14. hunter
hunter
By midafternoon, I had answered three calls about Friday’s dinner, denied a lower house permission to use one of the Quorum rooms for a private meeting, and sent two names back to Ronan because whoever had given them to him had lied badly enough that I was offended on principle.
None of it required much thought. Aldrich produced the same kinds of problems every week: people borrowing authority they did not have, people testing borders they understood perfectly well, people convincing themselves an old family name would protect them from a new mistake.
Most of it could be handled with a call, a warning, or somebody being reminded exactly whose permission they had forgotten to ask for.
Echo Matthews was becoming considerably less convenient.
Her file had been open beside my laptop since lunch.
I had stopped pretending otherwise after the third time I returned to it between other matters.
Her school history was clean. Her transfer paperwork was cleaner.
Every address existed, every listed employer existed, every reference answered the way they were supposed to, and somehow the whole thing became less convincing the longer I looked at it.
People left residue. Families especially.
Property records, old employers, court filings, tax documents, professional licenses, school registrations, marriages, divorces, debts, business partnerships, someone’s name buried in the minutes of a town council meeting because they had complained about a fence fifteen years earlier.
Echo’s current life had enough of that to look ordinary from a distance.
The farther backward I pushed, the thinner it became.
The four fathers were the worst part.
I had started with Matthews because it was the name attached to Echo and expected to find one branch that eventually explained the rest. Instead, every route split.
One father appeared under a business registration that had started later than his age suggested it should have.
Another had employment records that looked normal until they stopped for several years and resumed somewhere else without anything connecting the gap.
One had enough legitimate documentation to pass any ordinary search while still managing to tell me almost nothing about who he had been before Echo entered his life.
The fourth was worse. Too many names brushed the same records without staying attached long enough to build a history.
Somebody had cleaned this.
I leaned back and rubbed my thumb once along the edge of the trackpad before opening the property search again.
Ronan had sent me two older addresses connected loosely to the Matthews name, both useless.
One led to a rental complex demolished more than a decade ago.
The other belonged to a holding company that had changed hands twice before Echo was old enough to sign anything.
I widened the search instead of following her directly, looking at names that had appeared beside the family rather than inside it.
That was where Primrose surfaced.
It was barely anything. A property reference from years ago, one of those old archived records that had survived because somebody had digitized a municipal index without caring whether the information still mattered.
The Matthews name appeared in a linked document, then disappeared again beneath an identifier that did not match anything in Echo’s current file.
Primrose could have been a street, a district, a company, or somebody’s badly named development project.
The record did not give me enough to decide.
I copied the identifier into a separate note and ran it through the Quorum archive.
Nothing.
I tried the broader family database and got an access error so fast it irritated me.
That was more interesting.
My phone buzzed against the desk before I could chase it.
Ronan had sent the updated Friday seating list with three corrections marked and a note that Desmond’s people had expanded the Voss side again.
I read it once, sent back approval for the two changes that mattered, and told him to leave the third alone until I knew why the name had been added.
A second message came in from security about Colson’s people testing the south lot again.
I forwarded it to the person responsible for nights and told him I was done warning them.
Then I looked back at Primrose.
The access error remained.
I closed the laptop before I wasted another hour forcing a door I did not yet understand and gathered the folder beside it.
Echo had already managed to turn one morning into three separate problems, and I had another one waiting upstairs because apparently I had reached the point in my life where returning a pair of ugly boots counted as strategy.
The top floor of the library stayed quiet even when the rest of the building was full.
Aldrich students liked privacy until privacy required climbing stairs, which kept most of them on the lower levels.
The rooms up there belonged to the kind of people who did not need signs on doors to keep everyone else out.
There were study spaces, two smaller meeting rooms, and a long open section near the windows where we worked when the lounge became crowded or too easy to find.
I heard Malakai before I saw either of them.
His voice carried from the far side of the floor, lower than usual because somebody had already told him to shut up at least once. Echo answered with enough irritation to make it obvious the warning had not worked.
I rounded the last shelf and found her at the long table nearest the windows.
She had chosen the chair with the cleanest view of the stairs again.
Her books were spread around her in a loose semicircle, laptop open, one bare foot tucked under the opposite leg while the other rested on the rung beneath her chair.
The bandages at both heels were still visible.
Malakai had taken the chair beside her and somehow occupied more space than the furniture allowed.
One arm stretched across the back of her seat while he read something on her screen.
His own work sat abandoned several feet away.
He had a pen in one hand that I knew from the expression on Echo’s face did not belong to him.
“You’ve highlighted the same sentence three times,” he said. “At this point, I think the sentence understands you’re angry.”
Echo reached for the pen without looking away from her screen. “Give me my shit back before I start cataloging which of your fingers I can break without affecting your coursework.”
Malakai turned the pen once between his fingers and set it on top of her notebook, close enough that she did not have to reach far. He had learned something, apparently. The fact that he immediately leaned over to read the next paragraph ruined any possibility that the lesson had taken.
I set the folder down at the opposite end of the table.
Echo looked up first. Her gaze landed on me, moved to the floor beside the chair I had chosen, and stopped.
Her boots were there.
The change in her face was immediate enough that Malakai followed her attention and grinned before she had said anything. Echo uncrossed her leg and leaned sideways to make sure she was seeing them correctly, then looked back at me.
“You finally developed judgment.”
“I got tired of watching you walk barefoot through Aldrich.”
“That sounds suspiciously like admitting I won.”
“It sounds like I prefer you wearing shoes.”
She reached down and pulled the boots toward herself, checking them like somebody might have tampered with them on the way upstairs.
I had expected a comment about the heels, maybe another argument about the uniform.
Instead, she started undoing the laces with quick, practiced movements and kicked the Aldrich shoes farther beneath the table without giving them another look.
Malakai watched the entire process with an expression that would have been embarrassing on anyone capable of embarrassment. “You missed those ugly things.”
Echo slid one foot into the first boot and pulled the leather snug around her ankle. “Say one more disrespectful thing about them and I’m using your tongue piercing as a zipper.”
His grin widened. “There she is.”
I opened the folder because watching Malakai watch her was beginning to tell me more than I wanted to know.
He had always attached quickly to things that interested him. People were usually different. Malakai could spend an evening fascinated by someone and forget their name by breakfast if nothing kept his attention. Echo had lasted days, and the interest was getting worse instead of fading.
He knew her class schedule now. I knew that because he had disappeared from the lounge shortly before one of her seminars ended yesterday and returned beside her thirty minutes later.
He knew which assignment she was working on because he had apparently read enough of it to argue with her about one of the sources.
He reached for her things without thinking, stopped when she told him to, and resumed the behavior five minutes later in some slightly altered form that technically respected whatever boundary she had just set.
When Echo shifted her chair to reach the outlet beneath the table, Malakai moved his leg before she asked.
When she started searching beneath one of her books, he handed her the page she wanted without looking away from his phone.
That was new.
Echo finished tying the second boot and planted both feet flat on the floor. The change was stupidly obvious. She sat differently with them on, shoulders settling as if somebody had returned part of her balance. She flexed one ankle, then the other, before looking at me again.
“I’m keeping these.”
“I assumed that was the point.”
“And the heels are going somewhere they can’t hurt anybody ever again.”