The word lands precisely where he intended it.
I don't let it show.
"What arethe terms for contact with my family?" Not permission. Information. There's a difference.
He looks at me.
"Application through the portal.House Heir approval required."
A portal.A system. Systems are legible — you can learn them, find where they bend.
"Thank you,"I say. Not gratitude.
He goes backto the gun.
From the locked door,I look at him. The principle I've been building since September:make him work for it.Make whatever you are inside this arrangement something he has to reckon with rather than manage. Don't make it easy to forget you're a person.
I am in a locked room in a locked tower on a campus I arrived at today. I have no phone. I have no money. I have a uniform with my status printed on the tag and the words of an oath I said this morning in a voice that barely shook still sitting in my chest where I put them.
I have this: the knowledge that I am still me. Still thinking. Still watching. Still building the file on him the way he presumably built one on me.
My chin doesn't drop.
"When's dinner?" I say.
Something moves across his face. So fast it might have been invented. But I don't think it was.
"Seven," he says.
"Don't be late," I say.
I turn from the door, find the bedroom, close it behind me. Gray sheets. I look at the ceiling. I breathe.
Don't be late.I said his words back to him.
It was a very small thing.
It's all I have right now, so I'll take it.
The swallow tattoo sits under my ribs, below the gray wool of the uniform blazer.
For freedom,I thought when I got it, in a tattoo parlor in Bali, in the gap year I thought was mine.
I keep it now for the same reason, even here.
Especially here.
Dinner is at seven.
He knocks at exactly seven. Not a staff member, not an announcement through the door — he knocks, which I did not expect, and I saycome inbecause the room is apparently mine enough to invite someone into it.
The kitchen table has been set. Not formally — nothing in this apartment operates on formal — but two places, water and wine, food that came from somewhere in the building I haven't mapped yet. He pulls out the chair across from his and I sit in it and we regard each other over a table for the first time.
He eats efficiently. No conversation, initially. This, I understand from the three weeks of intelligence I've gathered about him via reputation and Commission whispers, is typical: Aleksei Romanov uses meals as functional rather than social occasions. He eats, he processes, he is done. He does not linger over tables the way southern Italian families linger, or the way my mother's side used to — the version of family I have only in stories my father told before he stopped telling stories.
"What do you know about St. Gabriel," he says.
A question. Not a test — or not entirely a test. More like a calibration.
