The email goes into to my dedicated complaint folder. Then I open a blank reply.
Thank you for your message. I confirm receipt of this notice and am available for preliminary interviews at your convenience. I will provide any additional clarifying materials as requested during the review process.
Before I can second-guess myself, I hit send.
The auto-response comes back immediately:Your message has been received and logged to case file #2024-RMC-447.
I close the laptop softly and exhale. Done. The ball is back in their court now.
My brain throws up a need: movement. Tea. I can at least get more tea.
The covered breezeway between the main hall and the staff wing is cooler than outside, shaded, the air smelling faintly of dust and metal and whatever they mop these floors with. My footsteps echo off the stone. Somewhere, a soda machine hums.
Halfway through, I see him.
Flavius leans against one of the support pillars, arms folded loosely across his chest. Post-shower now—hair damp, gray T-shirt soft against his chest, jeans instead of training gear. Somehow he looks more dangerous like this, not less, with the rawness of the morning still close to the surface.
Light from the open side of the breezeway cuts across his face, catching the ridge of the scar near his temple, the line of his mouth. His gaze finds mine and stays there.
My heart does a little stutter, like my autonomic system didn’t get the memo that we’re supposed to be calm now.
“Hi,” I say, because my social skills are occasionally fourteen years old.
“Hello, Sophia,” he says. Slowly. Like he likes how my name feels in his mouth.
We stop a few feet apart. The space between us feels both very small and very large.
“I was coming to find you,” he says.
My heart knocks once, hard. “Why?”
His attention dips to the phone in my hand, then back to my face. “You got news,” he says. Not a question. “From the complaint people.”
I open my mouth, then close it. “How did you—?”
“You get small in different way when email comes,” he says. He frowns, searching for words. “Not shrinking. Just… bracing. Like you prepare for hit.”
I didn’t realize it showed.
“They confirmed receipt,” I say. “And they’re scheduling interviews.” The word interviews tastes like metal.
He nods once. “Good,” he says. “Means they take it serious.”
“It means I have to sit in front of a committee and defend every detail,” I say. “Explain my own memory while they decide if I’m ‘credible’ enough to believe. They already have all the documentation—now they want to see if I’ll crack under questioning.”
The bitterness surprises me. Or maybe it doesn’t.
He studies me for a long moment. “Fortuna still with you?” he asks quietly.
My breath catches. We talked about it yesterday—my encounter in the garden, the way she told me to stop shrinking, the certainty that settled into my bones. But somehow hearing him reference it so casually, like he believes it as much as I do…
“Yes,” I say. “Still in my bones. Her words keep echoing: ‘Displeasure is not ruin.’”
He nods, as if this makes perfect sense. “Good goddess to have on your side.”
“You really believe she spoke to me,” I say. Not a question.
He lifts one shoulder in a half-shrug. “I told you yesterday—I believe you.” A small smile. “Fortuna speaks to who she wants. You are doing big things. She notices big things.”
