Chapter 5 #2
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 say come in because 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.
"Obsidian society. Regent hierarchy. Heirs and Orphans. Blood oath on entry." I hold his gaze. "The Masquerade is the first semester's primary event. There's a second event in the spring I don't have details on yet."
He watches me.
"The syndicate law seminar is taught by a retired Bratva counsel," I continue. "The asset valuation course uses real cases. The intelligence methodology seminar is where they teach you to think like a practitioner." I pick up my fork. "I've been doing research."
"Since when."
"Since before I arrived. My preparation time was limited by the year, but not by the restriction on what I could find."
Something shifts in his expression. Not approval — something closer to reassessment. I'm familiar with the look: reassessment, an update to an existing model. He thought he knew what was arriving. What arrived is a variable with more parameters than anticipated.
"The gap year was mine to use," I say. "I used it."
He doesn't respond to that. He picks up his wine glass and looks at me with the flat, measuring quality I'll spend the next months learning to read.
"You drafted an addendum to the contract," he says.
"Yes."
"In proper legal format."
"I had time and access to precedent. It seemed practical."
He holds my gaze for a long moment. Then he looks at his food and continues eating, which I've decided to interpret as: the conversation is over and the addendum stands.
I eat. The food is excellent, which I wasn't expecting, and I'm not going to comment on it.
"Curfew is ten," he says, eventually.
"I know."
"The key card in your room accesses the library and the east wing study rooms until eleven on weekdays."
"I know."
"The seminar schedule is on the tablet. You're enrolled in the Orphan track."
"I know." I set down my fork. "I have the tablet. I've read the materials. I know what I'm enrolled in." I hold his gaze. "Thank you for the information."
The corner of his mouth does something. It's not quite a smile. It's the involuntary response of a man who has encountered something he didn't plan for and hasn't yet decided what to do about it.
"Don't be late to seminars," he says.
"Don't be late to dinner," I say.
He was exactly on time.
He looks at me for a moment longer than necessary, and then he picks up his glass, and the rest of the meal passes in a silence that is, somehow, less hostile than it should be.
The first night in the Tower I don't sleep.
I lie in the gray sheets and look at the ceiling.
I run through what I know: the building's layout from the escort, the exits and access points on the map tablet, the biometric panel on the main door that requires his prints.
The locked room is real. The blood oath is real.
The barcode on the collar of the uniform blazer is real.
Also real: Don't be late, and his face when I said it. The involuntary response. The almost-thing.
Also real: the swallow on my ribs, which is mine. Which no one can barcode. Which goes where I go.
I think about the morning. I think about what the first morning of this will look like — what time he rises (early, everything about him suggests early), what the kitchen sounds like before seven AM, what the Tower feels like in daylight.
I'm mapping the negative space of him the way he apparently mapped mine, eighteen months of surveillance and I'm doing it in the first twelve hours.
The thought is almost funny.
Almost.
I close my eyes.
I don't sleep, but the awake is productive.
By the time the New Hampshire dark starts to lighten, I've made a plan.