Divine Milking System

Chapter 296: 296 | The Price of a Good Night

I arrived at the Summit gym at 5:23 AM wearing the same clothes from last night because I’d left Aurora’s apartment seventeen minutes ago and hadn’t gone back to Building C for a change of clothes. The leather jacket smelled like three different perfumes, cherry candy, and sex. My hair looked like someone had grabbed fistfuls of it repeatedly, which was accurate because someone had, multiple someones in fact, and my neck displayed a constellation of bite marks that Addison had left like she was signing her work.

I felt incredible.

Every muscle in my body carried that loose, warm satisfaction that comes from a night where sleep ranked dead last on the priority list. Aurora’s Silver essence still hummed through my system from the session after Addison fell asleep, when Aurora had pulled me into her room and spent two hours reminding me why she’d been ranked twenty-three since her first year. My lifespan counter had ticked upward. My stats had climbed. My ability library now contained Reaper’s Edge, an A-rank dual scythe manifestation that could cut through reinforced steel, sitting pretty in storage and waiting to be equipped.

I was walking on clouds. Floating. Ascending to a plane of existence where problems like Diamond-tier investigators and vengeful heiresses and federal crime consequences simply could not reach me.

The gym doors were unlocked this time, which meant Vale had already arrived. Good. No frozen toes, no maintenance workers offering sympathetic coffee, no existential crisis about whether showing up early constituted a personality flaw. I pushed through the entrance with the energy of a man who had conquered the known world and was considering expanding into adjacent territories.

Vale stood near the resistance band station with his back to me, silver hair catching the overhead fluorescent lights. He wore the same expensive jacket from yesterday’s session, which meant either he owned seven identical jackets or he hadn’t changed either. His designer sunglasses sat perched on top of his head despite the fact that the sun wouldn’t clear the horizon for another forty minutes.

"Monroe."

"Professor."

He turned around, and I watched his heterochromatic eyes travel from my face to my neck to my jacket to my general state of disheveled contentment with the thoroughness of a medical scan. The left eye, ice blue, cataloged data. The right eye, storm grey, processed implications.

Then Dominic Vale smiled.

Not the polite faculty smile he deployed during homeroom. Not the theatrical grin he used when telling fifty students they were future disappointments. This was the smile of a man who had just opened a birthday present and found exactly what he’d asked for, which in this case was apparently ammunition.

"Rough night?"

"Great night, actually."

"I can tell." His gaze lingered on a particular bite mark high on my throat that Addison had left as a parting gift when she’d woken up just long enough to sink her teeth into me before falling back asleep. "That looks like it hurt."

"Barely felt it."

"Mmm." He turned back to the equipment station and began calibrating the resistance bands with the casual pace of someone who had nowhere important to be and all morning to destroy my happiness. "You know what I find fascinating about the human body, Monroe?"

"Its capacity for suffering under your supervision?"

"Its capacity for recovery. The body performs best when rested, hydrated, and operating on a full night’s sleep." He glanced over his shoulder, one eye visible behind the fall of silver hair. "You look like you got approximately none of those things."

"I hydrated."

"With what?"

I opened my mouth. Closed it. Opened it again.

"Water," I said, which was technically true if you counted the glass Aurora had handed me at some point between rounds two and three.

Vale’s smile widened by approximately one millimeter, which on his face registered as hysterical laughter. He finished calibrating the bands and stepped aside, gesturing toward the station like a game show host revealing the grand prize behind curtain number three.

"Double it."

"Double what?"

"Everything. Every set, every rep, every exercise from yesterday’s routine. Double it."

The cloud beneath my feet developed structural issues. Small cracks spider-webbed across the surface of my euphoria as gravity remembered it existed and began reasserting dominance.

"You’re joking."

"I don’t joke about training, Monroe. I joke about attendance, fashion, and the existential meaninglessness of academic grading rubrics. Training is sacred."

"Yesterday’s routine nearly killed me at regular volume."

"And today you’ll do it at double volume with significantly less sleep and what I can only describe as the physical aftereffects of a very enthusiastic evening." He pulled his sunglasses down over his eyes despite being indoors and underneath fluorescent lighting that provided zero glare. "Consider it a lesson in consequences."

"Consequences for what?"

"For showing up to elite training looking like you lost a fight with a vacuum cleaner that was wearing lipstick."

I looked down at myself. Black smudges on my collar where Addison’s lipstick had transferred during a particularly aggressive moment on the couch. A purple mark on my left wrist where someone had gripped hard enough to bruise. My shirt wrinkled in patterns that told a story I was not prepared to narrate to a faculty member.

"This is punishment."

"This is education. There’s a difference."

"The difference being?" ƒreewebɳovel.com

"Punishment ends when I decide you’ve suffered enough. Education ends when you’ve learned something." He walked toward the open floor space and pointed at the ground. "Twenty-two rounds. Push-ups, sit-ups, squats. Same numbers as yesterday. Go."

Twenty-two rounds. Yesterday I’d done eleven and nearly died. My arms had given out during the push-ups, my abs had staged a full rebellion during the sit-ups, and my legs had stopped communicating with my brain during the squats. And that had been after a full night’s sleep and a proper breakfast.

Today I was running on four hours of intermittent consciousness, one glass of water, and enough post-sex endorphins to power a small city. The endorphins were fading fast, replaced by the growing realization that Vale intended to convert every ounce of pleasure from last night into an equivalent amount of suffering this morning.

"Professor."

"Yes?"

"What the hell, teach."

"Language, Monroe. Now drop."