Page 81 of Reckless Heir
I think about Mara's voice in the library:He doesn't move until he knows the move will land.
I think about the Regent vote. Spring. Aleksei positioning to consolidate.
I go to the study and set it on Aleksei's desk and wait.
He comes in at 7 PM and reads it in approximately four seconds.
His jaw does the thing. The barely-perceptible tightening that I have calibrated, over weeks, as the outward expression of an internal calculation being revised under pressure.
"No," he says.
"They said alone."
"I know what they said." He sets the card down with the precise control of a man who wants to do something else with it. "The Regents don't summon Orphans directly. That's not protocol."
"Whose protocol?"
"House protocol. Mine." He looks at me. "An Orphan appearing before the Regents without their House Heir is a vulnerability. It's designed to be."
"Then what does it mean that they're asking for it?"
He is quiet for a moment. I watch him run the calculation — what the summons is, what it's designed to produce, who benefits from the specific configuration it requires.
"It means someone on the council wants access to you outside my presence." He picks up the card again, examines it. "It means the Regent vote is moving faster than anticipated."
"Dimitri," I say.
He doesn't confirm or deny. He doesn't need to.
"I'll go," I say.
"Sofia—"
"I'll go, and I'll be what I've been training to be, and I'll read the room and I'll tell you everything I observe." I hold his eyes. "You know I can do this."
He looks at me.
The thing about Aleksei's silences is that they have different qualities. This one has the quality of a man adjusting a calculation — not reluctance, not fear, but the specific revision of someone who has just been reminded of a variable they keep underestimating. Three months ago, I was a factor he hadn't fully mapped. I've been mapping myself, methodically, in syndicate law seminars and library corners and a Tower kitchen at midnight, and at some point in the last month he started revising his estimate of what I'm capable of.
"You don't reveal that you understand Russian," he says.
"I know."
"You don't accept anything they offer — in any form, proposal, information, access."
"I know."
"And you observe everything. Posture, seating, who speaks first, who defers to whom."
"I know," I say. "I've been learning your world for three months. Let me use it."
He sets the card on the desk between us.
"I'll be in the building," he says. "Nearby."
"I know that too."
The Convocation Chamber is at the center of the east tower — not a room I've been in before, not part of any official tour of St. Gabriel's architecture. It's accessed through a corridor I've only seen closed, behind a door that requires a specific key card I didn't know existed. A Regent attendant escorts me from the Tower entrance. We don't speak.
