Page 71 of Reckless Heir
I have been the leverage in several negotiations this semester without being consulted about it once.
The original version was simple. I was sold. He was cold. The terms were clear. I knew what was happening to me and I could be angry about it in a clean, uncomplicated way.
Now the terms are blurred and I can't find the edges and I poured those three days in Miami into a glass and drank them and I cannot unknow what I know, which is that he almost said something in the kitchen. That he stopped himself. That the stopping cost him.
Across the table, one of the Heirs — a Sokolov, second year, who has been taking notes with the focused efficiency ofsomeone with a genuine future in syndicate law — glances at me. Not the usual assessment. Something more like recognition.You're actually here,the look says.You're actually paying attention.
I look back at my notes.
"You're doing the stare," Mara says, from the seat beside me.
I blink. The wordleverageswims back into focus. "I'm taking notes."
"You've written 'leverage' six times." She tilts her notebook so I can see hers — a full page, dense and legible. "You okay?"
"Fine."
She looks at me with the particular expression she's developed for when I'm clearly not fine. She doesn't push, which is why I like her. She just makes a small sound and goes back to her notes.
I writeleveragea seventh time.
The seminar ends. Mara peels off toward the library and I take the long corridor back to the Tower alone — the one that runs along the east wing, under the stone arches where the gargoyles look most like they're listening. St. Gabriel is always listening. I've stopped being unsettled by it.
What I'm not expecting is Dimitri Drakos.
He's leaning against the arch at the corridor's midpoint with his arms crossed, like a man who has been waiting a specific amount of time for a specific person. The Drakos Heir. Niko's younger brother, except that nothing about him reads as younger — he has the still, deliberate quality of someone who has never had to rush for anything and knows it.
"Sofia Conti," he says. Not a greeting. A test.
I don't slow my pace. "Drakos."
"You didn't used to walk like that," he says, falling into step beside me without being invited. "At the start. You walked likesomeone expecting an ambush. Now you walk like someone who's decided to be the ambush."
"Thank you for the commentary."
"It's an observation." He's easy, unhurried — nothing like Aleksei's contained precision, but something adjacent to it in confidence. "How are you finding it? The arrangement."
"Fine."
"That's not what I hear."
I keep walking. "I wasn't aware I was being surveilled."
"Everyone is being surveilled at St. Gabriel. You know that." He matches my pace without effort. "What I hear, specifically, is that the arrangement is evolving. That the terms have shifted." He pauses. "That Aleksei is not handling the shift particularly well."
I stop.
He stops too, which is somehow worse than if he'd kept walking.
"What do you want, Dimitri?"
He looks at me with dark eyes that are not as warm as they present. "I want you to have complete information. About the arrangement. About how it was set up and who made what decisions." A pause. "About whether the things Aleksei tells you — or doesn't tell you — are the whole picture."
"And you're offering that out of altruism."
"Out of interest," he says. "Different thing." He studies my face. "You're smart, Sofia. You're a Conti — you grew up in a house full of men who moved pieces on boards and called it family. You know how to read the architecture of a situation." He tilts his head slightly. "So read it. What do you actually know about how you ended up here?"
The corridor is very still around us. The gargoyles look down.
