Chapter 61
It had only been a week since I’d last touched Milo, but it felt like it had been an eternity. In the few months he’d been here, Milo had filled up a part of me that had been empty for so long, I hadn’t even realized how much of a shell of my previous self I’d become.
I had grown accustomed to the dark, hollow place in my chest where my heart had once been. So, when he’d answered my call and came to Neurovance, I hadn’t been prepared for the flood of sunlight that was his open, honest smiles full of optimistic possibilities.
He’d pulled me out of the cold, lonely depths of despair without even trying, and I knew I couldn’t ever possibly let him go.
Crawling on top of him, I wrapped my arms around him and crushed him closer.
I wished I could show him every thought and memory that rushed through my mind at his touch.
I wished I could show him the way my stomach had twisted in knots when I read the first line of his application essay.
How my eyes had flown through his work, absorbing every letter as if I were a drowning man and his words were my lifeline to the surface.
If I could just find him, meet him, I’d know everything would change.
And I’d been right.
Milo—my shy, adorably unsure Milo—somehow had the courage to do what Sebastian and I never could. He didn’t cower and blindly obey Luke the way we always had. He took each of Luke’s thinly veiled attempts at control and broke them open to expose the vile, rotten mass of repression hidden within.
It’s not that Milo wasn’t afraid.
It was that he was afraid but chose to fight back anyway.
That’s what made him so fucking beautiful to me.
He was saving me.
He was saving me, and he didn’t have any fucking idea.
I wanted to be like him.
I wanted to make him proud.
I wanted to protect him so that he wouldn’t have to be brave like this for me ever again.
It was my turn to be brave, and I made a promise to myself right there, with Milo’s soft lips pressed against mine, that I wouldn’t stop until Milo, Seb, and I were free of Luke forever.
Milo’s fingers slid up the back of my neck and curled into my hair. He tugged at the roots, and I hissed into his mouth as I buried my own fingers into his hips so hard I knew he would bruise.
“Fuck,” I rasped, plunging my tongue into his hot, sweet mouth. My entire body reacted viscerally to the tiny sound of pleasure he made as I licked and sucked at his tongue.
“Milo, Milo, Milo…” I hummed, finding myself smiling against his mouth in between tiny, affectionate bites to his lips. “So, so brave…”
He chuckled softly, his cheeks warming as I ran the tip of my nose across his gorgeous face so I could nuzzle into that sensitive spot right beneath his ear.
“Not brave, just desperate to be able to touch you again…” He breathed, just as I nipped that spot, causing him to gasp and arch back against the chair.
“Sweetheart, if you ever try to tell me you’re not brave again, I will paddle your ass raw.” I left kisses down his throat to the collar of the shirt I’d picked out for him this morning, revelling in the way he squirmed beneath my touch.
“Promises, promises,” Milo chirped, and I jerked back away from him, shocked by the snarky joke he’d just made.
He was grinning at me with one of his rare, mischievous little smirks that made him look like a wickedly impish version of Cupid.
I reached out and brushed my thumb over his warm cheek, grinning down at him with a look that I hoped clearly showed him how much he meant to me.
“If you’re looking to get punished, you’re out of luck, baby. I’m so fucking proud of you. All I want to do is worship you right now.”
Mirroring me, Milo reached forward to cup my face, but the still bleeding cut on his arm brushed my t-shirt, and he hissed in pain, which immediately caused my cock to soften.
I snatched up his wrist as I rolled off of him, getting to my feet next to the surgical chair and investigating his wound.
“Though, maybe the worship will need to wait. I need to stitch this up, and we need to get Sebastian in here before the presentation.” I glanced up to meet Milo’s eyes, and he was already nodding in agreement.
“Yes. Do you think we have time… to… to free him?”
“If we hurry, yes.”
I laid Milo’s arm back in the stirrup, though I didn’t belt him down this time. Heading over to the lab’s sink, I got to work washing my hands again so I could stitch Milo back up without risking infection.
“NOVA, can you message Seb on our encrypted chat and ask him to swing by The Cave as soon as he can? Let him know we found a way to remove Milo’s chip,” I ordered, feeling like I couldn’t wait another second to tell Sebastian what we’d accomplished here.
As rocky as our friendship had been since Milo had entered the picture, Seb was still like an older brother to me.
He and I had grown up together, and we’d always looked out for each other. Honestly, he usually looked out for me more than anything.
When I first showed him my dad’s pond as kids, it had been his idea to use nets to make catching the frogs easier.
He’d been the one to teach me all about video games.
It was Sebastian who showed me how to balance on a skateboard.
He’d spent countless hours listening to me ramble about my crazy ideas for new inventions when I’d started to become interested in science—even though I could tell he had no idea what I was talking about half the time.
Sebastian had been the one who’d found me when I’d fallen out of the apple tree in my father’s backyard. I’d broken my arm and had been in so much pain every time I tried to move, my vision blacked out, and I nearly threw up.
Seb had picked me up and calmly taken me back to the house. He’d made me cocoa and called my dad to tell him what happened. Then he sat with me and held my good hand while the local doctor reset my arm and put me in a cast…
He’d been the only person I’d had to turn to after my father had died.
The memory of Seb holding me while I sobbed uncontrollably into his shoulder at my father’s funeral rocked through my mind, causing a hard, painful lump to form in my throat.
It killed me that he hadn’t felt like he could tell me how bad Luke’s abuse had become. The guilt I felt over the fact that he had a chip implanted that was even close to as restrictive as Milo’s was making me sick to my stomach.
No more.
This ended today.
“NOVA?” I repeated after a long, silent moment. I frowned; it wasn’t like her to have any sort of delay when asked a question.
“Hi, hi, yes, sorry, Mr. Reynolds. Not sure what happened there. Feeling a little under the weather today. I think I have a bug.”
This caused my frown to deepen.
A bug? That wasn’t possible. Her network would have needed to be exposed to outside sources for her to pick up some form of malware.
She was a completely isolated AI by design.
Unless someone hacked her servers, which was also unlikely, considering my father and I had built her off-grid…
no. It was more likely she needed a software update.
I hadn’t been able to get out to the cabin for several years now.
Not with Luke’s chip in my arm. I would need to find out a way to develop an update for her remotely…
or, even better. Cut this chip out of my arm after the demonstration and take Milo far away from here.
I smiled at the thought of bringing Milo to my cabin in the mountains and showing him the place where so many of my favorite childhood memories had come to be.
“Run a self-diagnosis, please, and forward the results to my personal account. But before you start that, please send that message to Sebastian,” I ordered, snapping on a fresh pair of latex gloves.
“Yes, daddy,” she chirped, and I rolled my eyes, shaking my head.
“Smart ass…” I grumbled, though I was smiling when I approached Milo’s chair again.
“Ready, baby?” I asked, and he smiled up at me, his big eyes shining with excitement.
“Yep! Stitch me up, doc, then let’s get Sebastian sorted out next.” That little evil grin curled on his perfect, plush lips again. “I can’t wait to unleash our master plan on our resident supervillain.”
I leaned forward and brushed my lips over his, revelling in the fact that I could do that now without him cringing in agony.
“My little mastermind…” I smiled against him, indulging in one last kiss before getting to work patching him back up.