Page 19 of Reckless Heir
The thought is almost funny.
Almost.
I close my eyes.
I don't sleep, but the awake is productive.
By the time the New Hampshire dark starts to lighten, I've made a plan.
6
ALEKSEI
I've been in the suite for forty minutes.
The gun is disassembled on the side table — barrel, slide, spring, guide rod — laid out in the precise sequence I was taught at eleven years old by a man who believed that discipline with objects was the first discipline, and that everything else followed from it. I've reassembled it twice already. I'm working on a third. Not because it needs it. My hands require something to do that isn't checking the time.
This is a tell. I recognize it as a tell. I have no explanation for why I'm generating a tell when no one is present to read it.
The question I've been not asking myself for forty minutes is: what exactly am I waiting for?
I know what I'm waiting for. Sofia Conti is in the processing room beneath the east wing, going through the intake protocol I arranged. In approximately forty-five minutes she will emerge into the courtyard in a gray plaid uniform with a barcode on the collar and a blood oath on a piece of parchment and she'll walk toward the Tower that I told the intake supervisor to assign her to.
The Tower. My residence. I arranged this also.
I could have assigned her to any wing of the campus. The Orphan dormitory system has four towers, all adequate, all appropriately monitored. I chose this one. I told myself it was practical — proximity, observation, the ability to monitor the asset with minimal overhead. These are rational justifications.
I am forty minutes into reassembling a gun I don't need to reassemble and I am developing a data-based suspicion that the justifications were constructed after the decision.
Downstairs, in the processing tunnels beneath the east wing, Sofia Conti is being stripped of her phone, her clothes, her jewelry, and whatever remaining belief she brought through the gate that the world operates on fairness. I arranged the protocol myself. The uniform — gray plaid, the barcode sewn into the collar, the specific humiliation of wearing someone else's label on your body. The lancet and the parchment. The words she'll be told to say. The woman who runs processing has been with St. Gabriel for twenty-two years and has the particular affect of someone who learned very early not to let the room's distress become hers. She's efficient. She's not cruel. She is, however, thorough.
I don't go to processing. I never go.
The rule exists for practical reasons: the Heir's presence in the processing room would alter the dynamic in ways that are strategically counterproductive. Distance is power. She should arrive to me having already been reduced, processed, made to say the words — so that when she stands in this room, the terms of what this is have been established without my having to establish them.
These are the practical reasons.
I've been sitting in this chair for forty minutes, which is not a practical behavior, and I am aware of this.
The last surveillance packet arrived six weeks ago: Santorini, the infinity pool, three weeks left on her countdown. The analystcaptioned it:subject appears contemplative. No security concerns.The photograph showed her at the pool's edge with a glass of wine, her face turned toward the horizon, her brothers visible at a grill in the background. It was a good photograph. I filed it where I file all of them.
Fifty-four surveillance images over twelve months. Florence in November — the Uffizi, a market, a restaurant where she sat alone at a corner table reading for two hours with the specific pleasure of someone who has been given time to do exactly what they want. The Amalfi coast in January, the steep roads. Tokyo in March, which I hadn't anticipated — she moved independently within the city for four days, no family, no security, with the confidence of someone who'd been navigating on her own since she could read a map. Bali. Prague. The Santorini house.
I deleted fifty-three of those images after review.
The courtyard photograph I still have. In my desk. Third drawer. I haven't looked at it since she arrived in New Hampshire.
The door opens.
She looks like the photograph and nothing like it.
The photograph was motion-triggered, accidental, unguarded — the shutter fired on her at her least controlled. That woman was giving nothing to anyone. She didn't know about the lens. She was in a private moment, laughing at something, the book forgotten in her hand. I've looked at that photograph three times in eighteen months. Each time it does something to my attention that I've been categorizing as an analytical response to an unusual data point.
This is her composed. Her chin is already elevated when she steps through the door, her eyes making a rapid scan of the room before settling on me — quick, intelligent, practiced. She's assessing the space the way someone does when they've spenttheir life being told that rooms are situations and situations should be read before you commit to anything.
She finds me in the chair. She has the grace not to flinch.
I notice: the uniform fits perfectly, which is because I had her measurements from a photograph set and gave them to the uniform supplier three months ago. She is wearing my choices on her body and she already knows it — I can tell from the quality of the composure, the extra fraction it's being held at, the specific expression of someone who has had something done to them and has decided to absorb it without performance.
