrepentant, arm sliding securely around your waist, tugging you back into his side. “You’ll understand it someday when you fall in love, Jay, if you ever manage to pry yourself away from your emergency contact spreadsheet long enough.”
“I have never once had an emergency contact spreadsheet.”
“You have a color-coded one.”
“That’s completely different and also none of your business,” Jay called back, already several yards away, not even bothering to turn around, one hand raised in a lazy, dismissive wave that was somehow still warm underneath the deadpan. “Go home. Both of you. Rest. Text the group chat when you land safely in whatever version of normal you two are gonna have now.”
“Will do,” Jake called back, grinning, tail still giving happy, occasional thumps against the van even as Jay’s silhouette disappeared around the corner of the parking structure, dragging his broken suitcase into the dark.
You looked up at Jake — bandaged, exhausted, grinning down at you with an unguarded, golden happiness you’d never quite let yourself see the full shape of until tonight — and something settled in your chest, warm and certain, the kind of quiet that came after a very long storm finally, actually clearing.
“So,” you said. “Boyfriend.”
“Girlfriend,” he confirmed, testing the word like he wanted to feel the shape of it in his own mouth, and then grinning wider, brighter, entirely too pleased with himself. “I like that a lot more than casual. For the record. Officially. In writing, if you want, I’ll draft something, I’ll get Jay to notarize it—”
“Get in the van, Jake.”
“Getting in the van,” he agreed, still grinning, pressing one more soft, lingering kiss to your temple before finally releasing you and rounding the front bumper toward the driver’s side, tail swishing easy and content behind him the whole way, all traces of the last four exhausting, terrifying, totem-shaped days folding quietly down into something that finally, finally felt like it was just the beginning of something good instead of the end of a disaster.
You climbed into the passenger seat, pulled the door shut, and watched him fumble the keys into the ignition with hands that were still a little unsteady from adrenaline and joy in equal measure, the old engine turning over with its familiar, grumbling cough.
“Ready?” he asked, glancing over at you, ears still standing at full, happy attention.
“Ready,” you said, and meant it, in every sense the word could possibly carry.
The van pulled out of the parking garage and into the cool, ordinary night, gold envelopes and cursed totems and shattered marble lobbies shrinking away behind you with every mile, nothing ahead but the quiet, unremarkable, entirely wonderful shape of home.
.....
"Jake don't do it—"
"Aurr??"
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NOTE – I DO NOT WRITE FOR SUNOO JUNGWON OR NIKI
𝐋𝐄𝐄 𝐇𝐄𝐄𝐒𝐄𝐔𝐍𝐆
ღ — 𝑠𝑒𝑟𝑖𝑒𝑠
MINE OR YOURS? The story of how your stepbrother’s girlfriend realizes her boyfriend has never really been hers.
GENRE: STEPBROTHER AU ⋅ SMUT
WORD COUNT: 4.6k
WARNINGS: stepcest, infidelity, possessiveness, heeseung can lift reader, cucking kink, voyeurism, masturbation (f), oral sex (f), fingering, face sitting, unprotected sex, creampies
ღ — 𝑜𝑛𝑒 𝑠ℎ𝑜𝑡𝑠
COMPULSIVE DESIRE. The one where Heeseung develops a twisted obsession for his stepdaughter.
GENRE: STEPDAD AU ⋅ A/B/O AU ⋅ SMUT
WORD COUNT: 9.2k
WARNINGS: alpha!heeseung, omega!reader, stepcest, infidelity, age gap, obsession, possessiveness, grinding, begging, spanking, spitting, fingering, biting, daddy kink, breeding kink, size kink, hand job, pussy slaps, oral sex (f), squirting, unprotected sex, multiple creampies, knotting
¡BETWEEN TWO BESTIES! You take an interest in your sister’s hot friends.
GENRE: THREESOME AU ⋅ SMUT
WORD COUNT: 3.8k
WARNINGS: threesome, infidelity, voyeurism, (small) age gap, oral sex (f & m), unprotected sex, spit roasting, multiple creampies
ღ — 𝑑𝑟𝑎𝑏𝑏𝑙𝑒𝑠
LOVED YOU FIRST. In which Heeseung fucks his best friend’s girlfriend.
GENRE: CHEATING AU ⋅ SMUT
WORD COUNT: 751
WARNINGS: manipulation, possessiveness, voyeurism, cheating, unprotected sex, creampie
BETWEEN US. Heeseung and his girlfriend convince you to give them an anniversary gift they’ll never forget.
GENRE: THREESOME AU ⋅ SMUT
WORD COUNT: 692
WARNINGS: threesome, oral sex (f & m), unprotected sex, multiple orgasms
𝐏𝐀𝐑𝐊 𝐉𝐎𝐍𝐆𝐒𝐄𝐎𝐍𝐆/𝐉𝐀𝐘 𝐏𝐀𝐑𝐊
ღ — 𝑜𝑛𝑒 𝑠ℎ𝑜𝑡𝑠
PRETTY KITTY. The one where you’re infatuated with your owner’s hot friend.
GENRE: HYBRID AU ⋅ SMUT
WORD COUNT: 5k
WARNINGS: cat hybrid!reader, heeseung as reader’s owner, (slight) somnophilia, fingering, oral sex (f & m), unprotected sex, squirting, creampies, overstimulation, multiple rounds
DIRTY GAMES, FILTHY PRIZES. You and your friends always play sick games. Little do you know, there’s someone who’s better at playing them than all three of you combined.
GENRE: STEPDAD AU ⋅ SMUT
WORD COUNT: 8.7k
WARNINGS: stepcest, yandere themes, infidelity, age gap, stepdad!jay, jealousy, possessiveness, daddy kink, reader has nipple piercings, jake x reader x heeseung moments, nipple play, fingering, oral sex (f & m), biting, pussy slaps, unprotected sex, riding, making a sex tape, nudes, creampies
𝐒𝐈𝐌 𝐉𝐀𝐄𝐘𝐔𝐍/𝐉𝐀𝐊𝐄 𝐒𝐈𝐌
coming soon!
𝐏𝐀𝐑𝐊 𝐒𝐔𝐍𝐆𝐇𝐎𝐎𝐍
ღ — 𝑜𝑛𝑒 𝑠ℎ𝑜𝑡𝑠
¡BETWEEN TWO BESTIES! You take an interest in your sister’s hot friends.
GENRE: THREESOME AU ⋅ SMUT
WORD COUNT: 3.8k
WARNINGS: threesome, infidelity, voyeurism, (small) age gap, oral sex (f & m), unprotected sex, spit roasting, multiple creampies
NEVER LET YOU GO. Your best friend is unwilling to let you go from his life.
GENRE: BEST FRIEND AU ⋅ SMUT
WORD COUNT: 8k
WARNINGS: yandere themes, infidelity, sunghoon can lift reader, vomiting, drinking, jealousy, possessiveness, nipple play, fingering, pussy job(s), oral sex (f), unprotected sex, riding, squirting, creampies, having sex while another person is in the room
DEBAUCHERY. Your stepdad finally gives into your seductive provocations.
GENRE: STEPDAD AU ⋅ SMUT
WORD COUNT: 8.5k
WARNINGS: stepcest, infidelity, age gap, reader can be picked up by sunghoon, taking nudes, daddy kink, breeding kink, somnophilia, dub con, choking, spanking, begging, nipple play, mentions of a pussy job, fingering, oral sex (f), cum eating, squirting, unprotected sex, creampies, overstimulation
ღ — 𝑑𝑟𝑎𝑏𝑏𝑙𝑒𝑠
SALACIOUS FIXATION. In which Sunghoon’s fixation with you leads him to manipulate his way into your life (and pussy).
GENRE: STRANGERS TO LOVERS AU ⋅ SMUT
WORD COUNT: 1k
WARNINGS: hoon is mean and manipulative, yandere themes, daddy kink, size kink, unprotected sex, squirting, creampie, mentions of previous rounds
LASCIVIOUS ADDICTION. In which Sunghoon’s addiction leads him to make sure everyone knows you belong to him. (pt 2 of salacious fixation)
GENRE: STRANGERS TO LOVERS AU ⋅ SMUT
WORD COUNT: 1.4k
WARNINGS: hoon is still mean and manipulative, jealousy, possessiveness, daddy kink, size kink, exhibitionism, voyeurism, fingering, unprotected sex, squirting, creampie
FOREVER BE MINE. Jihyun tries to find closure and realizes she should’ve just moved on. (bonus part of never let you go)
GENRE: ESTABLISHED RELATIONSHIP ⋅ SMUT
WORD COUNT: 618
WARNINGS: hoon and reader being toxic (again), unprotected sex, having sex while talking on the phone, creampie
Bano sa laro, bano sa kama ⟶ Manchild kasi iyang ex-boyfriend mo. Bano na nga sa Valorant, hindi pa magaling kumantot, kaya iniwan mo siya.
PARK JONGSEONG
Welcome home ⟶ Ikaw na pala 'yan? Hindi akalain ni Jay na ang laki na ng pinagbago mo.
SIM JAEYUN
Thirst trap, thirst tweets ⟶ Bastos talaga iyang best friend mo, bigla kasing nag-thirst trap sa TikTok. Hindi niya ba alam na titeng-tite ka na sa kanya?
PARK SUNGHOON
Para sa streets ⟶ Sabi mo sa sarili mo, “never lower your standard when it comes to men,” pero iba kasi si Sunghoon. Pogi, funny, tapos tangina — magaling pa kumantot.
KIM SUNOO
Passenger seat, empty road ⟶ Tangina, ano na lang sasabihin ng kuya mo kapag nakita niya kung gaano ka-pokpok ng kapatid niya?
YANG JUNGWON
Ngayong gabi ⟶ Nasa Maynila ka naman, walang may kilala sa iyo dito. Bakit ka matatakot?
NISHIMURA RIKI
Gaguhan lang ⟶ Wala namang masama kung makipag-gaguhan ka sa crush ng best friend mo, right?
★ genre , vampire au | boxer au | reincarnation | soulmates | trauma healing | fate with blood on its hands | second chances. ★ pairing , vampire!boxer!ni-ki x reader. feat, enhypen. ★ warnings , reader is a dv survivor, and it will be mentioned, violence, blood, death, eventual smut
★ SUMMARY
you walk into crimson ring because you’re tired of being afraid. tired of flinching. tired of taking hits you never deserved. all you want is to learn how to fight back. but this gym…isn’t normal. the men who train there are too strong. some of them are kind. funny, even. some are terrifying without trying. but all of them carry something in their silence.
what you don’t know is that crimson ring isn’t just for fighters. it’s where vampires go to relearn control—to train their bodies to stay still when blood hits the air. a front for humans. a discipline for immortals. a place to feel everything—without giving in to it.
the one they call ni-ki won’t even look at you. he trains alone. never speaks. and when he finally does, it’s to say “you shouldn’t be here.” you don’t know why he hates you. you don’t know why he looks at you like he’s already lost you. but he does.
because you look like the girl he loved. the one he lost control with. the one he killed centuries ago—fangs in your veins. and now, you’re here again. same eyes. same voice. same scent that haunts him in his sleep. you don’t remember him. but he does. and this time, he’s not sure if he’ll save you. or ruin you all over again.
the air in the back room always smells like copper.
it’s better than what it used to smell like—death and rot and the wet earth of a grave—but heeseung still hates it. he hates that he’s used to it.
he sits at the heavy oak desk, staring at a stack of gym waivers he isn’t reading. a half-empty glass of dark red liquid sits near his elbow. he hasn’t touched it. he’s been trying to stretch the intervals between feeds. trying to remember what hunger feels like without giving in to it.
it’s his penance.
his secret.
“you’re brooding again,” jake says, tossing a crumpled paper ball at heeseung’s head.
heeseung doesn’t flinch. he catches the paper without looking up.
“i’m thinking. you should try it sometime.”
jake laughs, kicking his feet up onto the leather couch. he’s wiping a smear of blood off his bottom lip with the back of his hand, casual as if it were ketchup.
“thinking is boring. feeding is fun. you missed out tonight, hyung. tourists. downtown. nobody missed them, and they tasted like expensive vodka.”
“disgusting,” sunghoon mutters from the corner. he’s checking his reflection in a knife blade, tilting his head to inspect a hairline fracture in his porcelain skin. “alcohol thins the blood. makes it bitter.”
“adds flavor,” jake argues. “you’re just a snob.”
“i have standards,” sunghoon corrects. “unlike you and jungwon, who would eat a rat if it had a pulse.”
jungwon, who is currently hanging upside down from a pull-up bar in the doorframe like a bat, grins. his teeth look sharper when he’s upside down.
“rats are fast,” jungwon says. “fun to catch.”
heeseung sighs, rubbing his temples.
this is his family. his burden.
he remembers when they were human. he remembers sunghoon skating on ice, not hunting in alleys. he remembers jake struggling with math, not with bloodlust. he remembers jungwon as a kid who scraped his knees, not a predator who could rip a throat out with a smile.
he did this to them.
he saved them from death, yes. but he damned them to this.
and that’s why he spends his nights reading ancient texts, scouring the globe for witches, for alchemy, for anything that might reverse the turn. he wants to give them the one thing they don’t even realize they’ve lost.
humanity.
the heavy metal door swings open.
the temperature in the room drops.
jay walks in.
he doesn’t look at the trio. he walks straight to heeseung’s desk, planting his hands on the wood.
he looks rattled. and jay never looks rattled.
jake stops chewing on his lip. jungwon drops from the bar, landing silently on the balls of his feet. sunghoon puts the knife down.
the shift is instant. the predators sense a disturbance.
“what?” heeseung asks, voice low.
“she’s coming tomorrow,” jay says.
heeseung goes still.
“we talked about this, jay. it’s not her.”
“it is her,” jay snaps. rarely does he raise his voice at heeseung, but tonight, his composure is cracking. “i looked her in the eye. i heard her voice. i asked her about the past and she froze. it’s caroline.”
the name hits the room like a grenade.
jake sits up straight, legs swinging off the couch. “caroline? as in... dead caroline? as in, pile of ashes caroline?”
“impossible,” sunghoon says, standing up. “ni-ki drained her dry. we buried the body ourselves. there was nothing left to reincarnate.”
“nature balances the scales,” jungwon whispers, eyes wide. “maybe she came back for revenge.”
“she’s not a vengeful spirit,” jay says, turning to them. “she’s human. completely human. she doesn’t remember us. she thinks she’s just a girl named y/n who needs boxing lessons because her ex was a piece of shit.”
heeseung stands up slowly.
the room goes quiet.
he walks around the desk, his presence filling the space. heeseung is the oldest. the strongest. the sire. when he moves, the others naturally make space.
“reincarnation,” heeseung says, testing the word like it tastes like poison. “it doesn’t happen. not for people who die the way she did.”
not when i’m trying so hard to find a cure, he thinks. the universe wouldn’t be cruel enough to send her back right when i’m failing.
“i know what i saw,” jay insists. “and if she walks into this gym tomorrow and ni-ki sees her...”
he doesn’t have to finish the sentence.
they all know.
ni-ki hasn’t been the same since 1894. since the night he lost control. he is a volatile, silent weapon of guilt. if he sees the face of the girl he murdered walking around in gym shorts?
he’ll break.
and a broken vampire is a dangerous thing.
“he can’t see her,” heeseung decides instantly. “keep him out of the gym. change his schedule. tell him the pipes burst. i don’t care.”
“he trains at 3 a.m. usually,” jake points out. “she’s coming during the day?”
“3 p.m.,” jay confirms.
“then we’re good,” sunghoon says, leaning back against the wall. “day shift vs. night shift. they’ll never cross paths.”
“unless he decides to come in early,” jungwon points out unhelpfully.
“he won’t,” heeseung says. tone final. “i’ll make sure of it.”
he looks at jay.
“i need to see her first.”
jay nods. “that’s what i thought.”
“if she’s really a doppelgänger... or whatever this is... we need to know. we need to know if she’s a threat to our exposure. or a threat to ni-ki’s sanity.”
heeseung walks to the door, grabbing his coat.
“wait,” jake calls out. “what if she is her? like, really her soul?”
heeseung pauses at the threshold. his hand tightens on the frame.
“then we have a bigger problem than bloodlust,” heeseung says softly.
because if caroline can come back... if death isn’t permanent... then maybe the curse isn’t permanent either.
or maybe, it just means they are destined to kill her all over again.
“keep ni-ki away,” heeseung orders. “i mean it. if he smells her, it’s over.”
he walks out.
the door slams shut.
in the silence left behind, jungwon looks at the others.
“ten bucks says ni-ki finds out by wednesday,” he says.
jake smirks, fangs glinting. “i give it twenty-four hours.”
sunghoon just sighs, picking up his knife again. “this is going to be a disaster.”
the building looks like a bruise against the skyline.
red brick. industrial. grim. it sits on a corner of the city that feels forgotten, sandwiched between an auto body shop and a closed-down warehouse. there’s no neon sign. no "summer special" banner. just a heavy metal door painted a shade of red that’s a little too dark to be cheerful.
crimson ring.
you stand on the sidewalk, gym bag slung over your shoulder, checking your phone.
2:58 pm.
you’re early. you’re always early. anxiety does that to a person.
you consider turning around. sydney would understand. destiny would probably drive the getaway car. you could go home, make pasta, and pretend you didn’t just sign up to get punched in the face for therapy.
but then you remember the dream.
the fire. the shadow. the feeling of being hunted.
power, you tell yourself. you need power.
you push the door open.
the smell hits you first.
it’s not the gross, stale locker room funk you expected. it smells like iron. old leather. bleach. and underneath it all, that same metallic sharp scent you smelled in your kitchen when jay cut his finger.
the air inside is freezing.
like, ac-cranked-to-the-max freezing.
you shiver, stepping fully inside. the gym is cavernous. high ceilings, exposed pipes, rows of heavy bags hanging like carcasses. there are two boxing rings in the center.
and it’s quiet.
not silent—there’s the rhythmic thwack-thwack-thwack of gloves hitting bags, the skip of ropes against rubber mats—but there’s no talking. no music. no laughing.
the men training here are massive. shadows in motion. moving with a speed that makes your eyes hurt if you try to track them too closely.
“you showed up.”
you jump.
jay is leaning against the front desk, arms crossed over his chest. he’s wearing a tank top today, and you try not to stare at the fact that his arms look like they were sculpted out of marble.
he’s smiling, but his eyes are scanning you. carefully.
“told you i would,” you say, gripping your bag tighter.
“most people say that and then ghost.” he pushes off the desk. “glad you’re not most people.”
he gestures for you to follow him.
you walk deeper into the gym, conscious of the way the air seems to ripple as you pass. heads turn. not many. just a few.
a guy with cat-like eyes pauses mid-sit-up to watch you. another one near the water fountain stops filling his bottle, his gaze heavy and unblinking.
you feel like a rabbit walking into a kennel of wolves.
“ignore them,” jay says, voice low. “fresh meat is a novelty around here.”
“comforting.”
“this is heeseung,” jay says, stopping by the first ring. “he runs the place. and he’s the one you have to impress if you want to stay.”
heeseung is inside the ring, unwrapping his hands.
he’s terrifyingly handsome. sharp features, doe eyes that somehow look predatory, and a stillness about him that feels unnatural.
he stops unwrapping. looks up.
locks eyes with you.
and for a second, you feel like he’s reading your entire history. every scar. every fear. every nightmare.
he inhales. slow. deep.
his eyes widen—just a fraction.
he looks at jay. jay gives him a tiny, almost imperceptible nod.
it’s her.
the silent communication is loud enough to deafen you.
“y/n,” heeseung says. his voice is smooth, melodic. “jay says you want to learn how to fight.”
“i want to learn how to not be afraid,” you correct.
heeseung tilts his head.
“fear is good,” he says, walking to the ropes. he moves too gracefully. like gravity doesn’t apply to him. “fear keeps you alive. we don’t teach you to lose it. we teach you to use it.”
he leans over the ropes, looking down at you.
“have you ever hit anything before?”
“no.”
“good. no bad habits to break.” he points to a heavy bag in the back corner, shadowed and isolated. “jay will get you wrapped. show me you can throw a jab without breaking your wrist, and maybe i’ll let you come back tomorrow.”
twenty minutes later, your knuckles ache, your lungs are burning, and you’re pretty sure you’re sweating enough to drown.
jay is a patient teacher. almost too patient.
he touches you like you’re made of glass. correcting your stance with gentle taps, guiding your elbow up without actually grabbing you. his hands are cold. distractingly cold.
“snap it back,” he instructs. “don’t push the bag. hit it and retract. like a whip.”
you throw a jab. the bag barely moves.
“better,” he lies.
“i suck at this,” you pant, wiping hair out of your face.
“you’re new. you’re supposed to suck.” he hands you a water bottle. “take five. breathe.”
you lean against the wall, sliding down until you’re crouching. you close your eyes, trying to center yourself.
the gym has gotten louder. more bodies. more heat.
but then—
it stops.
not the noise. the feeling.
the air in the room drops ten degrees in a single second.
the hair on your arms stands up. your stomach drops, instinct screaming at you to run.
you open your eyes.
across the gym, the back door has opened.
a boy walks in.
he’s tall. lanky. blonde hair falling into his eyes. wearing a black hoodie with the hood up, headphones around his neck.
he doesn’t look at anyone. he walks with a strange, lethal fluidity. like a ghost haunting his own body.
the energy in the room shifts toward him. gravitational.
jay goes stiff beside you.
heeseung stops talking to the guy in the ring.
the boy—ni-ki, your brain supplies, though no one has said his name—walks straight to the furthest corner. he drops his bag. starts wrapping his hands.
he hasn’t looked up once.
but you can’t look away.
there’s something about him. something tragic. something angry.
“y/n,” jay says. his voice is sharp. urgent. “let’s call it a day.”
you blink, turning to him. “what? i just got here.”
“you’re tired. form’s getting sloppy.” he’s already reaching for your gloves, trying to undo the velcro. “come back thursday.”
“jay, i’m fine—”
thud.
the sound echoes through the gym like a gunshot.
you turn.
ni-ki has hit the bag.
he didn’t just hit it. he decimated it. the heavy bag, which must weigh a hundred pounds, swings violently, the chain rattling against the ceiling beam.
he freezes.
his head snaps up.
he breathes in. sharp. audible.
and then, slowly, terrifyingly, he turns.
across the gym, through the dust motes and the smell of sweat, his eyes find you.
time stops.
literally.
your heart stops beating. your lungs stop working.
it’s him.
the shadow. the tilted head. the feeling of fire and forests and teeth.
he stares at you. his face drains of color—what little color he had. his eyes are wide, blown with something that looks like horror. and underneath the horror?
hunger.
he takes a step toward you.
jay steps in front of you. a shield.
“ni-ki,” jay warns. low. dangerous.
ni-ki doesn’t hear him. he’s looking right through jay. right at you.
“caroline?”
the name is a whisper, but it carries across the room like a scream.
you frown, stepping out from behind jay because you’re not the kind of girl who hides, even when every cell in your body is telling you to.
“who?” you ask.
ni-ki flinches. like you slapped him.
he looks at your face. your confused, modern, very alive face.
he looks at the pulse fluttering in your neck.
his hands clench into fists at his sides. tight enough to turn his knuckles white. tight enough to draw blood from his own palms.
the emotion on his face shifts.
grief vanishes. coldness slams down like a steel shutter.
he looks at jay.
“get her out of here,” ni-ki snarls. his voice is rough, unused.
you bristle. “excuse me?”
he looks back at you. eyes dead. cruel.
“you shouldn’t be here,” he says.
“i paid for a membership,” you snap back, adrenaline making you stupid.
he walks toward you.
he moves so fast you don’t even see him cross the floor. one second he’s across the room, the next he’s standing two feet away.
he towers over you. up close, he’s beautiful. and terrifying. he smells like rain and something burnt.
he leans down, right in your face.
“this isn’t a playground,” he whispers. venom dripping from every word. “you’re weak. you’re fragile. and if you stay here...”
his eyes drop to your throat. dark. dilated.
“...you’re going to get hurt.”
he pulls back, shoving his hands in his pockets, and turns his back on you.
“leave.”
he walks away.
you stand there, heart hammering against your ribs, cheeks burning with humiliation and anger.
jay puts a hand on your shoulder. “y/n…”
you pull away.
“i’ll see you thursday, jay,” you say, voice shaking but chin up.
you grab your bag and walk out.
you don’t look back.
if you had, you would’ve seen heeseung holding ni-ki back by the shoulder.
and you would’ve seen ni-ki staring at the door you just walked through, looking like he was about to fall to his knees and weep
the door to the gym slams shut behind you, cutting off the smell of iron and the sound of your own humiliation.
you don’t stop walking.
you don’t even check to see if jay followed you out. you just put your head down, shove your hands in your pockets, and go.
the air outside is hot, heavy with exhaust and city noise, but you feel freezing.
it’s the adrenaline crash.
it’s the way his voice sounded. you’re weak. you’re fragile.
it wasn’t just an insult. it sounded like a diagnosis. like he looked at you and saw every bruise you’ve ever hidden, every time you didn’t fight back, every time you made yourself small to survive.
you hate him.
you’ve known him for five minutes, and you hate him.
you turn the corner, walking faster, your sneakers slapping hard against the pavement.
your vision blurs.
“dammit,” you whisper, wiping your eyes aggressively with your sleeve.
you’re not a crier. you survived him—the ex who put you in this mindset—without crying in front of people. you’re not going to let some lanky, emo boxer with a god complex break you down in the first round.
but the tears come anyway. hot and stupid and angry.
you walk the twelve blocks home in a fugue state, seeing nothing but the sidewalk cracks and the memory of those eyes.
caroline.
who the hell is caroline?
and why did he look at you like he wanted to kill you and save you at the same time?
by the time you get to the apartment, your face is dry, but your eyes are puffy.
you unlock the door and step inside.
it’s quiet. destiny isn’t home.
but sydney is on the couch, laptop open, working on a paper. she looks up, smiling, ready to ask how it went—
her smile drops instantly.
“woah,” she says, closing the laptop. “what happened? are you okay?”
you drop your bag on the floor. “i’m fine.”
“you don’t look fine. you look like you just fought a war.”
“i’m quitting,” you say, walking straight to the kitchen to get water. your hands are shaking. “i’m not going back there.”
sydney gets up, following you. “wait, slow down. did you get hurt? did jay—”
“jay was fine,” you snap, opening the fridge. “it’s the other guys. specifically one of them. complete asshole.”
sydney frowns, confused.
her phone buzzes on the counter. once. twice. three times in rapid succession.
she glances at it.
“it’s jay,” she says softly.
you stiffen, chugging the water so you don’t have to speak.
sydney picks up the phone, reading the texts. her eyebrows furrow.
“he says… he’s really sorry,” she reads, looking up at you. “he says ni-ki—that’s the guy?—is… complicated. apparently he has ‘issues’ and didn’t mean to scare you off.”
“he told me i was weak,” you say, slamming the water bottle down. “he told me i didn’t belong there. and then he kicked me out.”
sydney winces. “okay, that’s bad.”
“it’s not just bad, sydney. it’s… it was weird. he knew my name. or he thought he knew my name. he called me caroline.”
sydney pauses, thumb hovering over her screen. “who?”
“i don’t know. an ex, probably. or some girl he traumatized before me.” you laugh, but it sounds brittle. “jay is texting you because he knows he brought me to a place that isn’t safe. and he’s right. i’m not going back.”
sydney looks at the phone again.
“jay says he’ll handle ni-ki. he says heeseung—the owner?—wants you to come back. he says you have potential.”
“tell him to save the sales pitch.”
you push past her, heading for your room.
“y/n, wait—”
“i’m tired, syd. i’m gonna shower.”
“jay’s asking if he can call you,” she calls out to your back. “he sounds really stressed about it. he says please don’t quit over one bad day.”
you stop at your bedroom door.
you think about the gym. the way the air felt. the way heeseung looked at you like a riddle. the way ni-ki looked at you like a ghost.
you’re weak.
maybe he’s right. maybe you are.
maybe walking away is the smart thing to do. the safe thing.
“tell jay,” you say, voice flat, “that i’m over it. and tell his friend he doesn’t have to worry. i won’t be back.”
you shut the door.
you lock it.
you lean your back against the wood, sliding down until you hit the floor.
your phone buzzes in your pocket. probably sydney. probably jay.
you don’t check it.
you just sit there in the dark, knees pulled to your chest, trying to ignore the fact that for the first time in a year, you didn’t feel just fear.
SYNOPSIS: you and your ex boyfriend, jake, just can’t get enough of each other.
PAIRINGS: toxic ex boyfriend!sim jaeyun x fem ex girlfriend!reader
CONTENT: fake texts, small chapters (contains smut, MDNI), swearing, mentions of sex, jake is jealous as hell, jake rides a motorcycle, reader has no decorum lol, jake calls reader “mama.”
DEDICATIONS: @aegiyuun my baby
NOTES: please ignore the time at the top, i was too lazy to change it LMAO.
°˖➴ where you fall in love with your best friend of 10 years.
이 희승 ˎˊ˗
NOTHING YET…
박 정성 ˎˊ˗
NOTHING YET…
심 재윤 ˎˊ˗
── .✦ TURNING ME ON (SMUT)
°˖➴ (req) where jake gets turned on during 50 shades of grey.
⋮ ⌗ ┆MDNI !! oneshot , dry humping , cumming in pants , cussing , jake is sooo subby here and reader quite literally gets off from it LMFAO (lmk if i missed anything !)
── .✦ YOU’RE MY BEST FRIEND (SMUT)
°˖➴ jake best friend head cannons.
⋮ ⌗ ┆MDNI !! dom jake , missionary position , unprotected sex (wrap it up !) , pussy eating (jake lowk a munch) , multiple orgasms , multiple squirts , creampie , big dick jake bc i can lol , cuddling after care , cockwarming at the end (lmk if i missed anything !)
박 성훈 ˎˊ˗
── .✦ 3 SUM? (SMUT)
°˖➴ where you do maths with hoonki but ended up with a threesome.
⋮ ⌗ ┆MDNI !! oneshot , pwnp , threesome , blowjob , masturbation , unprotected sex (wrap it up !) , reverse cowgirl , cockwarming , creampie x2 , squirting x2 , overstimulation , pet names , cussing , established relationship with sunghoon , riki cums on reader’s stomach , reader is so horny and sunghoon lowkey got some kinks lolz (lmk if i missed anything !)
김 선우 ˎˊ˗
NOTHING YET…
니키 ˎˊ˗
── .✦ 3 SUM? (SMUT)
°˖➴ where you do maths with hoonki but ended up with a threesome.
⋮ ⌗ ┆MDNI !! oneshot , pwnp , threesome , blowjob , masturbation , unprotected sex (wrap it up !) , reverse cowgirl , cockwarming , creampie x2 , squirting x2 , overstimulation , pet names , cussing , established relationship with sunghoon , riki cums on reader’s stomach , reader is so horny and sunghoon lowkey got some kinks lolz (lmk if i missed anything !)
OT7 ˎˊ˗
── .✦ IT’S A MERRY MERRY CHRISTMAS (FLUFF)
°˖➴ where enha gifts you something for christmas.
⋮ ⌗ ┆christmas , gift giving , fluff , established relationship , skinship , hugging , cuddling , pet names (lmk if i missed anything !)
