98 Party (12)

Gale's statement was quite right, Iris had to admit. In the most basic meaning of the words, anyway.

"Are you all right?" Kyro asked, ignoring his friends dry humor, and Iris looked up at him, surprised. His voice was gentle, caring, not the furious growl she had expected.

He picked her up, and she didn't struggle. This was nice, but she was puzzled. Wasn't he going to throw her away this instant? It was an obvious course of action, so why was he acting so kind for the moment?

Not aware of her inner turmoil, he stroked her fur, thinking to calm her down. She was aware of it and forced back her shivering, but that didn't explain what the hell he was thinking. Had he lost his mind and want to keep her even though she could turn into a human at any moment?

"What do you think happened here?" Kyro asked in a cold voice, turning to Gale.

The blonde man shrugged. "Hell if I know. Unless you installed some underground escape route without telling me, I've no clue how she could have left through those jail-like windows." He picked up the blanket. "And she even had the audacity to leave your blanket behind. Think we will catch her if we go outside and say we're looking for a nude twenty-year-old girl with sandy hair?"

Kyro leveled a freezing glare his way, and Iris chuckled to herself. They were actually not connecting the dots. Wasn't it obvious that she was the girl? She had even said her name! How could they be so dense?

o.O

'But it's all for the better! As long as they don't figure it out, I can stay!' Happy, she leaned into Kyro's touch. If he continued to think that she was a simple fox, then everything could go on as before!

But when she caught sight of the blanket in Gale's hand, dark thoughts rose in her mind. This time might be fine, but what will happen if she changed again? And again? She wouldn't be able to keep her secret for long if she kept on transforming at random. There would certainly come a time when she would transform while being held by him, and that would be enough awkwardness for her to never raise her head again.

"I'll go check if anything's missing," Kyro finally said.

Gale nodded and stepped out of his way. "I'll go and have a talk with the security, maybe they missed something yesterday."

"Don't tell them there was an intruder. We don't need any wagging tongues."

"Certainly."

After that, Kyro brought Iris into the study and revealed to her all his secret stashes. Some of them were pretty fun, like a double-backed drawer, while others were as simple as stuff placed between book pages. None of them were disturbed, obviously, so he quickly went through everything and frowned. It clearly puzzled him how someone could have entered his house but not touched anything of his.

'Simple, really,' Iris told him with a grin. 'I don't need your documents, your apartment is quite sufficient. Especially when it comes with an unlimited food supply, entertainment, and no expectations besides welcoming you home and doing a couple parlor tricks.'

Luckily, Kyro didn't understand a word she said. He simply looked down at her with a smile and patted her head distractedly. "There really is nothing disturbed," he muttered to himself.

At this moment, he couldn't help but look back at the bed. Could the girl have really come in just to sleep with him? But that was idiotic, not to mention impossible. Who would be crazy enough to go through the trouble of getting through all the security to somehow get into his house just to sleep with him?

On top of that, the girl had even woken him up herself. If she had come to do something stupid, wouldn't she at least try to be lowkey about it?

But it didn't add up anyway. Right before he was kicked off the bed, he had a fraction of a moment to grasp what was happening, and he could have sworn his hand had been around the girl's side. And she had been looking at that hand when she pushed him away after screaming right in his ears. From that, it would seem that she had been the one surprised by being here, but that made even less sense than her sneaking into his apartment for god alone knows what reason.

He rubbed his temples, feeling the pressure building up. It didn't matter from which angle he tackled this random-girl-appeared-in-my-bed problem, none of them could be accepted by a person possessing a brain. What happened was just too illogical to make sense of it...