Page 37 of Reckless Heir
I put it on and stand in front of the mirror for longer than I need to.
The work ahead of me is figuring out how to make my choices mine anyway,I thought at the penthouse last week. I am working on this. It is slow work.
One item closed, this week: the loophole project. I mapped every access point in the intranet structure looking for a route to Luca's number or Dante's — a library relay, an unmonitored acquisition pathway, anything. There isn't one. The system is built by people who have been keeping Orphans inside it for a long time, and they've closed the obvious routes. I filed this information under: adapt. I'll find another way eventually. Fornow the channel is blocked and I've stopped spending energy on it.
The Old Opera House is not on any tourist map.
It occupies a block of the city that doesn't appear with that function in any property registry — the building is listed as a private heritage trust in the name of an organization that doesn't have a public board. The outside is deliberately maintained in decline: crumbling brick, aged ironwork, the kind of exterior that reads as abandoned to anyone not meant to see what it actually is. I've started noticing these buildings everywhere. The city has a shadow layer, and I've been living in it for four weeks now, and I can no longer look at a shuttered commercial property without wondering who owns it and why.
Inside, the Obsidian has restored it to a haunting glory.
Red velvet seats in the tiers above, stripped of whatever crowd used to fill them. Gold leaf peeling at the cornice in long strips that curl back like shed skin. The chandelier — original, enormous, a constellation of crystals that catches the candlelight and throws it in all directions at once — is lit. The stage is empty but for a string quartet playing something minor-key and precise in the far corner, their music filling the space without filling it, the way the right piece of music in the right room makes the room feel bigger rather than smaller.
The bar is set up under the dress circle. I get a glass of something cold and stand with it and take inventory.
The Obsidian events have a consistent vocabulary. Controlled lighting. Expensive things in unexpected combinations. The performance of casual elegance by people who have never been casual in their lives and know it. The hierarchy visible only to those who know how to read it — Heirs clustered near the focal points of rooms, Orphans at the margins, the Regents invisible as always and thereforeeverywhere. I've been learning to read these rooms. I'm getting better at it than I want to be.
Aleksei finds me near the bar.
He's in a black suit — different from the one he wore at the penthouse, similar in the way that all his suits are similar: perfect, unornamented, not a detail out of place. He's been talking to someone; I can tell because he's finishing a sentence as he approaches and there's the residue of performance still in the set of his jaw, the slight precision of a man who has been speaking carefully and is now releasing it.
He stops.
He looks at me.
The metallic silver dress under the chandelier, presumably. The specific way I've been standing with the champagne glass, I don't know. He looks at me the way he sometimes looks at me when he doesn't think I'm watching, which is longer and less clinical than the version I'm usually shown.
"You're glistening," he says, his voice low.
"I'm wearing foil," I say. "I feel like a baked potato."
Something moves in his eyes. A flicker. Gone so fast I could have invented it.
Come,he says, and leads me up the grand staircase.
There is a poker table in the private box overlooking the stage.
Of course there is.
Green felt, stacks of chips, four men already seated and waiting with the specific patience of people who are used to waiting for the most powerful person in the room. Aleksei settles into his chair with the ease of someone sitting down to something he intends to win, which is how he does everything. He pulls out my chair with a deliberateness that isn't chivalry — it's placement. He's putting me where he wants me.
He settles me on his lap.
I stiffen.
I know we're visible from the box across the way — I can see the glint of glasses being raised over there, the shift of attention. We're the tableau the room is watching: the Heir and his acquisition, arranged into a composition that communicates everything without saying anything.
"Relax," he says, his mouth at my neck. "You're stiff as a board."
"I'm not a chair, Aleksei."
"No. You're a talisman." He says it without irony. As if this is a real category and I've been assigned to it correctly.
The game begins.
I sit on his lap and watch Aleksei Romanov play poker and I try to understand what I'm watching. He's not playing the cards; that much is immediately clear. He holds his hand with the loose grip of someone who has been holding cards since childhood and no longer finds the cards interesting. What he's watching is the other men. Their breathing patterns. The specific way each of them holds still or doesn't hold still when a good card comes. The hierarchy of their tells, which he's apparently already mapped and is now exploiting with the efficiency of a man who completed his analysis three hands ago.
He doesn't look at his cards often.
