Page 80 of Reckless Heir
He releases my wrists.
He pulls the velvet curtain aside and offers me his arm.
I look at it.
He won't stop,he said.
Neither will I, I think. The choker sits warm against my throat. The real smile is still somewhere on my face. He's standing in a dark corridor with his composure half-assembled and his breathing not yet even, and I understand something I should have understood weeks ago:
He's not losing control.
He's choosing to give it up.
Slowly. In fractions. Like a man who's never done it before and is teaching himself how.
I take his arm.
We walk back out into the light.
The rest of the evening is a performance, and we both know it.
We return to the gala and he works the remaining room with his usual precision, and I circulate in the right orbit, and we have the right conversations with the right people at the right time. From the outside we are exactly what we're supposed to be: the Heir and his Orphan, the specific presentation of power that the Obsidian event requires.
From the inside, it's different.
Every time I look at him across the room I find that he's already looking at me. Not assessing. Not the cold inventory. The other thing — the thing he named in the corridor, the thing that has been in him all along under the architecture.
If I start,he said.
He's already started.
I think he knows it.
In the car home, the Hamptons dark on both sides of the private road, we sit close enough that the wool of his jacket brushes my bare arm, and neither of us mentions the corridor, and I think aboutnot yetand wonder if Friday is actually Friday or if it's a different kind of eventually — the kind that doesn't have a calendar, just a direction.
The choker is still locked at my throat.
He didn't offer to unlock it.
I didn't ask.
Some messages don't need to be argued about. Some messages you carry home.
24
SOFIA
The Regent summons arrives on a Monday.
Not an invitation — I've learned to read the difference. An invitation has space for declination written into its structure: the phrasing, the timing, the delivery mechanism. This is matte black card stock with no return address, delivered to my Tower room while Aleksei is in a meeting, which means whoever sent it knew his schedule and wanted me to receive it without him present.
The Regent Council requests the presence of the Romanov Orphan. Convocation Chamber. Tuesday. 9 AM. Alone.
I hold the card for a while.
It's heavier than it should be, physically — the card stock is thick, embossed, the Obsidian crest pressed into one corner. The crest I've been living under for three months without seeing it this directly. I look at it for a moment: the motif, the motto around the edge.Imperium sine fine.Empire without end. The kind of thing that gets written in Latin when you want it to sound like it predates accountability.
I've been at St. Gabriel long enough to understand what alone means on a summons. It means I'm the point of contact.It means whatever Aleksei knows about the Regent Council's intentions is not going to help me in the room because I won't be able to use it. It means someone has calculated that my value to them is higher when I'm separated from my Heir.
