Page 66 of Reckless Heir
"You're Dimitri's Orphan."
"I was assigned to House Drakos at enrollment. Yes." Her voice is very even. "It's different from your situation."
"How?"
She looks at the closed case file. "Aleksei acquired you specifically. Built a file, arranged the mechanism, named his price. It was deliberate. Intentional." She pauses. "Dimitri inherited me. His father made the arrangement when I was seventeen. I'd been a minor Orphan at a different institution — a feeder school for St. Gabriel, smaller, less formal. Drakos senior saw an application and made a decision and I didn't know about it until six months later." Her voice remains flat, even. She's told this story to herself many times. "Dimitri and I have been navigating what that means for two years."
"Are you?—"
"No." The word is clear. Final. "He's not— it's not like that. Dimitri doesn't want a person. He wants a position." She meets my eyes. "He wants something he can deploy. An Orphan who's useful in a specific way — smart enough to be credible,positioned well enough to be visible, contained enough to be reliable. He's been shaping me toward that for two years and I've been letting him think he's succeeding."
"And?"
"And." She almost smiles. Not warm — wry, the smile of someone who finds their own situation darkly interesting. "I'm smarter than he needs me to be and I know it and he's starting to suspect it. Which means I have approximately one more year of useful deniability before he recalibrates." She looks at the lamp. "Which means I need a plan before that happens."
I look at her. "That sounds exhausting."
"All of this is exhausting." She almost smiles again, more warmly this time. "Some of it is also interesting. I've decided to focus on the interesting."
"How long have you been deciding that?"
"Since the day I arrived." She opens the case file again, a small gesture of returning to something normal. "Sofia. Can I say something about Dimitri?"
"Yes."
She looks at me steadily. She's choosing her words carefully in a way she doesn't always — this is the specific version of Mara that comes out when she's about to hand over something that costs her.
"He's been interested in you since October. Not personally — I want to be clear about that, I don't think he's capable of personal interest in the way most people understand it. He's interested in what you represent to Aleksei." She pauses. "And he's patient. He doesn't move until he knows the move will land."
"Niko told me about the Regent vote."
"Then you know the shape of it. The question is what he's planning to use." She taps the file. "He'll find something real. He doesn't fabricate — fabrication is detectable and Dimitri hatesdetectable. He'll find something true and weaponize it." Her eyes hold mine. "Whatever the true thing is between you and Aleksei — whatever happened in the kitchen — he'll find it eventually. And he'll try to use it."
"How?"
"I don't know yet." An honest answer, which from Mara means she genuinely doesn't. "But I know his method. He looks for the thing that someone wants kept private. Then he finds a way to make it public, or make it appear public, in a context where it costs the most." She pauses. "The Regent vote is in the spring. He'll want his move to land before then."
The library hums around us. The radiator ticks. Somewhere in the stacks, the old building breathes — settling, the specific sound of stone and wood and whatever is between them. A building this old has heard things.
"What does he want?" I ask. "Really. Underneath the Regent vote and the positioning."
Mara is quiet for a moment. Long enough that I think she's decided not to answer.
"To win," she says. "Against Aleksei specifically. Romanov and Drakos have been in opposition for three generations. For Dimitri it's not political — or it is, but it's also personal in the way that things become personal when you grow up being told there's one person in the world you need to be better than." She sets the pen down for the last time. "He's been second to Aleksei his entire life. Grades, racing, Regent standing, everything. He's very tired of it." A pause. "And I think he's afraid of him."
"Of Aleksei?"
"Of what Aleksei is becoming." She looks at me. "Two years ago, Aleksei was a known quantity. Controlled, brilliant, predictable in his unpredictability. Dimitri knew how to position against that. Now there's a variable." She holds my gaze. "You're the variable. And Dimitri doesn't know what you mean."
"About Dimitri: know that he's moving and don't let him get you alone." She holds up a finger. "Which you have been doing with reasonable success except for that corridor in October?—"
"You knew about that?"
"I know everything that happens in the east wing between ten and eleven." She moves on smoothly. "About Aleksei." She pauses.
The pause is different from her other pauses. This one has the quality of someone arriving at a thing they've thought about and are choosing whether to say.
"The question isn't what to do about him," she says. "The question is whether you trust that what's happening is real, or whether you're protecting yourself from the possibility that it is." She meets my eyes. "Because those are two completely different problems and they have completely different solutions."
