Page 35 of Reckless Heir
"I'm a Conti," I say. "My family survived much stranger situations than this."
This lands. Her expression reshapes into something I haven't seen from her yet — a grin that's more genuine than sharp, the kind that's actually surprised. "God, you're going to be useful."
"Not for you."
"We'll see." She goes back to her case file, fork in her other hand. "Eat your bread. You look like you're metabolizing stress instead of food, and that is not a sustainable strategy."
We eat mostly in silence — Mara annotating a case file balanced on her knee, me working through the dry bread and watching the room with the intelligence methodology framework running behind my eyes without my permission. Gaps in information. Decision architectures. The way the Baltic Heir at the far window table laughed at something without looking at the person who said it. The way the Orphan girl who shoved me in the corridor has now positioned herself with her back to the room.
What does she know that she's protecting?
What is the Baltic Heir measuring?
I'm doing it constantly now. Reading rooms. I did it before St. Gabriel, by necessity and osmosis, at Dante's tables and in the corridors of the Conti world. Here they're teaching me to name what I was already doing.
It's useful, which I find annoying, and I've stopped being annoyed about it.
That evening I try to call Luca.
It's a stupid impulse, born from thirty minutes of feeling almost human and the specific ache of something Mara said —your family invented half the extortion rackets in this city— which made them real again in a way they haven't been since the iron gates. I take the tablet from the desk and open the communications panel and navigate to the contact list and there's the problem immediately:
There is no contact list.
There's an intranet portal. A campus directory. An approved communications log that allows outgoing messages to a pre-vetted list of numbers, each one marked with the Obsidian crest. None of them are Luca. None of them are Dante. None of them are Grace or Arielle or any of the Bali summer that feels, suddenly, like something that happened to a different person.
I sit with the tablet in my lap for a moment.
Then I check for my own phone — the one that was taken in processing, logged as contraband. There's a request form in the portal for "personal communications review." Estimated processing time: fourteen to twenty-one business days. Final approval:House Heir.
His approval.
I set the tablet on the desk and look at it for a long time.
I think about Luca. Twenty-four years old and living in the margins of a family that makes its decisions above his pay grade, and he still managed to be the person who knocked on my doorthe night Dante told us what he'd done. He didn't apologize for Dante. He didn't try to explain it. He just knocked and sat on the floor of my room with his back against the bed and saidI know it's shitand stayed until I fell asleep.
He doesn't know where I am right now.
He doesn't know if I'm alright.
He doesn't know about the processing room or the blood oath or the brand or Mara Kovac with her modified uniform and her stolen grape. He knows I'm at a school in New Hampshire attached to a man named Aleksei Romanov and that's probably everything.
I knew, in the abstract, that I was isolated. I knew the locked door and the biometric panel and the barcode on my collar were all the same message in different languages. But there's something specific about seeing it written out in a portal — the careful bureaucracy of being cut off, the forms you can fill out, the weeks-long review, the name at the end of the approval chain — that makes it land differently.
He hasn't blocked me from reaching my family.
He's just arranged it so that any attempt goes through him first.
The distinction is so small. The distinction is everything.
I don't fill out the form.
Not because I'm giving up. Because filling it out would mean waiting three weeks for his approval of my right to talk to my brother, and I'm not going to spend three weeks waiting on that particular mercy. I'll find another way. There are intranet libraries and acquisition systems and whatever loopholes I haven't found yet, and I have a long time and a very specific kind of Conti stubbornness that has been sitting idle since I said a blood oath in a concrete room.
I open the seminar notes instead and stare at them until the words stop being words.
Outside the Tower window, St. Gabriel settles into its specific autumn dark, and somewhere in this building Aleksei Romanov is being unreachable in the particular way of a man who has built unreachability into every system around him.
Make yourself too expensive to break,Mara said.
