Page 8 of Reckless Heir
It takes eleven minutes. I know because the clock on the writing desk marks them. The contract is thorough — they always are in this world, where the verbal agreement is the intention and the document is the architecture. My name appears forty-three times. Each appearance is in a clausethat defines what I am in this transaction: asset, collateral, acquisition, ward, companion,consort.The words cycle through their euphemisms but the meaning underneath them doesn't change.
I am a debt being paid.
By page four my hands are shaking. I control them. I read to the end.
"There's an addendum clause," I say.
"Sofia—"
"The gap year provision. It's in here." I look up. "You already agreed to a gap year."
"They agreed to it. Aleksei's condition was that you could have a year first." Something passes through his face. "He asked for it, apparently."
This lands strangely and I don't have the capacity to examine it right now. I note it and continue.
"I want to add something," I say. "To the addendum."
Dante's jaw tightens. "The contract is?—"
"Bring me a pen." I hold his eyes. "You owe me this."
He looks at me for a long moment. Then he reaches into his jacket for the pen he always carries — the one our father gave him, the one he uses for everything that matters. He sets it on the writing desk.
I take it. I draft the additional clause myself, in the careful legal language I absorbed from years of listening to my father's lawyers review documents at the kitchen table while I did homework nearby: that I retain the right to pursue academic study uninterrupted. That I retain verbal rights in any House Romanov function. That my person is subject to no physical harm outside the specific terms of the Orphan protocol.
Small things. Small, specific, negotiated things. Fragments of personhood carved out of a document that otherwise swallows me whole.
Dante reads what I've written. His expression does something I can't fully read — surprise, maybe, or a version of pride that sits uncomfortably given everything else.
"They'll accept this," he says.
"I know they will. It costs them nothing and it's specific enough to enforce." I take the pen back. "Now leave me the copy."
I sign.
The pen scratches across the paper. My name in my handwriting, the same signature I've used since I was fourteen on school forms and birthday cards and the occasional cheque from my allowance. The same letters, in the same hand, meaning an entirely different thing now.
I hand the pen back.
Dante tucks the document away with the particular efficiency of a man completing a transaction. He stands. His hand on the door.
"I'm sorry," he says. Very quietly. Like the words are something he's borrowed and has to return quickly before anyone sees.
"Don't." I look at the window rather than at him. "You're not sorry enough to have done it differently. So the apology is for you, not for me."
He leaves.
The door closes.
I stand at the window for a long time after he goes.
The moon has moved. The rose beds are silver and still. The fountain runs quietly, doing its patient work, the sound of water in the dark carrying all the way up to this window the way it has my entire life.
I am twenty years old.
I have not yet been to Tokyo, which is on the list I've been keeping since I was fourteen — the places I intend to go when Ifinally get out from under the careful dome of Conti protection. I haven't learned to dive. I haven't spent three weeks reading nothing but novels. I haven't done a dozen small, ordinary, freedom-shaped things I've been storing up like a currency I intended to spend.
I have one year.
