Page 61 of Even Robots Die (Even Ever After #3)

Florentine

I don’t think Brice realizes that he’s still holding my hand and I don’t know how to react to the feeling of intimacy it gives me.

I never hold hands.

I always have something to do and hate when people get in my personal space.

But once again, I don’t feel the need to pull away.

Even if Brice basically just rejected me, it’s like every push and pull when it comes to him is lowering the walls I built around my most tender parts, the ones I never show to anyone.

When we arrive at quatre boulevard Haussmann, I look at the names on the bells. There is no Isabella, but there’s someone with her family name.

I guess we’re at the right place.

“How do you want to proceed?” Brice asks me.

I toy with the bell and send Milton through the system. A second later, the door opens for us and I smile at Brice.

“We surprise them.”

“I guess it’ll do,” he says as I pull him after me up the stairs. It’s one of those old buildings that never got updated with lifts, and I’m already regretting eating that damn amazing pastry hours ago because it’s on the fifth floor and I’m already panting by the third.

Brice caught up to me quite easily and he’s not even breathing hard.

He scoops me up midway through the third and the fourth floor and carries me up to the right level.

I’m not even fighting him. I’m not in the best shape on a normal day, but today after being shot, barely resting, and running right and left all day, I’m exhausted.

You weren’t exhausted when your legs were wrapped around his hips and his tongue was in your mouth.

True.

But now all I want is to find dad and call it a day.

When we arrive on the fifth floor, Brice gets his gun out of his holster and I’m surprised to see that it’s one of mine.

“ Libération ?” I whisper.

“Yes, why?” he asks just as lowly. “It’s one of yours, am I right?”

The beaming smile that I give him in answer seems to be enough for him, and with a nod of his head, he points me to the door of the apartment we’re about to break into.

The locks aren’t electronic, so I'm not going to be able to do some magic here.

“Can I borrow your muscles to break in the door?” I ask him.

He doesn’t answer me and kicks the door open.

That’ll do.

We couldn’t hear it from the stairs, but the music is blaring inside the apartment and no one seems to react to our intrusion.

What the fuck is happening here?

There are clothes everywhere. Two glasses of wine are discarded in front of a holo screen still playing without the sound, and three empty bottles can be found next to the door that we banged open.

I can see a couple of bags of restaurant takeout near those bottles, and I am starting to think that we might have opened the wrong apartment when I hear screams from the other side of the apartment.

They’re drowned under the sound of the music, but I hear them all the same.

I run in the direction of the screams and crash through the door—luckily this one was not locked.

And I stop short.

What did I just interrupt?

I need to bleach my eyes.

“What the hell?” I yell over the music, and the two people, naked and very tangled with each other, finally look in my direction.

I have a full view of my dad’s ass as he’s taking the woman I’ve seen on the video feed of the catacombs from behind.

“Get out,” she says as my dad gives another pump.

For fucking sake, he could have at least stopped when he realized I was there.

I turn my back to them and bump into Brice, who is not as appalled as I expected him to be from the scene before our eyes.

Well, his eyes. I’m not looking at anything anymore, and yet the image is still burned into my mind.

I need a drink.

Brice and I go back to the living room and now that I take a closer look, I can see that I should have known what was going on.

Half of the clothes on the ground are underwear, and what I can see of the women’s clothes are more akin to night wear than anything that would be suitable to wear outside.

I stand in the middle of the room as Brice orders something on his holo. It takes a couple minutes for it to be delivered through the window, but by that time, Dad and Isabella are still not out of the room.

I don’t think they stopped and are getting dressed.

It makes me nauseous.

I’m standing in the middle of the living room as Brice passes me what looks to be an orange juice. I don’t dare to put my ass anywhere. Seeing as everything could be used as a surface for fun activities and knowing what I just saw, I’m not sitting anywhere.

I take a sip from the tumbler Brice holds for me.

I was right, orange juice. Sadly.

Brice seems to see the slight grimace I make at the taste.

“Not a fan of orange juice?”

“I don’t mind. But I would have appreciated alcohol with it right now,” I tell him.

“Are you serious?” he asks, dumbfounded. “You lost more blood than you should have today and you want alcohol?”

I turn my head in the direction of the room that we just left.

“Can you blame me?”

Brice doesn’t cast a glance at the doomed bedroom and drops the tumbler on the low table that’s between the couch and the holo screen.

Now that it touched something in this cursed apartment, I’m not drinking from it anymore.

I didn’t want it in the first place, anyway.

Brice walks up to me and catches my arm just above my elbows.

“At least he’s alright,” he tells me and I release a deep breath.

“More than alright from what I’ve seen,” I tell him and drop my head on the top of his chest.

I’m tired, and knowing that my sisters were worried, that I got shot so I could search for him and that he was here having a sex marathon completely oblivious makes me want to tear him another asshole.

No.

Wrong choice of words. If I ever see my dad’s asshole again, I think I’ll cut my eyes out.

Brice wraps his arms around me and tugs me to him and this feels … good.

“What do you want to do now?” he asks me, rubbing my back in a soothing way.

I like that he’s not trying to push me to go back to Blois to fix his brain. This is the second time he asks for what I want and I'm so used to people telling me what they want that I can’t help but notice the repetition.

I know he wants to go back to Blois the sooner the better, so he doesn’t have to stay there any longer, but he doesn’t seem to be in any kind of rush, or none that he’s making me feel.

“Let’s wait another five minutes so I can force him back home,” I pause. “Well, back to Notre Dame. And then we can go back to Blois so we can finally fry that brain of yours some more.”

Brice chuckles before taking a step back and suddenly I feel cold.