Page 83 of Reckless Heir
"We want to know," the center man says, "whose asset."
This lands precisely where it was aimed.
Dimitri. This is the shape of it — not a Regent summons for the Regents' benefit but a Regent summons that someone arranged to give them access to me without Aleksei present. Toplant a question.Whose asset?Because the answer, if it isn't Aleksei's, becomes leverage in the spring vote.
I look at the five faces.
I think about what Aleksei said:the Regents built the system. Everyone in it works for them, ultimately.I think about Mara:Dimitri doesn't move until he knows the move will land.I think about Niko in Singapore:he'll find something true.
The true thing is that I'm not entirely Aleksei's. Not in the way the contract defines it. Not anymore. The true thing is complicated and private and sits in a Tower kitchen and three words said to a brake caliper and a parchment that will eventually burn.
I don't give them the true thing.
"I'm a Conti," I say. "House Romanov holds the debt. I fulfill the contract." I look at the center man, the one who matters. "I'm not a strategic piece. I'm a student completing an arrangement." I pause. "That's what the contract says. I'd refer you to it."
The center man looks at me for a long moment.
I hold his gaze without effort. I've been in this room for eleven minutes. I have been cataloguing everything: the posture of each Regent (the woman on the far left crossed her ankles at minute three; the man on the far right hasn't moved once), who has spoken, who defers when the center man does, the quality of the silence after each of my answers.
He looks at me the way someone looks when they've come in expecting one thing and found something else.
Something in his expression shifts. Not warmth — respect is a cooler thing than warmth, more durable. He looks at me with the specific regard of someone who expected a variable and found a person.
"You're dismissed," he says.
I stand.
I walk back out the way I came.
The door closes behind me.
Aleksei is in the corridor.
Not in the chamber, not through the walls — just at the far end of the corridor, hands in his pockets, the particular quality of stillness that means he has been here long enough to become part of the stonework.
I walk toward him.
"Well?" he says.
"Dimitri arranged it," I say. "They were looking for a crack. I didn't give them one."
He looks at me.
"The center Regent," I say. "Describe him."
"Sixty-seven. Former Commission arbiter. Neutral in the Romanov-Drakos split until eighteen months ago, when he shifted." He watches me. "Why?"
"He looked at me differently at the end. Like he was revising an assessment." I meet his eyes. "I think the question they came in with and the question they left with were different."
Aleksei is quiet for a long moment.
Then: "What did you say to him?"
"I told him I was a student fulfilling a contract and referred him to the documentation." I pause. "In the exact language your lawyers used in the original filing."
Something extraordinary happens on his face.
It lasts approximately two seconds.
