Page 15 of Reckless Heir
The Tower isn't a dormitory.
I understand this the moment the guide — a silent, broad-shouldered upperclassman who moves like security and absolutely is — stops at the heavy oak door on the top floor and presses his thumb to the biometric panel. There's no number on the door. No nameplate. Just the panel, matte black against the ancient wood, and when the door swings open I understand immediately that this isn't a student's room.
This is a residence.
I step inside.
The door clicks shut behind me. The lock engages with a sound like a full stop at the end of a sentence that just told me something I already suspected.
The suite is enormous. Floor-to-ceiling windows overlook the campus — the spires, the stone gargoyles, the November forest pressing against the perimeter walls in the specific dark of a New Hampshire evening where the cloud cover sits low and the trees have already shed. The furniture is leather and chrome, sharp angles, no softness anywhere. No photographs. No personal objects. No evidence that anyone lives here inthe human sense, the sense that involves accumulation and attachment and the specific debris of an ordinary life.
It smells like him.
I know this before I know how I know it — cedar and iron and something colder underneath, winter air and expensive scotch. I've never been in a room with him before. I shouldn't know his smell. I know it anyway, in the specific irrational way the body absorbs information the mind hasn't caught up with.
"You're late."
The voice comes from the far side of the room, near the fireplace.
He's sitting in a high-backed leather chair in the shadows — not lit by the fire, because there is no fire, which feels like a deliberate choice. He's not looking at me. He's looking at the gun in his hands.
He's disassembling it.
I watch for a moment. The movements are automatic, practiced — the specific fluency of someone who has performed this action so many times it has bypassed thought entirely and become part of the body's vocabulary. He sets the barrel down on the side table with a soft metallicclink. He's wearing the uniform but it doesn't look like a uniform on him. It looks like tactical gear on someone who has decided to tolerate it.
He's younger than I expected.
This is the first surprise. I expected someone older — not ancient, but settled, because the Commission whispers around the Romanov name carry a weight that I'd unconsciously translated into years. He doesn't have years. He's twenty-four, twenty-five at most, barely older than I am — the file said twenty-four and the file was right, but numbers on paper don't prepare you for the version that's standing in the room — which is the detail that reorients everything, because whatever is in this room, it isn't accumulated age. The face is angular, aristocraticin a cold way, the jaw hard and precise. The hair is dark. The eyes, when he finally looks up, are gray.
Not soft gray. Not the gray of fog or slate. The gray of tempered steel — flat, functional, evaluated once for hardness and found adequate.
Those eyes move over me.
I know what an assessment feels like. I've watched my brothers do it my entire life, in negotiations, at functions, in the family rooms where the business happened around me while I was supposed to be invisible. This is an assessment. I am being catalogued. I can feel the data points being registered: height, face, posture, what the posture communicates about my current internal state.
I meet his eyes and don't look away.
"Come here."
It isn't shouted. It barely qualifies as spoken — it's a phrase delivered at low volume with the absolute certainty that volume is unnecessary. The kind of voice that has learned it doesn't need to work hard to produce results, because the results arrive when required.
I don't move.
"I'm not a dog, Romanov," I say. "Don't speak to me like one."
He doesn't blink. He doesn't show irritation. He doesn't show anything. He simply stands.
He is tall. I knew he'd be tall from the photographs but knowing and experiencing are different systems: he fills the space between the chair and where I'm standing with a slow, entirely controlled approach, not fast, not threatening in the explicit sense, justcertain.The way a tide is certain. It doesn't need to rush.
He stops inches from me.
The heat off him is immediate and startling — the room is cold, the fire is unlit, and he radiates warmth at close range with the specific quality of someone whose body temperature runs slightly high, slightly furnace, slightly more alive than the room they're in. I have to tilt my head back to hold his gaze. I do it.
"You're not a dog," he agrees. His voice is deep, a resonance that I feel in my sternum. "Dogs have loyalty. You have a price tag."
"Everyone has a price."
"No." His hand comes up and grazes the barcode on my lapel — doesn't touch my skin, just the fabric, just the tag, but the proximity is so precise it's effectively a touch. "People have prices. Objects have costs."
