“We’re clearing out. The room’s all yours,” I tell him, assuming he’s come to use the conference room after us.
But the guy gives me a cold, flat smile and tugs the hem of hisbeige suit coat. “Ah. I was rather hoping you both could stay a bit longer.”
At the guy’s voice, Thio whips his head up, papers clutched in his hands.
His entire posture changes. What tension had been brewing between us is nothing compared to the crystallizing brutality that takes him now, his jaw hardening, face blanking. He’s shutting down. Shuttingout.
“Myrdin,” Thio says. “What are you doing here?”
The defensiveness in Thio’s tone has my spine popping upright. My eyes go from him to this guy, Myrdin, my gaze narrowing.
Myrdin’s cold smile doesn’t change. “Arasne expects a report.”
Arasne. He works with Thio’s cousin?
My mind fits together a missing piece: Ihaveseen this guy before. He was at the grant award brunch, sitting at Thio’s table. Making sure, I know now, that Thio lived up to their Tourael standards to determine whether his mom gets the care she needs.
I curl my hands into fists around the strap of my messenger bag.
“And I’ll see her at our lunch meeting next week,” Thio says through his clamped jaw. “You didn’t need to show up here to—”
“She heard your first check-in for the grant was today,” Myrdin interrupts, pulling a tablet out of his jacket pocket. He starts tapping on the screen and poises over it, like he’s waiting to take notes. “She has been… less than pleased with your updates and wants a recap of the presentation you just gave. Which shouldn’t be hard, should it?”
Thio deflates, his focus dropping to the table as his knuckles go white on the stack of papers he’s clinging to.
“Fine,” he relents laconically, an inevitable exhaustion sweeping over him.
I can’t immediately tell why I hate seeing him like this. But it is that,hatred,and a sharp, ravaging “No” cuts up out of me, drawing both Thio and Myrdin’s attention.
“We have, uh—” I fumble, eyeing Thio. “That thing. We have to do. You don’t have time for this now.”
There is nothing. It’s the end of the day.
Thio briefly gives me a look of gratitude, but it’s resigned.
Myrdin’s head tips. I swear his nostril curls, but he resets and smiles that flat smile. “This won’t take long. Provided you are both forthcoming in the details of this project.”
Confusion has me shaking my head. “Both?”
“What?” Thio frowns at Myrdin.
Myrdin sighs impatiently and lowers his tablet. “Yes.Both. The family is concerned that this partnership will not bear the fruit we expect, and as such, Arasne has requested that you both begin reporting your progress. Until such a time as we can be assured of your success.”
My body goes numb. Inside and out.
The Touraels want me to start reporting to them, too.
I stand there, gawking at Myrdin, some part of my brain screaming at me to react, but I can’t.
Until Thio slams the papers onto the conference table.
I jump at the impact, my heart restarting in a painful hammer against my ribs.
“Myrdin,” Thio barks. “Leave.”
Myrdin startles, too.
“You had no right coming here,” Thio tells him, redness rising across his face, shoulders arching like he’s one wrong move away from leaping over the table and tackling his cousin’s go-between. “I will see Arasne at our regular meeting next week, where I and I alone will tell her what she needs to hear to satisfy the terms of our arrangement. This? You showing up on campus? You barging in, demanding Sebastian report to her, too? Thisdoes not happen.”
