Lust Sync: Every Woman Wants Me Now
Chapter 37: Her Secret Craving

Chapter 37: Her Secret Craving

The evening lights of downtown shimmered through the hotel’s high-rise windows, casting a golden glow across the luxury suite. Charles stood by the minibar, shirt unbuttoned, tie loose around his neck, his mind still reeling from the day’s events—two new women synced, a secret investor revealed, and Nina’s warning ringing in his ears like a death knell.

The crystal tumbler felt cold in his hand as he poured himself a drink, but his movements froze mid-air when the bedroom door creaked open with deliberate slowness.

Out stepped Camilla Quinn, barefoot, wrapped in nothing but a silk robe that clung to her curves like liquid shadow. Her usually sharp, calculating eyes—the ones that had dominated boardrooms and crushed competitors—looked different tonight. Soft. Vulnerable, even. For a woman who’d built an empire on never showing weakness, this was more unsettling than any corporate takeover.

"You’re brooding again," she said, her voice carrying that low, husky quality that had first drawn him to her months ago in that pharmaceutical conference.

Charles turned slowly, setting the glass down with a soft clink against the marble surface. "Hard not to. This Lust Sync... it’s changing everything. And it’s happening faster than I can control."

Camilla’s bare feet whispered against the cold marble as she approached, each step deliberate and predatory. "Everything," she repeated, her manicured fingers sliding gently up his chest, tracing the definition of muscle beneath his shirt. "Including me."

He met her gaze, surprised by the raw honesty he found there. Camilla Quinn didn’t do vulnerable. She didn’t do admissions of weakness. Yet here she was, laying herself bare in ways that had nothing to do with the silk barely covering her body.

"I wasn’t supposed to feel like this," she continued, her voice dropping to barely above a whisper. "You were just another variable in my equation. A calculated risk with a promising return on investment. But now..." She stopped, her green eyes searching his face as if trying to decode something written in a language she’d never learned. "I feel addicted to you, Charles. Like you’re oxygen and I’m drowning without you."

The system pulsed faintly in the back of his mind, a warm electric current that made his skin tingle.

> [Lust Sync Detected: Camilla Quinn — Tier Ascension Available]

> [Emotional Resonance: 94%]

> [Physical Compatibility: 98%]

> [Psychological Integration: Pending...]

His breath hitched, but he fought against the system’s pull. Instead of acting on the surge of power, he asked, "You feel it too? The connection?"

She nodded, leaning in until her lips were barely a whisper from his, her breath warm against his skin. "I try to sleep and dream of you. I sit in board meetings and imagine your hands instead of profit margins. I open files at work and see your face in the spreadsheets. I’m losing control, Charles, and I’ve never lost control of anything in my life."

Her confession sent fire racing through his veins, but Charles held himself back from claiming her mouth. Something in her posture, in the way she held herself just out of reach, told him there was more.

"Then don’t run from it," he said, his voice rough with restraint. "Sync with me. All the way. No more half-measures."

Camilla hesitated, and for a moment, her mask of vulnerability slipped back into something harder, more calculating. Then she laughed—a sound with no humor in it, only shadows and secrets.

"I want to. God, I want to more than I’ve ever wanted anything," she whispered, stepping back toward the bed. "But there’s something you don’t know. Something that changes everything."

Charles’s body went rigid, every instinct screaming danger. "What?"

She turned away from him, walking slowly to the edge of the bed where moonlight painted her silhouette in silver. From her purse—expensive leather that probably cost more than most people’s cars—she pulled out a black envelope, its surface unmarked except for a small symbol that made Charles’s blood freeze.

The same symbol that had appeared in his dreams.

"Your system," she said, holding the envelope like it contained poison, "it’s not the only one."

The air in the suite went dead silent except for the distant hum of the city forty floors below.

"What do you mean?" he asked, his voice low and sharp as a blade.

Camilla didn’t answer immediately. Instead, she opened the envelope with surgical precision and pulled out a photograph—grainy, surveillance-style, the kind that suggested government involvement or corporate espionage. A woman stood at the center of a crowded pharmaceutical conference, her features half-obscured by a white lab coat and designer sunglasses. But Charles recognized her instantly, his heart stopping completely.

Iris Blake.

The brilliant geneticist who’d been one of the first women to kiss him back in those early days, when he’d thought the system was just some strange stroke of luck. The woman who’d vanished without a trace after their second encounter, leaving him to assume she’d been another casualty of the system’s mysterious "optimization" process.

"She’s been building her own sync system," Camilla said, her voice clinical now, all business. "Different base code. Modified genetic triggers. Same fundamental outcome, but with... variations. And she’s been using what she stole from you to perfect it."

Charles’s blood turned to ice water in his veins. "Iris vanished after our first real connection. I thought the system had eliminated her somehow, optimized her out of the equation..."

"She disappeared because she was preparing," Camilla corrected, moving to stand beside him. "She let you build your network, gather power, establish your connections... while she did the same. Only her method is different. Darker."

The photograph slipped from Charles’s numb fingers, fluttering to the marble floor like a death sentence. He sank onto the leather couch, his mind racing through implications and possibilities, all of them terrifying.

> [System Alert: Unknown Interference Detected]

> [Sync Pathway Crossed — Source: I.B.]

> [WARNING: Hostile System Integration Attempted]

His HUD flickered like a dying television, lines of code scrolling past too fast to read. Then it stabilized, but something felt... wrong. Corrupted.

Camilla moved beside him, placing a perfectly manicured hand on his knee. The touch sent sparks through him, but now he wondered if it was his system or something else entirely.

"She’s coming for you," Camilla said softly. "Not because she loves you, not because she wants to be part of your network. She wants to consume you. Take the system back and turn it into something that serves her vision of what human connection should be."

Charles clenched his jaw, rage building like a pressure cooker in his chest. "Then I’ll stop her."

Camilla’s smile was sad and knowing. "It won’t be that easy. She’s already synced with seven men. Each one died within a month. Slowly. Painfully. Their life force... drained."

His fists balled at his sides, knuckles white with tension. The idea of someone twisting the same gift that had given him purpose, connection, and power into an instrument of death—it filled him with a fury he’d never experienced.

But even through his anger, a cold voice in the back of his mind whispered: What if her version was stronger? What if she’d found a way to perfect what he’d only stumbled into?

Camilla leaned forward, her lips brushing his cheek with butterfly softness. "You’ll need me in what’s coming next. Fully synced. No secrets between us. No walls."

This time, he didn’t hold back.

Their lips met in a collision of fire and desperation, hunger and need crashing together like waves against stone. Her hands dug into his back, nails leaving crescents through the fabric of his shirt, while his gripped her waist, pulling her closer until there was no space left between them. The system flared to life, electric heat racing through every nerve ending.

> [Sync Deepening — Tier Ascension Unlocked]

> [New Trait Acquired: "Crimson Authority" — Targets compelled to obey spoken commands when heart rate exceeds 120 BPM]

> [Integration Level: 97%]

> [Final Ascension Available]

Camilla gasped against his mouth, her body arching into his as the connection deepened. But just as the heat threatened to tip them both over the edge into something unstoppable—Charles froze.

Because a whisper slithered through his mind like ice water in his veins.

Not from Camilla. Not from his system.

But from somewhere else entirely.

> "I see you, Charles. I see her. I see everything you’ve built. And soon... you’ll see what I’ve become."

The voice was Iris’s, but wrong somehow. Distorted. Hungry in ways that made his skin crawl.

The suite’s lights flickered once, twice, then began strobing in a pattern that hurt to look at. A high-pitched whine filled the air—the sound of electronics failing, of systems overloading—causing Camilla to cry out and cover her ears.

> [WARNING: System Boundary Breach Detected]

> [Hostile Takeover Attempt in Progress]

> [Firewall Compromised]

> [Initiating Emergency Protocols]

And then... silence. Complete, absolute silence that pressed against their eardrums like physical weight.

Camilla looked up at him, her eyes wide with terror and something else—recognition. "What was that?"

Charles stared at the empty air where the voice had seemed to originate, his fists clenched so tight his knuckles had gone white. "It’s her. She just touched the system. Somehow, from wherever she is, she’s already inside."

Outside the window, lightning forked across the night sky in patterns that defied meteorology—geometric, deliberate, too precise to be natural. Except there were no clouds, no storm. Just electricity dancing across clear stars like a cosmic web.

Then his HUD exploded with red warnings, messages cascading faster than he could read:

> [SYSTEM MERGE INITIATED]

> [Countdown: 29 Days, 23 Hours, 47 Minutes]

> [Only One Can Survive the Final Sync]

> [Prepare for War]

But the final message, the one that made his blood freeze completely, appeared in text that wasn’t from his system at all. The font was different, the code signature alien:

> [Charles... I’ve missed you. Time to come home. —I.B.]

> [P.S. — Your friends are lovely. I do hope they survive what’s coming.]

The lights in the suite died completely, plunging them into darkness broken only by the impossible lightning outside. And in that darkness, Charles could swear he heard something that shouldn’t exist—the sound of footsteps in the hallway outside their door.

Slow. Deliberate. Getting closer.

Camilla’s hand found his in the dark, her grip desperate. "Charles," she whispered, "I need to tell you something else. Something about why I really came here tonight."

But before she could speak, the footsteps stopped.

Right outside their door.

And someone knocked.