Page 33 of Reckless Heir
I'm yours,she said.
With cost in every syllable.
What I did in the antechamber — the fire, the care I used, the specific minute-and-a-half before I pressed the brand — that was not in the contract. The contract specifies the ritual. It does not specify care. I was careful because she was choosing to stay still and I was aware of that choice and I was?—
I set the photograph down.
I look at the word I wrote in the margin of this file eight months ago.
Mine.
I thought I meant a legal thing. An acquisition. A contract term.
I'm starting to understand that I may have meant something else.
Not yet, I think. We're not ready for what that means. There are things that need to happen first — the Regent vote, the semester, the slow work of building something on a foundation that started crooked and needs time to settle. There are conversations I'm not ready to have because I don't yet have the words for them.
But I keep the photograph in the drawer.
And I understand thatkeptis not a word that belongs in the neutral vocabulary I've been using.
It belongs in a different language.
One I'm going to have to learn.
10
SOFIA
The mark on my hip throbs. It's not a wound—not technically. It's barely even a blister anymore. But I feel it with every step, a phantom weight dragging my left side down.
Property.
The memory of the chapel is a fever dream of candlelight and humiliation. And pleasure. That's the part that sticks in my throat like a shard of glass. I shattered for him. In front of them. And he didn't even kiss me.
St. Gabriel's academic curriculum is — I'll give it this — not what I expected.
The courses are real. Taxing, even. Orphans take a prescribed track in their first semester: syndicate law and precedent, asset valuation and liquidation theory, diplomatic protocol for inter-House dealings, and a seminar on criminal intelligence methodology that uses real case studies with the names redacted but not the methods. The professors are not professors in any conventional sense — they're practitioners, people who have navigated the actual systems being discussed, and they teach theway people teach things they have survived rather than merely studied.
The syndicate law professor is a retired Bratva counsel with a scarred palm and a voice like gravel in a creek bed. He knows which questions are too specific and which students come from families that would recognize the cases even with the names removed. He teaches us to think about law not as what is permitted but as what can be demonstrated — a subtle distinction that becomes important, he says, in jurisdictions where demonstration is all that stands between you and consequence.
The asset valuation course deals with a kind of mathematics I recognize from Dante's ledgers: not the simple math of what things cost but the more complex calculation of what things are worth in relation to leverage, timing, and who else wants them. I'm good at this. I was good at it before I could name it.
The intelligence methodology seminar is taught by a woman I've never heard speak above a murmur, who assigns case studies that read like history and probably are — events that made newspapers somewhere, with the identifying detail stripped out and the decision structure left bare for dissection. How did this group know what they knew? What information would have changed the outcome? What's the gap between what was known and what was acted on?
I'm good at all of it, which I hate, because being good at it means that whatever these people built me to be — the Conti girl, the receipt, the Orphan — includes competencies I didn't choose. I absorbed this world by proximity when I was young. The Bratva world runs on the same operating system as the Conti world; the vocabulary is different but the grammar is identical. I know how this works. I always knew how this works.
The Heirs notice. They always notice.
They sit at the back of the seminar rooms, three of the six Heirs who share the class rotation with us, and they watch the Orphans with the specific attention of people who are measuring. I've started tracking what they measure — when they write notes, when they look up. One of them, a Heir from a Baltic family whose name I haven't been given, wrote something in his notebook the second time I answered a question that wasn't directed at me.
I told myself to stop answering questions that aren't directed at me.
I've told myself this four times.
I keep answering them.
The other Orphans notice differently — a few of them look at me with the quiet calculation of people assessing whether association is useful or dangerous. Most look away. Being claimed by Romanov makes me a satellite object: proximity to me means proximity to him, and that cuts both ways.
