Page 65 of Reckless Heir
She closes the case file.
"Okay," she says.
"I didn't say anything."
"You sat down with the specific posture of someone who has been carrying a thing for three days and has finally decided to put it down somewhere." She sets the pen aside. "What happened?"
I look at the lamp. The old books. The window that shows the campus dark and the November trees stripped bare. "Something happened," I say. "And then he acted like it didn't. And now we're in the same building doing the same routines and not looking at each other's faces."
Mara is quiet for a moment.
"The kitchen," she says.
I look at her.
"I don't know the specifics," she says, without any particular emphasis. "I know that you came back from Miami different and then something happened in the Tower and now you look like someone who got what they wanted and is furious about it."
"That's very specific for not knowing the specifics."
"I've been watching the two of you since October." She picks up her pen and sets it down again. "Aleksei Romanov has never in four years of attending Obsidian events given any indication that he experiences inconvenient feelings. He is — very controlled. Famously controlled. The kind of controlled that the older Regents find reassuring and the other Heirs find faintly alarming." A small pause. "And then you arrived, and hestarted showing up to seminars he has no business attending and finding reasons to be in the dining hall at noon." She gives me a look. "I know the shape of it. I don't need the details."
I sit with this for a moment.
"The seminars," I say.
"Syndicate law, three Tuesdays running. Your seminar, not his." She raises an eyebrow. "He sat in the back and didn't participate and left before it ended. The professor didn't say anything because you don't say anything to Aleksei Romanov about his seating choices."
I think about Tuesday seminars. I think about the back of the room, where I never turn.
"I didn't know," I say.
"I know you didn't." Her voice is not unkind. "Which is how I know the shape of it."
"What do I do with the shape of it," I say.
"That depends on what you want."
"I don't know what I want."
"I think you do," Mara says, not unkindly. "I think you know exactly what you want and it's inconvenient and it doesn't fit into any story you can tell about yourself that still makes sense. So you're calling it not-knowing."
The lamp flickers. Radiator heat ticks in the corner.
She's right. I know she's right because the word she used —inconvenient— landed exactly, the way specific words do when they name something you've been circling for days without the right vocabulary.
I want it. I've been wanting it for weeks with the specific clarity of someone who knows exactly what they want and has seventeen good reasons not to say so. The contract is one reason. The power differential is another. The fact that three days ago he touched my face and saidstay furiousand then kissed me in a kitchen and then told me about the Hamptons in a voice thatmight as well have been reading from a calendar — that's a third reason, a very specific one, the kind that makes you question whether wanting something means it's available.
But thenot-knowingis a cover.
I've been wearing it like a coat.
"What's your situation?" I ask. "With House Drakos."
The question lands. I watch her decide whether to answer it.
She's always careful when Dimitri's name gets near her. Not afraid — Mara doesn't read as afraid of anything, which I've come to understand is itself a kind of armor — but precise. The specific precision of someone who has been navigating a situation for a long time and has gotten very good at knowing which parts of it are safe to show.
"Complicated," she says finally.
