18. hunter
hunter
By the time Desmond asked for the Aldrich numbers a second time, I was considering whether stabbing myself through the hand with my mother’s fountain pen would qualify as a reasonable excuse to leave.
I had already given him the quarter’s protection intake, favor collections, the number of active obligations sitting beneath my faction, and the handful of problems that had required more than a phone call to resolve.
None of the numbers had changed in the thirty minutes since I laid them out the first time.
Desmond knew that. Repetition was less about the information than whether my answer changed when he came at it from another direction.
Across the table, Ronan had stopped touching his wine entirely.
Malakai sat beside him with one hand resting near his plate, listening while Desmond worked through a question about two lower-house accounts that had started carrying more debt than value.
The dining room was quiet enough that I could hear cutlery from the other end of the table, where two older Quorum families had spent most of the evening discussing a property acquisition I had no interest in inheriting as a problem.
“The Bellamy account gets restructured before the end of the month,” I said.
“The younger son keeps borrowing against obligations he can’t personally enforce.
I’m moving the useful debts into the house and cutting off his authority to make new ones until he proves he understands the difference between leverage and credit. ”
Desmond took a sip of whiskey before nodding. “Better than letting the account rot because you don’t like the boy.”
“I don’t need to like him.”
“No. You need to know whether the operation survives him.”
Dinner with my father had never been social, even when food was involved.
He wanted to know what I was building, which parts were profitable, where loyalty was slipping, and whether I had noticed the same weaknesses he had.
The Quorum gave territory to people who could hold it.
Being Desmond Hansen’s son meant he expected me to demonstrate that fact more often than most.
He turned his attention toward one of the expansion reports beside his plate. “Westbridge is opening again.”
Ronan looked up at that. I kept my expression neutral.
Desmond flipped a page. “Administration finally approved the outside housing acquisition. We’ll have people there before winter term if legal doesn’t find another reason to crawl up its own ass.”
I remembered the name from Ronan’s work around Echo, but there was no reason to drag her into the conversation. “You had people there before.”
“Barely.” Desmond’s mouth tightened. “We were expanding too quickly and buying access instead of building structure. Useful for getting a foot in the door. Useless for keeping anything once the students who mattered graduated.”
Malakai shifted beside Ronan, subtle enough that nobody else at the table would have noticed. I did because I had been waiting for either of them to react to the same connection.
“What did you have there?” I asked.
“A little of everything. Drugs, academic records, introductions into two family businesses, a handful of students running smaller schemes that could have been folded in if somebody had known what the fuck they were doing.” Desmond set the report down.
“There was one favor operation worth taking. Surprisingly broad reach for two students.”
My hand stopped against the stem of my glass.
Desmond did not notice. He was looking toward the papers again, already halfway into old business that had never mattered enough to remain personal.
“What happened to it?”
“We got the records. Never got control of the operation.”
Ronan’s attention shifted to me for less than a second.
Desmond continued before I had to ask. “Whoever built the damn thing understood compartmentalization better than the idiot who surrendered it. The records were coded, incomplete, and dependent on context we didn’t have.
By the time the people handling the acquisition realized they had bought a filing system instead of the operation itself, the useful connections were already scattering. ”
“Who surrendered it?” Malakai asked.
“One of the students. I don’t remember his name.” Desmond frowned as though irritated by the failure of somebody who probably had not crossed his mind in years. “He thought handing over the records bought him protection. It did, technically. What it didn’t buy us was the network.”
The description sounded enough like Nichlas that I reached for my glass and drank rather than looking at Ronan or Malakai.
Desmond went on to explain why the current Westbridge expansion would be handled differently, and I listened because I had spent my entire life learning not to react when my father said something worth remembering.
He did not mention Echo. He did not mention anybody being hunted after the records changed hands.
Whatever had happened around her had either sat far enough beneath him that he never knew the details, or he had no reason to think any of us could connect his old operation to the woman currently taking up too much space inside mine.
By the time dinner ended, my head hurt. Desmond stopped me near the hall long enough to ask whether the new operator he had heard about was contributing enough to justify the noise around her.
I gave him the same answer I would have given about anyone else working inside Aldrich: she completed what I put in front of her, understood leverage, and had not created a mess I could not contain.
Ronan waited until we were outside before looking at me. “Two students. Coded records.”
“I heard him.”
Malakai opened the car door and glanced back toward the house. “Nichlas thought he handed over the operation.”
“We don’t know that’s the same one.”
Neither of them argued. We had enough coincidence to pay attention and nowhere near enough proof to start building conclusions. Ronan pulled out his phone once we were moving and began searching without announcing what he intended to find, which saved me from having to tell him.
I checked mine. Echo had not called or messaged once, which made me check the screen again instead of relaxing.
I had left her alone for less than three hours with coursework, food, and an explicit instruction to leave Nichlas alone. The absence of messages meant she had either listened to me for the first time since arriving at Aldrich or had done something she knew better than to document.
Malakai glanced at the screen when I checked it again. “She hasn’t called?”
“No.”
Ronan looked up from his phone. “That’s concerning.”
I shoved mine back into my pocket and stared out the window for the rest of the drive. The elevator opened onto the lounge twenty minutes later and the smell of copper hit me first.
Blood had a way of changing a room before you saw where it came from, metallic and warm beneath the cleaner scent somebody had apparently made a halfhearted attempt to use. I stepped out ahead of Ronan and stopped hard enough that Malakai nearly ran into my back.
Nichlas was tied to one of my dining chairs.
For several seconds, my brain refused to make the pieces fit because the man in front of me looked considerably worse than the Nichlas I had left on campus that afternoon.
His shirt had been cut open in several places and was soaked dark across the chest and one thigh.
Blood had dried beneath his nose and down his neck, with newer streaks running from somewhere near his hairline. His hands were bound behind the chair, and what I could see of his fingers was swollen and wet with blood around the nails. One eye had nearly closed beneath the bruising.
Echo sat on the edge of the table several feet away with a towel in one hand and blood smeared across the front of her shirt.
She looked at us as though we were early.
“Dinner good?”
Nobody answered her. Nichlas made a sound that barely qualified as one and tried to lift his head and Malakai moved first.
He crossed the room, crouched in front of Nichlas, and put two fingers against his neck while Ronan came around the other side of the chair.
The shift in Ronan was immediate. Whatever he had been thinking about Desmond or Westbridge disappeared while he assessed the blood on the floor and the condition of Nichlas’s hands.
“How long has he been like this?” Malakai asked.
Echo glanced toward the clock. “Define this.”
I closed my eyes for one second. When I opened them, Ronan was already cutting the restraints around Nichlas’s wrists. “He needs a doctor.”
“He’s alive,” Echo said.
“For the moment.” Ronan eased one of Nichlas’s arms forward and swore under his breath when he saw the hand properly. “What the fuck did you do to his fingers?”
Echo wiped the blade in her hand with the towel and set it carefully on the table. “Several things.”
Malakai looked over his shoulder at me. Nichlas still had to survive whatever end Echo eventually intended for him, and leaving him here while I argued with her was not going to improve the odds.
“Take him,” I said. “Use ours. No campus records.”
Ronan and Malakai got Nichlas upright between them.
His knees barely held, forcing Malakai to take most of his weight while Ronan grabbed the coat lying near the chair and wrapped it around what remained of his shirt.
Nichlas turned his head toward me once, expression dazed enough that I could not tell whether he expected me to save him or simply wanted confirmation that I had seen what she did.
Then the elevator doors closed behind the three of them. I waited until they were gone before looking at Echo who was still sitting on my table.
Blood had dried in a thin line along one side of her jaw, and there was enough beneath her fingernails that I did not want to know which part of Nichlas it had come from. Behind her, my floor looked like somebody had tried to clean a murder scene before remembering the victim was still breathing.