Page 40 of Reckless Heir
"It's just a party," I say. "In the common dorms. Mara invited me."
"Mara Kovac is chaos in a skirt," he says, not turning around. The second button, the collar. "And the answer is no."
"Why?"
"Because it's pedestrian. Because it's unguarded." He reaches for the jacket. "And because I said so."
He turns. His eyes are the flat gray they get when the decision has been finalized and this conversation is now a formality we're completing. "Does that suffice?"
"No," I snap, because I'm tired of this, because it's been six weeks of controlled existence and two Obsidian events and the poker table and the brand and the silence in between, and Mara Kovac invited me to a party where people drink bad vodka and play bad music and nobody assigns anyone to a category before they've said a word. "I'm twenty-one years old. I'm allowed to go to a party."
"Not when you belong to me, you're not." He walks past me, lifting the jacket off the chair. "I have business tonight. Stay in the Tower. If you leave—" He pauses at the biometric panel. One second. "Don't."
The door clicks shut.
The lock engages.
I scream into the pillow, which is undignified and also necessary. Then I hurl it at the wall, where it hits with the satisfying but deeply inadequate impact of soft against stone, and I pace.
Stay in the Tower.
The Tower, where the windows don't open. The Tower, where the door requires his fingerprint and has since the first day. The Tower, where I eat and sleep and attend seminars and have apparently agreed to spend every evening of my twenty-first year within a man's approved radius.
I think of Mara's invitation, delivered at breakfast three days ago with her particular brand of casual inevitability:there's a party Saturday, common room B, after hours. The Ice King will never know.She'd looked at me with the expression she useswhen she already knows the answer and is giving me the space to arrive at it myself.
I look at the window.
Doesn't open.
I look at the service elevator door, partially visible from the bedroom — the one the cleaning staff uses at 6 AM and 9 PM. The one that bypasses the biometric in the main corridor.
I should stay.
I know I should stay. He'll find out. He finds out everything, through channels I haven't mapped yet, and the consequences of disobedience in this world are not theoretical. I have a brand on my hip that established that.
But the anger is a living thing, and the cage is real, and I am twenty-one years old, and I want one hour of not being the receipt.
I grab my coat.
I wedge the service door open with the thickest book on my shelf — Syndicate Diplomatic Protocol: A Practitioner's Guide, which is either a fitting or a deeply ironic choice — and I run.
The party is loud and dense and smells like spilled vodka and the specific desperation of people who've been inside a controlled environment all week and are managing their relief poorly.
It's perfect.
The common room has been transformed through the usual mechanisms of student parties anywhere: furniture pushed to the walls, someone's playlist running through a portable speaker set entirely too loud for the stone acoustics, red cups appearing from somewhere, a keg that is almost certainly not approved by St. Gabriel's catering guidelines. For twenty minutes I stand near the wall and let the noise wash over me and I remember what it feels like to be in a room where nobody is performing hierarchy.
Mara finds me at the keg. "You actually came." She hands me a cup with the efficiency of someone who has been managing events all week and is delighted by a development. "I gave it forty percent."
"Bold of you to give it forty."
"I know how he works." She shrugs. "But I also know how you work. You were going to either sit in that room all night manufacturing reasons this was fine, or you were going to come." She tilts her cup at me. "I'm glad you came."
I drink. The vodka is exactly as bad as promised and I don't care. I dance, briefly, which I haven't done since Bali, and my body remembers how and the remembering is its own kind of grief and its own kind of joy simultaneously. For forty-seven minutes I am just a woman at a party, warm and loud and present in my skin.
Then the music stops.
Not a fade — a guillotine cut, mid-beat, total silence falling on the room like a dropped curtain. In the sudden quiet, two hundred conversations pause simultaneously, which is a specific sound: the catching of breath, the instinctive understanding that something has arrived that requires attention.
