Chapter 102: The Neighbor Next Door
*/Third Person POV/*
The clock on the laptop read 1:47 AM, and Kara’s eyes were practically glued to her laptop.
She sat against the headboard with the blanket pooled at her waist with the screen’s glow washing her white pajamas blue, one sleeve pulled down over her knuckles, cold toes tucked under the opposite thigh, and her hair loose over one shoulder because she’d given up on the hair tie an hour ago, a long chestnut spill of it reaching past her elbow that she had to keep pushing off the trackpad.
On the screen, a werewolf girl named Seraphina was being fought over by five gorgeous Alpha brothers.
Chapter after Chapter, Kara had scrolled at the right speed, at the right intervals, brown eyes moving along the lines, but she could not have repeated one sentence of it to save her life.
Because behind those eyes, a different scene had been playing on loop since the lights went out, the same one, over and over, with the smell of grilled chicken in it.
[Will I ever get the old Nikki back? Even just a bit?]
And the image of a man with a sandwich in both hands, eating like it was a job, because chewing was the only thing in that kitchen he could still do for her.
Kara pulled the sleeve further over her knuckles.
"As we are... we’re deadweights," she mumbled at Seraphina and her five handsome Alphas. "And realistically... that’s not changing as fast as it needs to..."
She’d run the numbers the way he would have, because five days around Nikki and everybody starts doing it.
Maybe she should ask for some of those enhancers.
Or one of the... abilities. The magic powers, as Nora called them to his face, mostly to watch his eye twitch.
The System sold them, he’d said so. Fireballs. Vampirism. Actual cultivation, like in the novels.
Then she shook her head at herself, hair sliding off her shoulder with the motion, and almost laughed.
Forget what those things cost. She’d seen his face do arithmetic over the next enhancer.
Things like that were wasted on people like them, and the worst part, the genuinely unbearable part, was that he would never once say so.
Then her mind once again flashed his plan for them.
Turning Leo’s home in the village into a fortress with borewells and a greenhouse and more than a winter of food, built by a man who would then stand outside the finished walls of it and leave.
And he wouldn’t do it because there was profit in them.
Because there wasn’t any; that was the entire point.
No skill they had that the System couldn’t sell him cheaper, no watch they could stand that his Awareness didn’t stand better, nothing they could carry that his Inventory didn’t carry for free, and weightlessly.
He’d do it simply because they were his people.
Kara sat with that, and it warmed her all the way through, and then it hollowed her out on the way back, both at once, which had somehow become the only way she felt anything about Nikki anymore.
Because if they were actually useful to him, he wouldn’t be dumping them anywhere.
He’d be taking them along.
That was the plain shape of it, once you stopped flinching.
Without them, with the System and the powers and a partner who could match him shot for shot, he’d already be halfway to Ashport.
Every supply run, every silo, every refrigerated trailer of food, none of it was for him.
Two people on the move don’t need a mountain of loot; he’d said that straight to her face across a plate of sandwiches.
That mountain was for them.
An inheritance, gathered in advance, by a man planning his own absence.
[... that’s not where I want to be.]
The thought arrived without drama, fully formed, wearing her own voice.
Not in the safe house. Not behind the walls he’d build, waving from the gate twice a year when he passed through.
She had tried every argument on herself for five days straight.
The world has ended. Safe is a miracle. You cannot be picky about where you live anymore, Kara.
But that feeling did not move one centimeter.
Nora was different; Nora had Leo, and the two of them were a unit now in that way that made everyone pretend not to smile.
Nia’s father, she barely knew, a quiet man in a white coat who nodded more than he spoke. So she didn’t know his stance.
But her? Her place wasn’t there.
And then there was Nia.
Kara let herself think the name properly, for the first time all night, and it landed the way it always did.
Like an asteroid.
Bright, and fast, and burning, and by the time you saw it coming it had already changed the shape of everything.
A woman who dropped out of a previous lifetime with a rifle and a filthy mouth and turned out to be just as powerful as him, just as quick, just as unhinged in exactly the same key, so that the two of them together sounded like one person arguing with a mirror.
Kara had looked for a flaw in the match. She was honest enough to admit that.
She’d looked the way you probe a tooth, and she’d found nothing.
Nia matched him in ability, matched him in wit, out-cursed him on a good day, and had already survived the entire end of the world at his side once.
Whatever was left of the old timeline, they’d carried it together through things Kara couldn’t imagine, and Nikki would never say.
Her understanding of him, of this Nikki, the one who came back, ran deeper than Kara’s could ever reach.
The group had known before Nia ever showed up.
He’d told them everything: the regression, the old crew, about the one whose name was already carved next to his on a rifle before any of them had ever seen her face.
So when she walked into their lives, nobody had needed to ask.
They were official before they’d said a word.
And the Nikki Kara knew, the real one, her one, the boy from the next door over who argued about the great plot about a novel with six cowgirls in a farmhouse with total sincerity, who volunteered at the shelter because she asked once, who ate her cooking like it was the last food on earth years before that was really true...
That Nikki was a thing of the past. An outdated version. A build nobody was maintaining anymore.
While she was still just the neighbor next door.
The one who used to make food for him, and read NovelPhoenixs with him, and hang out every single day, and watch bad movies, and play games, and volunteer with him, and trade secrets with him, and-
-Knock-Knock-!
Kara’s whole body jolted so badly that the laptop nearly went off her lap.
Her heart began hammering louder than any war drums in the span of a single second, because a knock at 2 AM in this world was never ’nothing’.
And before she knew it, Kara was already moving, laptop shut and dropped on the nightstand, bare feet finding the cold floor, across the room, fast, her hair swinging loose behind her and her mind producing disasters in high resolution as she flung the door open.
Nora stood in the hallway in her pink pajamas, dark brown hair out of its usual ponytail and sitting on her shoulders in sleep-flattened waves, clutching her pillow to her chest with both arms, looking even smaller than her five-foot-nothing usually managed.
"W-what happened?!"
"Can’t sleep," Nora said, and rubbed one eye with her fist.
For a long moment, Kara genuinely glitched, hand on the door, heart still going, the entire catalog of catastrophes she’d assembled in four meters of hallway dissolving one by one into the image of her baby sister holding a pillow.
Then her face went cold.
"I can," she said, and closed the door, and in that very instant, a hand shot into the gap.
"Let me sleep with you?" Nora’s voice came through the crack, pitched up into the register she’d been weaponizing since age three.
"No. Go back to Leo."
"He’s snoring too loudly!"
"Go to Nikki’s room then."
"But I wanna sleep with you!"
"No."
"Please?"
"No."
There was a pause on the other side of the door, half a second too long, and something in the quality of it made the hair on the back of Kara’s neck stand on end before her brain caught up on why.
Slowly, she opened the door back up.
"You really won’t let me?" Nora asked, her big brown eyes flashing.
"Yes," Kara said, resolute, over the top of a bad feeling arriving fast.
And that bad feeling stood correct.
"Fine then!" Nora huffed. "Then I’ll pee right in front of your door and go sleep in Nikki’s room!"
Kara stood stunned for exactly one second, and then the anger arrived, clean and hot and mostly-speechless.
"Sure, then do it," she sneered, folding her arms, calling it, because there was no chance, none. "Here, I’ll even stand right here and watch you do it."
Now it was Nora’s turn to freeze for a second.
Then that round face set, jaw and all.
"Sure! Watch then!"
Nora spat through gritted teeth, then hooked her thumbs into her waistband and pulled her pajama pants down and squatted right there in the hallway, pillow still clamped under one arm, her whole face going red to the ears while those brown doe eyes never once left her sister’s, glaring up at Kara with the full righteous fury of the terminally underestimated.
"And I’ll poop too while I’m at it!"
To say Kara shook with anger would be a massive underplaying.
She was straight up convulsing, the tremors of a woman experiencing all five stages of grief at once, one temple visibly throbbing under the fall of her brown hair, arms locked across her chest while she and her sister stared into each other’s souls across a doorway at two in the morning.
Brown eyes into brown eyes. The family resemblance, weaponized in both directions while the seconds stretched, tense and unbroken.
And just as it began to look like Nora might genuinely, actually, in the name of everything, do it-
"Fine, come in!" Kara ground out through her teeth.
"Yay~"
Nora stood, pulled her pajamas up, and strolled in past her sister like a woman who had not just done what she had absolutely just done, pillow swinging, flattened waves bouncing.
While Kara stood in the doorway a moment longer, staring at the empty hallway, and let out a breath that emptied her whole body.
Somehow these two minutes had taken more out of her than the entire day.
"You’re taking the left side," she said flatly, and climbed onto the right, pulled the blanket up over her shoulder, and put her back to the whole situation, hair gathered out of the way with one practiced sweep of her arm.
The mattress dipped as Nora climbed on, but no rustle of blanket followed, no settling.
Kara could feel it through the springs: her sister sitting up against the headboard instead of lying down, wide awake, arranged, patient.
The silence that followed stretched just long enough to be deliberate.
"Bet they’re getting raunchy in that RV right now," Nora said, to the ceiling. "Nikki and that Nia girl..."
Kara’s back instantly went stiff.
It happened before she could stop it, one involuntary centimeter of it, under a blanket, in the dark, and she knew instantly and with total certainty that it had been seen, because right after that, from behind her came that unhurried, satisfied, and absolutely infuriating sound of Nora chuckling.
The pillow. The puppy eyes. The hallway ultimatum. All of it, the whole production, was just a delivery mechanism.
Her little sister had come here on purpose.
"Beat it..." Nora said softly. "Everyone knows you’re in love with Nikki... including Tikki."