Arc 6 | Chapter 241: Anything to Keep Her Close

“Not gonna invite me in?”

Olivier leaned against the wall next to his office door. “No.” On a good day, he wouldn’t invite his younger brother in, if given the choice. Today had not been a good day, and given the person hiding inside his office, sending him increasingly dirty messages, he definitely wouldn’t be inviting him in today.

[

Emilia:

if you dont hurry ill start without you~

]

Yet another picture popped up after the message, this one of Emilia’s lower stomach, his sweats pushed low enough on her hips that her curls were spilling over the top, her hand pressing at her cunt over the fabric, a wet spot barely visible under her fingers. And under her ass? His fucking office desk. The one right behind him, so perfect for tipping her over, if only his annoying brat of a brother would fuck off.

“We have to talk about this,” the younger man tried to say, brushing his blonde hair off his forehead. Had Olivier purposefully taken them to a dive bar in Alver for dinner, just to watch his annoying brother sweat in the sweltering heat of the pink tide, not a single place in Alver covered by climate control or properly air-conditioned? Yes, yes he had. The man had been annoying him for hours and deserved to suffer.

“We really don’t,” Olivier responded, levelling his brother with a look that once would have sent him scurrying away—once would have sent practically everyone sprinting. Not so much anymore. Despite the fact that he was still respected, that his war record—not to mention the number of echoes he took out each year—still frightened many of the people he met, his public persona had definitely softened people’s opinion of him.

Much as Emilia had been fond of saying when they were younger, he was, at his core, a good person, and he had spent the last decade leaning into that—trying to make everyone, not just her, see it. It had worked, but at times like this, where he really wanted everyone to fuck off, he rather regretted his decision to not simply continue being the stone-cold bastard so many people had assumed him to be for most of his life.

To truly scare someone off these days, he’d have to cut them with his words, and he wasn’t in the mood to talk to his brother, let alone let his frustration loose on him. Unfortunate. Plus, he had a beautiful woman waiting for him—one who had sending him increasingly inappropriate images of her damp fingers leaving streaks over his desk, clearly aware that he was hovering outside the door.

“But—”

“Go away, Antoine,” Olivier snapped. “I do not want to talk to you in general. I certainly don’t want to talk to you about this.”

The younger man opened his mouth, intent to say more, but Olivier was done.

Pushing himself off the wall, he didn’t even bother opening the door to his office, instead sparking inside and grabbing the terrible woman who had been torturing him with sexual messages for the last few hours around the waist and sparking again. Normally, it wasn’t advisable to spark someone without connecting with their Censor, but Emilia would be fine—at least, she would be if she really had managed to get her knots mostly in order.

Indeed, when they landed back in his apartment, she was wobbling slightly, but it was more from the giggles erupting out of her than anything else. The expanse of smooth skin presented to him when she pulled back told him why: the woman was buck naked.

“You didn’t grab your clothes!” she laughed, her entire being more relaxed than it had been only the day before—clearly, her knots were in much better condition now. “What will your innocent baby brother think, when he bursts into your office and finds only a pile of sweats waiting for him?”

Considering that Antoine had been informed that Emilia had suddenly popped back up in his life—something his baby brother had spent the whole day harassing him about, but not in the sort of way Olivier would have expected—the man would probably just assume she’d been there. Maybe he would break something—Antoine had struggled with managing his anger since the end of the war, and it wouldn’t be the first time he smashed something in a rage over the smallest of things.

This was, among other things, why Olivier generally avoided working with his younger brother. Unfortunately, their mother had begged him to let Antoine work on this case, even the more traditional woman realizing that her younger son was slowly moving into practicing law only for the sake of the rich. It had been generations since the de la Rues had served only the rich, and while Olivier and his cousins had certainly pushed their firm much farther into the realm of public interest and pro bono cases than their parents might have liked, Antoine’s pivot into nearly only private practice was concerning to everyone.

Olivier had almost immediately come to regret letting his brother in on their case, especially since he’d been resentful of the situation. Henri had been tasked with keeping him from driving them all to an early grave—or to killing the asshole—and it had been working. Then, the man he had hooked up with the last few days had tipped Antoine off about Olivier forcing money onto Emilia. Small world that his hookup was close friends with Emilia.

Now, Antoine was pissed. He also hadn’t asked how Emilia was, and while Olivier had spent early parts of the last decade suspicious that his brother was still in contact with his once-best friend, he had eventually learned that wasn’t the case. Why they weren’t in contact, despite the friendship that had existed between them even in the moments before the final battle began…

Well, Olivier had already felt a strange apprehension about what could possibly have led the two to fall out so severely with one another, especially when considered in relation to Emilia’s disappearing act. The fact that his brother was now irate he was once again in contact with her—a lot of contact, at the moment, their bodies still pressed firmly together as she smiled up at him, looking and feeling so much like the young woman who had once invaded his classroom and refused to get out, no matter how many times he had her bodily removed, than she had mere hours earlier.

“Little princess,” he said, brushing a strand of loose hair behind an ear. Some of it had been braided, but it was so haphazard that he assumed someone had been doing it more to pass the time than actually style it.

“’vier,” she said, finally letting him go to look around the space. “This your new place?” the woman asked, turning and looking around like she wasn’t standing naked in his apartment—like she hadn’t just been waiting for him naked in his office or sending him harassing messages.

“One of them,” he replied, watching her meander through the room. She peeked out the window—thankfully one way, the last thing he needed was his neighbours commenting about the pretty silverstrain who’d been wandering around his apartment naked. “I spend a lot of time at my… hookup’s place.” Technically, things between him and his friend with benefits had been morphing into something more for a while now, but neither of them knew how to talk about it, and now, with Emilia coming back into his life…

It was complicated, to say the least. The two of them had gotten together under strange circumstances, and changing the rules of their relationship… Well, there was one very specific situation where doing so would be easy—easy enough, wonderful enough, that they’d even fantasized about it together, hands wandering over each other’s hard bodies while they whispered about a future neither of them had ever dared hope could come to pass. Not until now, anyways.

“You live with the guy you’re kinda, not-really seeing?”

Coming to stand behind Emilia, his hands pressing into the glass to either side of her, caging her in, he replied, “Sometimes. It’s complicated. Do you not live with your boyfriend?”

“Ex-boyfriend, now,” she said. “And no. I have a roommate—Pria.”

“Ex?”

The painfully long sigh that left Emilia was… amusing, if also somewhat concerning. His Censor spun and oh.

He was going to kill the assholes.

“’vier~” Emilia whined, her hands having risen to press over the fists he was now pressing into the glass. “It’s fine. The clones are scaring the shit out of them.”

“The clones are dealing with this?” he asked skeptically. As much as Emilia was well-loved by The Black Knot, sending them in to deal with something like this—regardless of how unacceptable those men

locking

Emilia in with them was—was rather over-the-top. In the past, someone—usually Malcolm—would call him in to deal with whatever nonsense Emilia had gotten herself into. Olivier doubted Emilia even knew how many times he’d been called to threaten lawsuits against various people who set their bad intentions on her.

“Uh… no… Pria and Beth were coming to meet Sil and me”—Sil was the man Antoine had been hooking up with, Olivier believed; what a strange twist of fate for them to have met and hit it off—“and were talking about the break-up and how you’d given me money. I’d joked that you hadn’t given me money for sex, but also hadn’t

not

given me money for sex, so I think Pria was joking about that with Beth. My ex and his roommates overheard, a fight broke out, the main guy got swiped up by The Black Knot,” Emilia explained, continuing onto how her ex, some of his roommates, and the now-detained-by-The-Black-Knot-roommate’s parents had shown up at Beth’s dorm and effectively threatened them.

“Samina is with you?” Olivier asked, increasingly confused. It had been a long time since he’d dealt with having to decipher one of Emilia’s stories, which never seemed to start at the proper point. Eventually, he’d understand—something it had taken him a long time to realize, much of their early relationship marred by his annoyance with her wandering storytelling—but sometimes it took a while.

Honestly, after so many years, after listening to her tell other people stories and plans and complicated war strategies, Olivier wasn’t convinced she didn’t purposefully tell him roundabout stories just to mess with him.

Another few minutes of Emilia explaining the situation—purists and knotters, which he’d already known a bit about, a virtual raid, running into multiple people they knew there, issues with the raid that were now being looked into by one of those people, Emilia refusing to give their name, and Malcolm, and a trip to a luxury airship, all explained in chaotic detail and order—Olivier was caught up.

“I see…” he said, unsure what to even say, or why she’d visited him. As much as he would never refuse her visits—ironic, considering he’d once spent a significant amount of effort trying to get her to stop showing up in his life, classroom and apartment—it wasn’t like he’d actually needed the clothing back.

If anything, knowing she was out there, wearing his too big clothing, had been even more of a turn on than the messages she’d been sending him throughout the day—his favourite had been a short video of her just relaxing in the clothes, eating snacks while smiling at something someone was saying offscreen. Now, knowing she had visited Simeon, he realized why the background had seemed familiar. His second favourite was the one she had sent while hiding in his office, teasing him with glimpses of her fine silver curls—that one had immediately been saved away for him to admire later.

Thinking about those curls, about the naked woman still standing between him and the window, peering out over the gently pink ocean, he couldn’t resist slipping a hand between her legs to run his fingers through them. “Why are you here, Emilia?” he asked over her breathy giggles. He wasn’t really touching her, never letting his fingers brush over her clit, but given the way she wiggled, tried rising onto her toes to bring his hand closer to the sensitive nub, even this much touching was enough to get her going.

Unsurprising—Emilia had always been easy.

“I… inside the raid,” she said, breaking off when his fingers brushed a little lower and then stopped.

“Hm? Is something wrong?”

“Fuck you,” the woman muttered, leaning back against him, her ass rubbing into him like he’d let himself be distracted from his mission to get answers—like she even wanted him to.

Emilia liked it rough and mean, and while he’d certainly found himself partners—including the man he generally found himself sharing a bed with these days—who liked it that way as well, there was something about the woman that just rubbed different. Perhaps it was the fact that she had been so young and innocent when they’d first hooked up, that despite the horrible thing that had been done to her when she was barely more than a teenager, she’d continued being so free with herself, finding a joy in sex that he’d never found in anyone else. Emilia had always been willing to play and learn and experiment, and while he’d always known what he wanted in a sexual relationship, she had been the first person to really make him feel like he could actually find someone he was compatible with.

Then, he’d realized he couldn’t have her—couldn’t bring her into the strict family he was tied to. Then, the world had changed and he had changed with it. Then, Emilia had left, and he had woken to find her weeks gone, not a trace of her to be found, no one—not Rafe, Malcolm, his brother or any only member of their unit—knowing where she’d disappeared to.

Of course, at least a few of those people had been lying—Rafe had eventually admitted he knew where she was, and Olivier had his suspicions about a few of their unit members—but he’d long grown out of the anger he held for any of them. They were just protecting Emilia, just as he would.

Anything, to keep the woman showing up in his life, happy and free. Even better if she showed like this, naked and perfectly willing to play with him. It might have been decades since playing with her had been the only thing he wanted to do with her, but if that’s what she wanted—perhaps needed; a violent, anxious energy radiating off her—from him, Oliver was more than willing to be nothing but a friend and good fuck for her.

“If you don’t tell me, I won’t continue,” he said, not quite able to resist pressing his hips against her ass, his cock still trapped in his pants.

Groaning, Emilia’s head slammed into his chest. “There was a dream, during the raid. I saw Halen.”

Olivier let out a considering sound. While he didn’t raid often, he’d heard from others about strange dreams they had inside virtual raids—they were oddly common among members of their unit, according to Helix, as well as anyone who had directly known anyone in their unit, especially the people who had contributed so heavily to the training system’s creation.

“They’re highly off-putting,”

Nyren had once told him, the northerner on a brief trip down to Rosalia for a reunion of sorts—something they tried to do once or twice a month, due to conflicting schedules that rarely allowed more than a handful of them to meet up at a time.

“It’s like meeting with a ghost. Usually, its people who are still alive—who leave itty bits of their souls and minds behind in the raids. But when it’s the dead and honoured? Speaking from beyond the grave? It is not right.”

Helix and Nyren had proceeded to argue about whether the memories of people, like Halen, who appeared in their raid dreams were spirits from beyond the grave or echoes of the people they had been before their death. It didn’t much matter. The pyr had a point when she said dreaming of the dead so vividly—knowing that memories from their time training within the original system were talking to you—was weird. Wrong.

“Nyren raids?” Emilia asked when Olivier related this story to her, her mind disappearing stars knew for several long minutes. “I knew Wyren did, but hadn’t heard of his sister joining any.”

He had long ago gotten used to how distracted she could be, even in the midst of sex. Being annoyed or insulted would do him no good, and while Emilia did whatever it was inside her mind or Censor, he content himself to tracing shapes over her bare skin—over the gentle curl of her stomach, under the soft slopes of her breasts, across the faded scars from her decades of war and general clumsiness. It was a beautiful body—strong and soft; so familiar to him and yet so different from the one he had occasionally been allowed to see and touch in the latter years of the war. Older, but just as lovely as it had been more than half a lifetime ago.

Emilia’s hand snapped up to his, catching it as it was itching up towards her nipples. “Halen said he set up Hail to make sure all of us who worked on the training system—as well as the skills the real-world raids use, maybe?—would have some sort of rights over it. I mean, it was just a weird dream of him—I didn’t even know it was a thing that happened until you told me, I’d just assumed it was my imagination—but I dunno, it seemed like he—it?—was probably telling the truth?”

“You… have no control over the raids?” Olivier asked, genuinely confused. “You should. You helped create multiple parts of both the virtual and real-world raids.”

Emilia shrugged, muttering that she hadn’t really thought about until long after the war was over and Hail had already taken over the project, with government support, no less. “Honestly, even though I generally hate what’s happening with the raids—especially the real-world ones—it hadn’t even really occurred to me that I might have some stake in Hail or the software.”

“You do,” Olivier said, forcing down the instinct to ask Emilia

why

she hadn’t even thought about it. He knew why: something was wrong. Virtually no one in their unit had thought she had run away for no reason; rather, they just didn’t know the reason. Given the state of her knots the day before—even now, something still not being quite right with her—Olivier had no doubt whatever had happened in those last moments of the war, in the weeks before he had woken from his medically induced coma, something terrible had happened to her. Emilia had survived so much throughout her life, and yet, none of it had ever seemed to affect her—not to the extent that she developed traumatic knots. For something to have finally broken her…

Olivier wished he knew what it was—wished she’d tell him so he could fix whatever it was, hunt down whatever had caused it and erase it from the world and her mind. This Emilia wouldn’t tell him, some part of him knew. Instead, all he could do was tell her he’d look into the situation with Hail. Helix would be the first place to start, but he wouldn’t be available for another week. Plus, he’d certainly never mentioned any stake in Hail, despite his long career there. Simeon? Rafe? Most of the training system had been designed before he’d joined the unit, and he wasn’t sure who else had actively contributed to it.

“You have more important things to do, with the Alver case,” Emilia gasped, Olivier’s hand already roaming back between her legs, actually giving her what she wanted this time.

“I will always have time for you, Emilia,” he promised, grinding against her ass as he circled her clit. “Always.”

The woman pressed back into him, one of her hands grasping at his wrist while the other rose to press against the glass. Several stories below them, the world moved in the growing darkness, close enough that he could make out the faces of his neighbours, see the smiles stretched over their faces as they laughed and hurried off to live their lives.

“’vier,” Emilia moaned, arching back into him as he pressed wet kisses to her neck, leaving little marks and wondering if her ex would get to see them—probably not if he was being held by the Hyrat twins, if Emilia was leaving for Ship’o Stars so soon. “Please. I—” Emilia broke off as she shuddered through an orgasm.

“Always so sensitive,” he muttered, pressing another kiss to her neck as he ground harder into her ass, his fingers slipping lower, into the heat of her. He could already tell she was unlikely to come again, all that anxious energy leaving her for tiredness instead.

Still, she hummed and leaned further into him as he finished himself, content to let his hands explore her body, his own orgasm a slow gasp into the top of her head. He hadn’t even bothered to free himself, but he’d worry about the mess later.

Emilia turned into the hug he hadn’t realized he was giving her, her wetness smearing over her waist. Then, she was hugging him back, and all Olivier wished was that she’d stay there, that she’d stay in his life, that she wouldn’t leave him again.

Perhaps that desire was what led him to slip a hand under her ass and pull her onto the couch with him, her legs automatically parting to straddle him. Just a few minutes longer, that was all he wanted. Just a few more strokes through her hair, a few more shapes drawn into her skin, a few more breaths of shared air.

“I have to leave,” she said, too short a time later. Olivier would live with her filling his lap, if he could, but she was right—she had a ship to catch, and clothes to find before she went, unless…

Pulling back and gaping at him, Emilia told him it was

not

a nudist ship. “Do things like that even exist?”

“Yes,” Olivier told her darkly, forwarding her a legal case he’d been involved in, where a couple had accidentally booked a ticket on a nudist cruise. They had arrived and been horrified. Attempts to receive a refund, as well as compensation for a ruined vacation and wasted vacation days, had been denied, as it should have been—it had been clearly marked in many places throughout the booking process that it was a nudist cruise. The fact that the couple had missed every indication was not the ship’s fault.

Emilia was still giggling as she left, wearing yet another of his shirts, the length barely covering her ass. The silence left in her wake… it had been a long time since he’d felt this alone. A moment later, he was standing in front of a house on a beach, the same one he had sought refuge in after the echo attack—after realizing just how broken Emilia had become.

The door opened before he could knock, tired eyes blinking at him, bleary and unfocused.

“How long have you been inside the Virtuosi System?” he asked, unimpressed with his friend with benefits.

The man blinked back at him and said nothing.

Sighing, Olivier ushered the man back inside, Censor already ordering them food from a nearby restaurant and bidding the fabricator to make a few remedies. Clearly, it was going to take a bit—and possibly a proper sleep—for him to get any answers about Hail out of the man.