Chloe didn’t say anything for what felt like a full minute.

Jordan watched her process, watched the gears turning behind those dark brown eyes that had replaced her signature blue contacts for the family dinner. She was doing the thing she always did when confronted with new information, cataloging it, sorting it, determining how it fit into her existing understanding of the world and whether it changed anything fundamental about her position.

"Seventy-nine percent," she said again, quieter this time.

"Yeah."

"That’s... high?"

"Highest I’ve got." Jordan shrugged, trying for casual and landing somewhere closer to desperate. "The System breaks even at fifty. Below that, I lose money. Above that, I profit. Seventy-nine means every dollar I spend on you comes back at one-point-five-eight times."

"So when you bought me dinner last week..."

"Made about twelve bucks."

Chloe’s laugh came out sharp and disbelieving. She pressed her palm against her forehead like she was checking for a fever, then let her hand drop and stared at Jordan with an expression he couldn’t quite read.

"This is insane. You understand that this is completely insane, right?"

"Fully aware."

"A magical phone app that tracks how much girls like you and pays you money based on attraction percentages. That’s the explanation for everything. The hot springs, the body, the grades, all of it."

"The hot springs came from a different thing. Gacha system. I pulled a bunch of tickets and got lucky."

"Gacha."

"Like in mobile games. You spend currency, you get random rewards. Sometimes the rewards are traits that improve your voice or your dancing or whatever. Sometimes they’re items." Jordan paused, considering how much detail was too much. "I got something called Bunny’s Blessings once. The System description was deeply concerning."

Chloe’s eyebrows climbed toward her hairline.

"The point is, the resort wasn’t planned. I spent tickets expecting to get something useful for my daily quests and instead I got a multimillion dollar property in Newport Beach."

"Daily quests."

"Path to Becoming Adonis. Ninety minutes of exercise, proper hygiene, skincare routine, talking to three different women without apologizing for existing or offering to buy them things." Jordan ticked them off on his fingers. "Failure penalty is losing stamina recovery. Success gives me three tickets."

Chloe took her phone from where she’d set it on the counter and pulled up something on the screen. Jordan recognized the notes app, the same one she used for business planning and content scheduling.

"I’ve been keeping a file," she said. "Every time something didn’t add up. Every inconsistency, every moment where you knew something you shouldn’t or did something that didn’t match the person you were supposed to be."

"How long?"

"Since the coffee date." She scrolled through the document, and Jordan caught glimpses of bullet points and timestamps and observations that painted a picture of someone who had been watching him very carefully for a very long time. "I thought you might be a con artist at first. Then I thought maybe you were some kind of trust fund kid pretending to be normal for fun. Then I thought you might be running a money laundering operation through the resort."

"That last one’s creative."

"I was desperate for an explanation that made sense."

She set the phone down and looked at him again, really looked at him, like she was seeing him for the first time and trying to reconcile the person in front of her with the pathetic simp who had paid three thousand dollars for forty-five minutes of her professional attention.

"Why didn’t you just buy me expensive things?"

Jordan blinked.

"What?"

"If spending money on me makes you more money, why weren’t you buying me bags and jewelry and all that?" Chloe’s voice held genuine curiosity rather than accusation. "Not that I’m complaining, but the math seems obvious. Higher investment, higher return."

"I was going to. At the beginning, that was literally my plan. Find a girl, register her, spend money until the chemistry climbed, profit off the returns." Jordan rubbed the back of his neck, the familiar tell he couldn’t quite suppress. "Then someone got really worked up about me buying her a streaming setup."

Chloe’s face went through several expressions in rapid succession, settling on something between embarrassment and amusement.

"That was different. I didn’t want to owe you anything, I didn’t want to feel like I was being bought, I didn’t want to be another..." She trailed off, and her cheeks flushed pink. "I didn’t want to be another Eliza."

"Exactly."

"Or have you feel that way about me. Like I was just taking from you."

"Also exactly."

Chloe let out a breath that was half laugh, half sigh. She reached over and punched his arm, not hard enough to hurt but hard enough to make her point.

"So you’re telling me you could have been buying me designer bags this whole time and instead you’ve been getting me boba and cheap dinners because I threw a fit about a ring light?"

"Pretty much."

"Jordan McKnight, you absolute idiot."

"The System agreed with you, for what it’s worth. There’s a whole thing about how genuine connection generates better returns than transactional spending. Something about sustainable attraction versus purchased compliance." Jordan shrugged. "I figured if you wanted expensive things, you’d tell me. You’re not exactly shy about asking for what you want."

Chloe’s flush deepened, and Jordan filed that reaction away for future reference. The pink spreading across her cheekbones and down her neck was doing things to his concentration that probably weren’t appropriate for a serious conversation about supernatural dating apps.

"Wait." Her eyes sharpened again, the business version of Chloe reasserting itself. "Kumiko is on here."

Jordan went very still.

"I saw the screen. Active connections, two slots filled. Me and Kumiko." Chloe’s voice had gone flat in a way that usually preceded someone losing a limb. "You registered her."

"Yes."

Chloe’s jaw tightened, then relaxed as she processed the timeline. Jordan could see her mentally cross-referencing his confession about Kumiko with her own file of suspicious observations, checking whether the dates aligned and whether his story held together.

"Forty-two percent," she said finally.

"What?"

"Her chemistry. I saw it on the screen. Forty-two percent."

"Yeah. Below break-even." Jordan’s voice came out more defensive than he intended. "I’ve been spending time with her, taking her on dates, but the number isn’t climbing as fast as yours did. The System says it’s because she’s got attachment issues from previous relationships and trust takes longer to build."

"The System says."

"It’s weirdly insightful about psychological barriers to intimacy."

Chloe stared at him for a long moment, her expression unreadable.

"So let me get this straight. You have a magical app that tells you exactly how much every girl you’re dating likes you, provides detailed analysis of their emotional baggage, and financially incentivizes you to spend time with them."

"When you put it that way, it sounds—"

"Like the most broken cheat code in the history of romance?"

"I was going to say ethically complicated."