The door cracked open, and Bonnie stuck her head in, thankfully keeping her gaze fixed on the floor. “I’m not interrupting, am I?” she asked.

“Not at all,” Lucas replied.

“Good, good. I’ll be back when these are exchanged, boss.” She disappeared then, leaving Lucas alone for only a brief minute before the door opened once again.

Xun Guan walked in this time.

Lucas watched her with curiosity, and she gave him a wicked smile. “I see you’ve been making yourself at home in a dead man’s house.” She produced two shoddy packs of bottled beer and a few plates of snacks, mostly mutton skewers, fried chicken, and garlic fries, which she placed around the bath, half next to Lucas and half on the side across from him. “I mean, not that I’m surprised. You always were the kind not to worry about anything, or at least not to show it.”

“What can I say? It feels nice and cozy,” he replied. He shrugged noncommittally as he grabbed one of the fries, bit into it, and savored the wonderful flavor of garlic and salt that was layered across the crispy potato stick. While he was reaching for one of the bottles of beer that Xun Guan had set next to the plate of snacks, she disrobed right in front of him and slowly slipped into the bath, not even bothering to hide her figure.

He couldn’t take his eyes off her. Hers was a body that he had seen naked a thousand times, but it had been too long. His heart beat so hard that he could feel it in his throat. This was the figure he had longed for every night he went to sleep in that cold, empty bed.

“You know,” Xun Guan said as she adjusted herself in the bath, “you’re passing up a pretty easy source of stress relief with that fox girl.”

“I know,” Lucas said. He struggled to calm himself and to act like nothing was out of the ordinary. Xun Guan seemed so at ease.

“Not gonna even give it a spin? She doesn’t seem like the type of girl that will get possessive.”

“Nah, I think I’ll pass,” Lucas answered, washing down the fry with a swig of cold brew. In-game beer wasn’t exactly the same as beer in real life: it was a little better and a little worse. It wasn’t as sweet as most American beers, and it wasn’t as bitter as a lot of the homebrew IPAs that beer snobs in their early twenties raved about. The game brew was more like modern German beers, but with a little less flavor.

“You know, Lucas”—Xun Guan paused to take a sip of her own beverage—“you weren’t the one who died that day.”

Lucas’s breath seized up for a moment, and his eyes widened. He was caught completely unprepared for such a statement from her. She looked like his dead wife, but he had never told her why he had trouble looking at her. Bonnie knew, and Kegan knew, so it was possible that the GM had listened in on those conversations, but given her tone and the way she put the words together, the sentence sounded personal.