Page 14 of Reckless Heir
Sofia Conti. Status: Orphan.
The paper takes the blood and holds it and becomes a document. I think about the contract in the drawer beside my mother's stationery, my signature on it in the same hand I've had since I was fourteen.
She slides a card across the table. The words printed on it are short.
I have no house but what is given.I have no name but what is granted.I have no claim but what I owe.I belong to House Romanov.Until the debt is paid.
I read them once. I look up.
"No," I say.
She meets my eyes for the first time. "The outcome is the same either way. The guards will hold your hand to the parchment. I'll say the words. Everything is filed identically." She pauses. "What differs is the dignity of it."
The ventilation hums. The antiseptic hangs in the air.
I think about Dante in the dark of my room, his hand on the door, the apology he swallowed because he already knew it wasn't the right size for what he'd done.
I say the words.
In my own voice, at a pace I set, looking at a fixed point slightly above her head so that I am choosing where I look whileI say them. My voice doesn't shake until the last line, and even then it barely does, and I don't think she catches it.
Until the debt is paid.
I hand the card back.
She files it with the parchment, the intake form, the barcode tag documentation. The manila folder closes. She pushes a tablet across the table — locked down, intranet only, curfew and rules preloaded.
"The Tower," she says. "Northeast quadrant. Welcome to St. Gabriel."
I push open the door and step into the courtyard.
The rain has slowed to something between drizzle and resignation, a fine mist that coats everything in gray. The campus stretches out before me — gargoyles, arches, stone that looks like it was quarried from the bones of something older than the families who built here. Students move in clusters under the archways, all of them in identical gray plaid, all of them doing the thing I'll spend weeks learning to do: looking at everything while appearing to look at nothing.
They clock me.
Not with interest — with assessment. I'm new, I'm arriving late in the term, and I'm walking from the direction of the processing room, which apparently broadcasts information I didn't know I was transmitting. A group of three near the south archway goes quiet as I pass. A woman my age, dark-haired, positioned like someone who always chooses corners, tilts her head in a fraction of recognition before her eyes slide away.
I keep walking.
The map on the tablet is utilitarian but accurate. The Tower is in the northeast quadrant, accessed through a secondary gate and then a courtyard that the main student body apparently doesn't use. I figure this out when I push through the gate and find myself in a narrow garden space with a single stone bench, adead fountain, and absolute quiet. The main campus noise drops away immediately.
Above me, the Tower.
Four stories of the same gray stone, but taller and narrower than the surrounding buildings, a single structure with its own entrance and its own set of narrow windows. A light is on in the top floor, pale gold against the afternoon dark.
My thumb throbs where the lancet went in.
I press it against my palm and look at the light in the window.
Someone is up there,I think.He's up there, and in approximately five minutes, I'm going to walk in and we're going to meet each other, and nothing about the next year of my life is going to be something I have a name for yet.
The rain picks back up.
I walk to the door.
5
SOFIA
