Chapter 24
SOFIA
The Regent summons arrives on a Monday.
Not an invitation — I've learned to read the difference.
An invitation has space for declination written into its structure: the phrasing, the timing, the delivery mechanism.
This is matte black card stock with no return address, delivered to my Tower room while Aleksei is in a meeting, which means whoever sent it knew his schedule and wanted me to receive it without him present.
I hold the card for a while.
It's heavier than it should be, physically — the card stock is thick, embossed, the Obsidian crest pressed into one corner.
The crest I've been living under for three months without seeing it this directly.
I look at it for a moment: the motif, the motto around the edge.
Imperium sine fine. Empire without end. The kind of thing that gets written in Latin when you want it to sound like it predates accountability.
I've been at St. Gabriel long enough to understand what alone means on a summons.
It means I'm the point of contact. It means whatever Aleksei knows about the Regent Council's intentions is not going to help me in the room because I won't be able to use it.
It means someone has calculated that my value to them is higher when I'm separated from my Heir.
I think about Mara's voice in the library: He doesn't move until he knows the move will land.
I think about the Regent vote. Spring. Aleksei positioning to consolidate.
I go to the study and set it on Aleksei's desk and wait.
He comes in at 7 PM and reads it in approximately four seconds.
His jaw does the thing. The barely-perceptible tightening that I have calibrated, over weeks, as the outward expression of an internal calculation being revised under pressure.
"No," he says.
"They said alone."
"I know what they said." He sets the card down with the precise control of a man who wants to do something else with it. "The Regents don't summon Orphans directly. That's not protocol."
"Whose protocol?"
"House protocol. Mine." He looks at me. "An Orphan appearing before the Regents without their House Heir is a vulnerability. It's designed to be."
"Then what does it mean that they're asking for it?"
He is quiet for a moment. I watch him run the calculation — what the summons is, what it's designed to produce, who benefits from the specific configuration it requires.
"It means someone on the council wants access to you outside my presence." He picks up the card again, examines it. "It means the Regent vote is moving faster than anticipated."
"Dimitri," I say.
He doesn't confirm or deny. He doesn't need to.
"I'll go," I say.
"Sofia—"
"I'll go, and I'll be what I've been training to be, and I'll read the room and I'll tell you everything I observe." I hold his eyes. "You know I can do this."
He looks at me.
The thing about Aleksei's silences is that they have different qualities.
This one has the quality of a man adjusting a calculation — not reluctance, not fear, but the specific revision of someone who has just been reminded of a variable they keep underestimating.
Three months ago, I was a factor he hadn't fully mapped.
I've been mapping myself, methodically, in syndicate law seminars and library corners and a Tower kitchen at midnight, and at some point in the last month he started revising his estimate of what I'm capable of.
"You don't reveal that you understand Russian," he says.
"I know."
"You don't accept anything they offer — in any form, proposal, information, access."
"I know."
"And you observe everything. Posture, seating, who speaks first, who defers to whom."
"I know," I say. "I've been learning your world for three months. Let me use it."
He sets the card on the desk between us.
"I'll be in the building," he says. "Nearby."
"I know that too."
The Convocation Chamber is at the center of the east tower — not a room I've been in before, not part of any official tour of St. Gabriel's architecture.
It's accessed through a corridor I've only seen closed, behind a door that requires a specific key card I didn't know existed.
A Regent attendant escorts me from the Tower entrance. We don't speak.
I use the walk to prepare.
The first thing I know is what they want: information about what I am, what I represent to Aleksei, whether I'm a controlled variable or a wild one.
The second thing I know is what Dimitri wants, which is different: he wants me uncertain or afraid, because an uncertain Orphan is a useful tool in a Regent meeting, and a useful tool in a Regent meeting is leverage in a Regent vote.
The third thing I know is what I'm going to give them, which is nothing useful.
The corridor is stone, cold, lit by sconces that might be original to the building. Centuries of something heavy in the walls — decisions made, debts extracted, the specific weight of an institution that has been running long enough to believe it's permanent.
I walk steadily. I don't hurry. Hurrying tells them something.
The chamber is circular. Stone walls, high ceiling, five seats arranged in a shallow arc facing a single chair in the center.
The five Regent seats are occupied. I recognize none of the faces — they're not wearing masks here, which is its own information: the Masquerade masks are for external ceremony.
In this room, they don't need the theater.
They're older than I expected. Three men, two women, ranging from perhaps fifty to perhaps seventy. The kind of faces that have watched things happen for a long time and have learned to read the meaning rather than the surface. Five sets of eyes settle on me when I enter.
I walk to the center chair.
I sit.
I don't cross my ankles. I don't fold my hands.
I sit the way Grace told me to sit in rooms like this — as if the chair belongs to you and you chose to use it.
Grace said this about boardroom dynamics, not Regent chambers, but the principle is the same: posture is information, and I'm going to be very careful about what information I release.
"Sofia Conti," says the woman on the far left. Silver hair, precisely dressed, a voice that carries without effort. "House Romanov Orphan. You've been at St. Gabriel for ten weeks."
"Yes."
"We've been watching your progress." She says this without particular warmth. Informational. "You've distinguished yourself in the Orphan seminars. Your syndicate law professor describes you as the most analytically capable student in the current cohort."
I say nothing. This is a statement, not a question.
"We're interested in your future," says the man in the center.
He's the oldest, the stillest, and therefore the most important.
I make a note: sixty-seven, former Commission arbiter.
Neutral in the Romanov-Drakos split until eighteen months ago, according to something I overheard Aleksei tell the Moscow team.
Something shifted him. "Not the near future — the near future is already determined by the arrangement with House Romanov. We're interested in the longer term."
"The arrangement runs until the debt is paid," I say. "There's no defined end date."
"Debts end," he says. "Or they transform. Or the parties transform." He looks at me steadily. "The Regents take a long view, Miss Conti. We want to understand what you are, before you become something else."
"What I am," I repeat.
"You're a Conti. Old family. New to this world despite your blood. You've been processed through the Orphan system and assigned to the most powerful active Heir in the current cohort." The woman on the left again. "And you are demonstrably not what an Orphan usually is."
"What is an Orphan usually?"
A beat. Something moves between them — not quite communication, more the adjustment of people who operate by long-established understanding and rarely need to explain themselves to each other.
"Useful," says the man in the far right seat. He's the youngest of the five, sharp-faced. "Compliant in the specific ways that matter. Decorative when required." He looks at me without disguise. "You're none of those things."
"I'm here," I say. "I said the oath. I wear the uniform."
"You also drafted an addendum to your contract before you arrived," the woman says.
"You've been studying Russian without informing House Romanov.
You have files on every major Regent family going back three years.
" She tilts her head slightly. "We see everything at St. Gabriel, Miss Conti.
Including what's in the library acquisition requests. "
The room is very still.
Oh, I think. And then: of course.
The library acquisition requests. Eastern European Political Linguistics: A Practitioner's Reference.
They know. They've been watching the library acquisition requests because of course they have — the Regents run the institution, and the institution has surveillance in its walls, and whatever I thought I was doing in private has been noted somewhere.
This is useful information. They've just told me the depth of their monitoring.
I file it and continue.
"You want to know," I say slowly, "whether I'm an asset or a liability."
"We want to know," the center man says, "whose asset."
This lands precisely where it was aimed.
Dimitri. This is the shape of it — not a Regent summons for the Regents' benefit but a Regent summons that someone arranged to give them access to me without Aleksei present. To plant a question. Whose asset? Because the answer, if it isn't Aleksei's, becomes leverage in the spring vote.
I look at the five faces.
I think about what Aleksei said: the Regents built the system. Everyone in it works for them, ultimately. I think about Mara: Dimitri doesn't move until he knows the move will land. I think about Niko in Singapore: he'll find something true.
The true thing is that I'm not entirely Aleksei's. Not in the way the contract defines it. Not anymore. The true thing is complicated and private and sits in a Tower kitchen and three words said to a brake caliper and a parchment that will eventually burn.
I don't give them the true thing.
"I'm a Conti," I say. "House Romanov holds the debt. I fulfill the contract." I look at the center man, the one who matters. "I'm not a strategic piece. I'm a student completing an arrangement." I pause. "That's what the contract says. I'd refer you to it."
The center man looks at me for a long moment.
I hold his gaze without effort. I've been in this room for eleven minutes.
I have been cataloguing everything: the posture of each Regent (the woman on the far left crossed her ankles at minute three; the man on the far right hasn't moved once), who has spoken, who defers when the center man does, the quality of the silence after each of my answers.
He looks at me the way someone looks when they've come in expecting one thing and found something else.
Something in his expression shifts. Not warmth — respect is a cooler thing than warmth, more durable. He looks at me with the specific regard of someone who expected a variable and found a person.
"You're dismissed," he says.
I stand.
I walk back out the way I came.
The door closes behind me.
Aleksei is in the corridor.
Not in the chamber, not through the walls — just at the far end of the corridor, hands in his pockets, the particular quality of stillness that means he has been here long enough to become part of the stonework.
I walk toward him.
"Well?" he says.
"Dimitri arranged it," I say. "They were looking for a crack. I didn't give them one."
He looks at me.
"The center Regent," I say. "Describe him."
"Sixty-seven. Former Commission arbiter. Neutral in the Romanov-Drakos split until eighteen months ago, when he shifted." He watches me. "Why?"
"He looked at me differently at the end. Like he was revising an assessment." I meet his eyes. "I think the question they came in with and the question they left with were different."
Aleksei is quiet for a long moment.
Then: "What did you say to him?"
"I told him I was a student fulfilling a contract and referred him to the documentation." I pause. "In the exact language your lawyers used in the original filing."
Something extraordinary happens on his face.
It lasts approximately two seconds.
It might be the closest thing to pride I have ever seen on him, and it has been directed at me, and I don't know what to do with that except store it in the place where I keep the things I'm not ready to name. The place that's been getting crowded lately.
"The Hamptons is Friday," he says.
"I know."
"We should discuss—"
"After the Hamptons," I say. "You said not yet. I'm giving you until Friday."
He looks at me.
I walk past him toward the Tower.
Behind me, after a moment, I hear his footsteps follow.
Not catching up. Just following.
That's different.
That's new.
And I find that I'm not surprised by it, which might be the most significant development of all.