Page 9 of Reckless Heir
After that I belong — legally, contractually, with my signature on the proof of it — to a man I've never met. A man named Aleksei Romanov, who is twenty-four and races cars and has killed people and who asked, apparently, for the gap year. Who asked that I have a year first.
I don't know what to do with that.
The gap year clause is the anomaly in the document. Every other term reads exactly as I expected — the language of ownership, acquisition, the careful legal vocabulary of things this world does to people it has decided are property. But buried on page seven, in a subclause attached to the enrollment timeline, is the phrasethe Orphan party shall be permitted a period of not less than twelve months from the date of contract execution for personal travel, study, and preparation before commencing her obligations.
The rest of the contract reads like something built from a template. This clause reads like something added later.
He asked for it. Dante said so. He asked that I have a year first.
I carry this to the writing desk and sit. Second drawer: my mother's stationery, pale blue sheets still in the order she arranged them. I take out a sheet. I take out the pen Dante left because he forgot it in the shock of the conversation or maybe left it on purpose.
I write:What I intend to do with one year.
I write slowly. I've been composing this list in my head since I was fourteen, updating it as my understanding of the worldchanged — first in the optimistic language of a girl who believed the cage door would open eventually, and then in the more tactical language of a girl who understood it wouldn't, so she'd have to decide what the cage was made of and whether she could move it.
Florence. Tokyo. Bali. The Greek coast. The Atlantic road in Ireland if Rafe will take me — Rafe, who married Grace and found something that looked, from the outside, like landing.
And: Russian. I should learn Russian.
I write it down.Russian.I underline it twice.
He's from Moscow. The organization runs in Russian. St. Gabriel, with its international intake, will have Russian speakers throughout the Obsidian structure — the intelligence methodology, the negotiation seminars, the rooms where real decisions are made. The gap year provision gives me twelve months in which I can learn a language and arrive already able to understand what's being said around me while everyone believes I can't.
Understanding what's being said around you: this is its own kind of protection.
I think about the man in the contract. Aleksei Romanov, twenty-four, Russian, racer, heir to a structure built over generations. I've looked him up — carefully, through channels that don't connect back to the family, in the hours since Dante told me about Emilia and I understood something was coming. What I found is a man who performs in public with the specific control of someone who never performs anything unintentionally. No excess. Nothing that doesn't serve a purpose. Photographs at events where you can see him calculating the frame. Race interviews where he gives answers that are technically complete and completely sealed.
A man who controls what he shows.
I write:Figure out what he doesn't show.
This is going to be the work. Not surviving the arrangement — surviving I can do, I've been preparing for exactly this in a domestic key my entire life, the girl in the corner of the room who is supposed to be decorative and is actually cataloguing everything. The work is the other thing: becoming whatever I need to be inside that arrangement that makes the arrangement less total. Making it so that when he looks at me, he's looking at a person, not a variable.
I don't know yet what the rule is, but I know the shape of it — something about cost, about making yourself too much trouble to break carelessly. The vocabulary isn't assembled yet. The principle is.
I write it down anyway.
The moon is fully off the roses when I finish the list. The fountain is still running. The estate is the estate — the stone, the hedgerows, the hundred-year weight of a family that built itself into the landscape and called it permanence. I am twenty years old and in twelve months I will sign myself into a different architecture entirely.
But tonight I have this window and this pen and these blue sheets and a list withRussianunderlined twice.
I fold the list. I put it in my own drawer, not my mother's.
In the morning I'll start planning.
Tonight I'll just let it be what it is.
I press my forehead against the cold glass and look at the garden until the moon moves off the roses and the dark comes back. Then I go to bed.
I don't sleep.
But I lie there with the light gone and my eyes open and I think:one year.
One year to burn something into my skin that nobody can take.
Even me.
3
