Grace is the one who actually has it.
"Are you ready?" she asks. Direct, no cushioning. This is why I love her.
"No." I look at the water. "But it doesn't matter if I'm ready. Time's up."
Emilia reaches across and takes my hand. Her fingers are cool from the glass she's been holding. She doesn't say anything immediately, and I appreciate that — Emilia's version of comfort is presence rather than language, which is the version I can accept right now.
"He might not be what you expect," she says finally.
"Dante chose you," I say. "That's different."
"Dante didn't choose me at first either." She meets my eyes. "He made a decision about me. There's a distinction. The choosing came later."
This is more honest than I expected from her and I file it somewhere I'll look at later, when I'm in the room with him and trying to understand what I'm working with.
Grace leans forward. I recognize the register — she's shifting from support to strategy, which is the register I actually need.
"St. Gabriel isn't what you think it is," she says. "It's not a school in the conventional sense. It's a proving ground. The children there have been raised to see every person as a variable in their equation. If you walk in looking like a variable someone else controls?—"
"Then I'm a variable someone else controls," I finish. "I know."
"Information is currency," Arielle says. She's looking at the water, but she's not watching it. "Whatever else is true about the arrangement, you arrive knowing things. The Bratva power structure. The Obsidian hierarchy. The family relationships and pressure points." She glances at me. "You've been studying."
"For a year." I've been learning Russian — not fluently, not yet, but I understand more than I can speak and that differential is useful. I have maps of the Romanov network, the Regent families, the Obsidian alliances. I have a file on Aleksei specifically: racing record, known associates, the shape of his public reputation and what I can't find about the private one. "I know the architecture."
"Then walk into the architecture knowing you can read it," Grace says. "Don't let him see that you can, necessarily. But know."
She says this with the specific authority of someone who learned it herself, the hard way, in a room she also didn't choose. Grace Callahan, who married Rafe Conti three years ago andarrived at the family's edge knowing nothing and now knows everything — who did it by watching, mapping, making herself indispensable in ways that weren't the ways anyone expected. She taught herself the business not to run it but to understand it, which is its own kind of protection.
"The Orphan structure specifically," Grace continues. "You'll be expected to be decorative. Expected to stand still and be presented at functions and look appropriately owned. If you perform that part well enough?—"
"They underestimate me," I say. "I know. I grew up being underestimated."
"The difference is they'll do it with more certainty than anyone you've dealt with before." She holds my eyes. "These people built systems for deciding what each person is worth and then treating them exactly that way. You have to give them no information that updates the assessment."
Arielle sits forward. She's quieter than Grace — her father is a Prime Minister, which means she grew up in rooms that ran on restraint — but when she speaks the quality of attention she brings is absolute.
"What I know of Aleksei Romanov specifically," she says, "is that he's not a showman. The other heirs — Drakos, Sokolov — they perform their power. Romanov doesn't." A pause. "My father's people have crossed paths with the family on regulatory matters, in the way that powerful organizations occasionally collide with governments. The consistent note about the son is: he is difficult to read. He gives almost nothing. The people who underestimate him for that reason consistently lose."
"So don't underestimate him," I say.
"And don't assume that not being readable means not feeling anything." She looks at the water again. "Some people are very still precisely because the feeling is very large. The stillness is the management, not the absence."
This lands somewhere I don't have a category for yet.
"Don't show your hand until you know what game you're playing," Arielle adds. "But watch for his tells. Everyone has them. The stillest people often have the most legible ones if you know what you're looking for."
"And don't lose yourself in it," Emilia says, quietly. "Whatever he asks you to be — remember what you actually are."
I think about a swallow tattoo in an Ubud parlour in the rain.
For freedom.
"I won't," I say.
Later, when the sun is going down, I walk the cliff path to the private beach alone.
My security detail stays at the top — two men who have followed me across eleven countries and have learned, in that time, to read the difference between alone-and-safe and alone-and-afraid. I'm the former. They give me the beach.
