Pocket Dungeon 4, page 1
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Chapter 1
I let out a heavy sigh as I dropped the last of the boxes down onto the honey-colored hardwood floors of our brand spanking new penthouse. I might have been more than a little sweaty, and definitely sort of out of breath, but I still couldn’t stop the wide, giddy grin that spread across my face at those two words.
Our penthouse.
“Is that the last of them?” Iris asked as she poked her head around the corner.
The blonde woman had a box of her own held in her arms, and I didn’t even have to look inside to know it was all of her vinyl’s.
In the relatively short amount of time she’d been outside of the dungeons and in the real world, the woman out of time had managed to gather quite the collection, and I was more than happy to let her display them however she wanted.
“Should be,” I called back and pretended I wasn’t still trying to catch my breath.
Sure, the dungeons and frequent, vigorous sex with the beautiful women in my life gave me more than a workout, but there was truly nothing more exhausting than trying to haul boxes from a parking garage, especially in downtown Chicago.
I knew I could have paid for movers to take care of everything, but I wasn’t an idiot. I had some pretty sensitive stuff among my belongings, as well as way too much gold to seem reasonable.
And that wasn’t even accounting for all of the precious gems, too.
Oh, or the fact that most of the women I hung out with weren’t human. There was that, too.
I’d opted to have movers take care of the furniture a day ago while the women and I made ourselves scarce over at Monty’s Music and Records, the store I co-owned with none other than Monty himself.
The only thing I’d had to do was give Bethany, the manager of our new building, the Marquee, permission to escort the movers upstairs with the single piece of furniture we’d brought over from the apartment.
It was definitely way easier than trying to figure out how to move a massive sectional couch through downtown Chicago with nothing but an SUV and an old motorcycle, that was for sure.
Iris had just picked out the sectional before we moved, and we all liked it so much, we decided to keep it and replace at least one of the couches that came in the pre-furnished penthouse living room.
The movers had even taken the other couch away for us to do whatever it was movers did with an expensive couch no one wanted.
The women and I had packed everything else up ourselves and driven it over in only a couple of trips in the back of our Mercedes SUV.
The vehicle was still a recent enough purchase to have that new car smell lingering in the leather, and when I added that to the craziness of having just bought a penthouse apartment outright, I felt like I was living in a dream.
“Do you need help?” Yasha el-Nasir asked.
The fox-woman tilted her head to the side so that her long curtain of fine, golden-red hair hung down toward the floor. Her fox ears twitched in poorly hidden amusement as she met my gaze.
She’d come to stand in front of me as I gathered myself on the stack of boxes, and of course, she didn’t even look like she’d so much as broken a sweat. Her cropped t-shirt and flowing, floral patterned skirt weren’t really the best moving attire, but clearly, she hadn’t been bothered at all.
I might have been annoyed with the fact that she was still so perfectly put together if she wasn’t also incredibly adorable.
“I’m fine,” I assured her with a wave of my hand and an only slightly wheezing breath. “I’m just trying to gather the willpower to get up.”
“I can pull you upright,” she offered and stuck out her hand.
She even wiggled her fingers, like that might entice me to take her hand and get up to my feet.
And sure enough, it did.
I’d found it nearly impossible to say no to anything Yasha wanted since the moment I’d found her fighting for her life in one of the dungeons against a dragon wyrmling.
That moment felt like a lifetime ago, even though I knew it hadn’t been more than a handful of months.
It was crazy, how someone could step into your life and tilt everything on its head so wonderfully. It wasn’t entirely Yasha’s doing, however, or even Iris’.
No, that would be the crystal and all of the weirdness that came with it.
I groaned as I rose up to my feet, and I could have sworn my knees popped at the sudden change in position. I wasn’t even thirty yet, there was no way I could be dealing with old man knees so soon.
Music began to drift down the hallway from the room Iris had disappeared into, which meant she must have finished getting her record player all set up to her liking.
One of the perks of the penthouse, other than the general everything– because holy shit, the everything– was the spare room. There were plenty of extra bedrooms, as well as a massive master suite, but the spare room had become a catch-all in our planning for the move.
It was now Iris’ music room, as well as me and Yasha’s training room, and the place where Elaene had decided she wanted to set up all of her books.
And now that I was thinking of Elaene…
“You two can come out now,” I called out into the vast penthouse.
Even with the furniture the penthouse came with, plus our sectional, there was still so much open space, my voice literally echoed and bounced off the massive floor-to-ceiling windows.
That would take some getting used to, or alternately, more furniture. Who was to say which?
It had probably been nothing more than a symptom of my overcaution, but I hadn’t wanted to risk anyone seeing Liva while we moved all of the boxes upstairs. Sure, we had a personal, private elevator, but I hadn’t survived and thrived as well as I had so far by making sloppy choices.
So before we’d even started bringing boxes upstairs, Elaene and Liva had stowed themselves in one of the bathrooms in a spare bedroom. Technically, only Liva needed to be out of sight, but the blue-skinned woman had made it clear she felt much safer with Elaene by her side.
I couldn’t blame her. Sure, I had never been rescued after being held captive in a creepy sex dungeon before, but I imagined it came with some pretty particular hang-ups when it came to being told to go hide somewhere so people couldn’t see.
Liva was a logistic I hadn’t initially planned for when we’d purchased the penthouse, and frankly, I had no idea if the newest woman in my life intended on staying around.
She was still a nearly impossible nut to crack, but I couldn’t blame her. She and Elaene had both been the property of Archibald Black, the severely fucked up, now severely deceased, leader of the black market crystal ring operating out of Chicago.
He’d been one nasty son of a bitch, and he’d had more than just those two women held captive in his massive, fuck-off estate. But unlike Liva and Elaene, the other three women had hopped straight back to another realm through the Well to New Worlds. The portal was still the most impressive item I’d recovered from a dungeon, and even though it took seventy-two hours to recharge, being able to open a portal anywhere in the vast multiverse was an incredible feat.
It was definitely past the seventy-two hour threshold to open a new portal, but so far, Liva hadn’t mentioned wanting to go back to her own world.
And she still hadn’t come out of the bathroom.
“Guys?” I shouted again. “It’s safe!”
Iris and Yasha were both looking my way now as well, and apparently they were so baffled by Elaene and Liva’s disappearing act that they both made their way over to me.
“Which bathroom were they in again?” I asked, and I only allowed myself a second to be giddy about the fact that this was something I had to ask at all.
“The one in there,” Iris said and nodded her head toward the proper bedroom door. “The one Elaene seemed drawn to.”
“Got it,” I said and offered the blonde woman a two-fingered salute. “I’ll go make sure everything’s okay.”
“Be careful,” Yasha said.
“Of what?” Iris raised an eyebrow.
“I do not know if I trust the blue woman yet,” Yasha said, like it was the most obvious thing in the world.
“You’re paranoid,” the blonde said. “And you’re wasting precious time when you should be helping me unpack my vinyl’s.”
“What-” Yasha opened her mouth, but before she could finish the sentence, Iris had dropped an apparently heavy box into her arms.
“Do not ask what vinyl’s are, I know you know, and the joke stopped being funny a month ago.” Iris turned just fast enough that I nearly missed her grin as she brushed past me on my way into Elaene’s room.
The bedroom wasn’t any different than the other two spare bedrooms in the penthouse, but Elaene had claimed it as hers all the same. I was pretty sure it had something to do with the angle the windows faced, but I’d have to ask her to be sure.
There were only a few boxes in the room, which was a surprise in and of itself, considering we didn’t have a
The bathroom door in the back of the room was closed, but I could see faintly moving figures behind the frosted glass insert in the honey-toned wood.
I reached up to rap my knuckle against the door lightly and took a preemptive step back.
“Hey,” I said. “It’s Wes. Are you two okay in there? We’re done moving stuff up and down with the elevator, so it’s safe to come out and actually look around now.”
There were sounds of quick shuffling, and what sounded a whole lot like water splashing?
My brow furrowed, and I leaned a little closer to the door to try and figure out what the fuck was actually going on back there, but just as soon as I pressed my ear to the glass, the door swung open.
The two inhuman women stared back at me with matching wide-eyed gazes.
They were also, I noticed, both soaking wet.
Not that I was about to complain about something like that.
When I’d first come across Elaene, she’d been trapped inside a giant tank full of water inside a high-level dungeon. She’d also had a tail at that point in time, which had led me to believe she was a mermaid, a fact she had very astutely corrected me on later.
I’d seen the Atlantean woman dripping wet on numerous occasions since then, but this marked only the second time I’d seen her both fully clothed and drenched.
Her long, nearly black hair was sopping wet and clung to her face and shoulders in thick curls, which made her finned, pointed ears stand out on much more prominent display. Their greenish tint was even more apparent than usual and was brought out by the pale, sage green of her gauzy dress.
The fabric clung to her curves in a way that was borderline obscene, and it made seeing the faint scale marks up and down her long, barely pearlescent legs that much easier.
Her green-gray eyes met mine, and I could have sworn she batted her long lashes at me, as if that would somehow distract from whatever the hell was going on.
“What?” was the only word I could muster as my gaze darted from one wet woman to the other.
I had so many questions.
“I had never seen her tail,” Liva said, as if it was the most obvious thing in the entire world.
“It was too difficult to transform in Black’s captivity,” Elaene added as she pushed a large, soaked clump of hair from her face. “We were not fed properly, and a transformation requires a large amount of energy, even with water.”
“And I wished to see her tail,” Liva said in the same tone as before.
Admittedly, now that she said it twice, I really wasn’t that surprised. I don’t think anything Liva could have said or done would have really surprised me, though, if only because I had yet to get a good grasp on the new woman.
She was by far the least human-looking out of all the women in this penthouse, which was thanks to the whole “holy shit, she’s entirely blue” thing she had going on. Oh, and the fact that she had wings. Like, genuine wings.
Liva was petite, and she looked every part the ice fairy I was fairly certain she was, though I’d yet to get any real clarification.
Her skin was a rich, cool shade of blue, which was a shock in comparison to her snow-white hair and her incredibly pale, nearly white eyes. Her lashes looked like they were perpetually flaked with snow, and even her wings looked as if they were made from the delicate, fragile ice that topped puddles of water at the very start of a freeze.
There had been a reason I was concerned about someone seeing her while we moved boxes in. She definitely did not look human, or at the very least, she looked like a human in very dedicated cosplay.
I also knew for a fact that she was mildly terrifying and vengeful, but she’d earned that attitude in my eyes. And hell, if she wanted to see Elaene’s tail, and Elaene was cool with it, far be it from me to be a party pooper.
“Okayyyyy,” I said. “But I’ve gotta ask, why are both of you soaking wet? I get why you are, Elaene, but Liva?”
“That is my fault,” Elaene said a little sheepishly. “When I transformed, I underestimated how much water was in this tub.”
“She splashed me,” Liva elaborated. “And I do not think she is sorry, are you, sister?”
The petite woman’s lips curled up into a small, pleased little smirk as she glanced over at the Atlantean, and Elaene matched the look with one of her own.
“I’m just glad you two are alright,” I said before any more splashing could be instigated and I got caught in the crossfire.
As much as I loved the idea of two gorgeous women having a splash fight, I was less keen on the idea of having to deal with wet denim for even a second. Talk about chafing.
“We are quite fine,” Elaene assured me. “And you said it’s safe for us to emerge?”
“Oh, yeah,” I said and stepped out of the doorway. “Yasha and Iris have already started unpacking, and I think we got all your boxes in the right place, Elaene.”
The Atlantean smiled and showed off her sharkishly pointed teeth as she brushed past me.
I took another step back to give Liva more room as she left the bathroom, despite the fact that she took up less space than Elaene. It just went with the territory. It had only been three days since everything with Black came to its end, but I still wasn’t sure how Liva felt about me.
The blue woman clearly trusted me enough to have come back to our apartment to stay while we waited for the Well to New Worlds to recharge, but she’d also made sure not to be alone with me, and I’d done my best to accommodate her and give her a wide berth.
It wasn’t something I was even remotely offended by. I knew damn well the sort of things that had been done to Elaene in the prison Black constructed for the stolen inhuman women in his “possession,” and according to the Atlantean, Liva had been there even longer than she had.
Who knew the sorts of horrors the poor fairy had seen? If she wanted to have some distance from men, far be it from me to stop her. I was just happy she was comfortable in my presence at all.
Liva gave me a slight nod of appreciation as she trailed after Elaene out of the bathroom. Her bare feet touched the ground, but only by a hair.
Her wings were clearly not yet strong enough for her to fully take flight, but her strength had been improving rapidly over the last three days, and now she seemed to float everywhere with her toes barely even brushing the ground.
I moved back a little further so that she would be able to leave the room without interruption, but before she could make it out into the hallway with the rest of the women entirely, I spoke up.
“The portal, the Well to New Worlds, I mean,” I said. “It’s entirely charged up, if you want to take it back to your own world.”
Liva paused in her steps, but only for a second, before she shook her head. It was practically an imperceptible little shake, but it was definitely there. The already hard to decipher look on her face momentarily became even harder to read.
“No,” she said. Her tone left little room for questioning, even though I had about a thousand questions.
But I simply nodded and gestured for her to head out to see the rest of the penthouse.
A sharp gasp rose up from the woman in front of me as soon as she stepped out of the bedroom and into the living quarters.
I’d figured something like that might happen.
When we’d brought Liva up to the penthouse, all the blinds had still been drawn, but now they were wide open, and all of the massive, floor-to-ceiling windows were on full display.
It was one hell of a view.
I rounded the corner and leaned in the doorway as I watched the blue woman dart to the middle of the room. I didn’t even have to see her face to know her eyes were blown wide to the size of saucers.
Her wings fluttered excitedly and caught the light in the most beautiful display as they sent beams of light and color dancing across the pale hardwood floors with each little flap. The patterns bouncing in the light reminded me of stained glass as she moved until she was pressed right up against the windows with one of her hands raised and laid flat against the glass.
Her shock of short white hair fell in her eyes as she leaned in until her nose was pressed against the glass entirely.
