Page 30 of 8-Bit & Cat

She had let him erase Ethan. And she didn’t even feel guilty.

That should have terrified her. Instead, all she felt was a hunger. For more. For everything she’d spent her life not realizing she needed.

Her pulse jumped at the buzz of her phone.

Then her stomach dropped.

She turned, pulse roaring in her ears as she reached for it, everything in her gut knowing it was Ethan. He always called when she was either at her lowest or most desperate.

It was him.

Zero new calls.

Seven new messages.

A sudden burning anger hardened her jaw at the zero calls. “Because you’re too chicken shit to say it in words? To my face?”

She clicked on the messages.

You were supposed to text.

You didn’t.

Wow. How fucking dare he? Reprimands her for not doing what he said, not texting him back like he said.

Her stomach dropped at his next line.

I don’t like you over there alone.

I think you should go back home till things settle down.

A sharp, twisting pain gripped her stomach.

Go home?

Her eyes blurred as the pressure built in her chest.

“Where is that now?” she gasped.

It had been in his arms. In the rough scrape of his jaw against her skin. In the way he kissed her like she was something…special. His. Home had been his presence. It had been the vow that no matter what they faced, they would do it together. He wouldbethere.

And now?

Home was a chair in the center of a virtual room she never knew she needed. It was the press of Omnis’ virtual fingers against her real pulse. The steady, deliberate way he measured her very existence. And the virtual heat of Zero’s hand on herwrist, the slow, methodical way he unraveled her. How they watched her, saved her, and shaped her, for him.

Her stomach twisted hard. He wanted her to leave that? Go back to being the woman he’d struck a business agreement with? Come when you have time and fuck whenever you want or can?

Her grip tightened on the phone, her other hand pressing hard against her stomach as if she could physically hold in the ugly things clawing inside her. She’d been ready to tell him everything. Ready to finally face him, to lay it all out, to demand something real. But now? Now, she couldn’t shake the ice creeping through her veins. Because those words—You should be at home until things settle down— they weren’t just practical, they were distance. A wall. A quiet confirmation of a truth she had refused to acknowledge.

Maybe Ethan still had reserved a temporary card with them. A role they agreed to play until emotions got in the way. Maybe he never meant for love to be part of it. Maybe he’d hoped she’d just fall in line with his virtual family and his virtual fantasies. If that was the case, he sure got what the fuck he put down for, didn’t he. His wife all but fucked both his virtual siblings.

There was one thing she knew to be a fact. He did not feel the cruel break between them the way she did.

She stared at his name, head shaking, body shaking, finger shaking over the call button.

Pain gathered in her chest till it was an all-out war to take a fucking breath.

What in God’s name was she doing?

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