Page 34 of Reckless Heir
A girl shoves past me in the corridor between third and fourth period — shoulder into shoulder, the kind that's calibrated, not accidental. I catch myself on the wall. She doesn't look back.
I note it and keep walking.
This is the social grammar of St. Gabriel when you are Romanov's Orphan and Romanov doesn't eat lunch in the cafeteria: not direct hostility, because direct hostility requires being willing to be observed committing it, and everyone here calculates exposure. What they do instead is small and deniable — the shoulder, the occupied seat, the look that moves through you at a slight angle so it can't be read as a look. I've been here two weeks and I understand the system well enough to see its logic, even if I'm still mapping the people who built it.
The brand on my hip pulses with my heartbeat, low and constant. I've stopped reacting to it. It's data now — temperature and position — rather than sensation.
The cafeteria is a cavernous hall of stone and noise, and I've learned its geometry in two weeks: Heir tables by the tall windows, Orphans clustered in the middle distance according to House alliances, scholarship students near the kitchen door. The aisles between territories are negotiated space — traversable if you don't stop.
I don't have a territory.
This is the structural problem with being Romanov's Orphan in a room where Romanov doesn't appear: I exist inside his gravitational field without the physical anchor of his presence, which means the other bodies in the room register me as a variable they haven't classified. Not hostile exactly. Not friendly. The wary attention of a system encountering an element it doesn't have a rule for.
I get a tray. I scan the tables. The invisible lines are exactly where they always are.
I walk toward an empty table at the back.
"Taken," a boy says without looking up.
The next one: a girl drops her bag onto an empty chair before I reach it. Her expression is pleasant, patient, carrying the complete absence of apology that signals this is practiced rather than impulsive.
I stand in the middle of the room for a moment with my tray, doing my own calculation.
"Oh for fuck's sake, just sit here."
It comes from a table near the center — a girl with wild curly hair and honey-brown skin, waving at me with a fork. Her uniform is modified: skirt hemmed aggressively short, blazer open over something that is definitely not within the dress code.
I know who she is from the orientation roster. Mara Kovac. An Orphan — House Drakos, from context, though she's never confirmed it. She has the particular composure of someone who has been in this world long enough to have stopped being regularly surprised by it.
I sit. The surrounding tables register this. A slight realignment of angles, people not quite looking while orienting toward the new information.
"You're either brave or running out of options," I say, setting my tray down.
"I'm bored," she says, which is not agreement or disagreement. "I've watched you do that circuit around the room three times this week. It was interesting for about eight seconds."
She steals a grape from my tray without asking, which tells me immediately that she's a person who tests the temperature of new relationships through small appropriations and then watches what happens.
I push the rest of the grapes toward her.
Something in her expression adjusts — recalibration, brief — and then she proceeds to eat them with the focus of someone who has already moved on.
"They'll adjust," she says, not looking up. "You're the only thing Romanov has ever publicly claimed. That creates a particular kind of confusion — nobody knows yet whether proximity to you is useful or dangerous, so they're defaulting to distance until they figure it out."
"How long does that take?"
"Depends on whether Romanov does anything visible with you in the next few weeks." She toggles a grape between her fingers. "Or whether you do something that forces a reclassification."
She says it like she's describing a market, which is probably accurate.
"Is it true he branded you?" she asks, direct enough that it lands differently from the careful deniability of everyone else. She's asking because she wants to know, not because she's trying to communicate something through asking.
"Yes."
She's quiet for a moment, absorbing this with the face of someone who doesn't have an immediate frame for it and is building one. "I heard about it but I thought it was rumor."
"It was in the contract."
She looks at me. Something in her face has shifted from the bored-practical register she came in with. "And you're — here. Eating lunch."
