Chapter 579 | Barefoot on the Helipad

Chapter 579: 579 | Barefoot on the Helipad

Misato grabbed my wrist before I could say anything clever, and I had been loading up something extremely clever.

"Move your feet, Monroe."

She hauled me out of the gym and into the grey morning, and for the first fifty meters I let her pull me because her grip carried the authority of a woman who had dragged Jordan Wayne out of a gate by his collar. The lime green ponytail whipped against her back as she ran. Her captain’s hoodie was zipped to the throat, but she had thrown it on over a sleep shirt and a pair of black shorts.

I pulled even with her on the slope toward Summit and decided that B-rank Endurance was the best purchase of my life.

"How do you know they landed?"

"My mother called me at four fifty-one." Misato kept her eyes on the path. "The Davenport house staff got woken at four and told to prep the San Francisco helipad. She saw the passenger list before the pilot took it back."

"Your mother reads passenger lists?"

"My mother has worked for that family for nine years, and she reads everything." Misato took the next switchback hard enough to spray gravel off the edge. "That is the only reason she still has a job."

The cliffs dropped away on our left, and the ocean below had turned the color of dishwater waiting for the sun to make up its mind. Summit House sat at the top of the hill in glass and white stone, looking smug about its view. Somewhere beyond it, on the bluff past the switchbacks, a helicopter was settling onto a pad that Johnathan Davenport probably paid for in cash during a bad mood.

I ran the math while my legs did the work. Blair called a lawyer at eleven forty-seven. The lawyer worked at Harrington, Wells and Associates, which had drafted nine pages of legally binding feelings before sunrise. A notary got woken at midnight and paid triple. Somebody at that firm, or somebody at that notary, or somebody whose salary eventually traced back to a man with silver hair, had picked up a phone.

Clause Fifteen said officers of Davenport Industries. The man who signed the officers’ checks had apparently read it at breakfast.

"Monroe." Misato’s breath stayed even, which was offensive. "What did she do?"

I looked at her. She looked at the path. The question sat between us for six strides, and I could feel the lime ring in the back of my skull pull tight, because Misato Ayame had spent nine years being the last person told about anything that involved her own life.

Blair wanted to hand her the contract at breakfast. Blair wanted to watch Misato read page six and look up, and Blair had dreaded that look all night in a stolen sweater. That was Blair’s moment to spend, and I had no right to spend it for her.

But Johnathan Davenport had just landed on the roof, and Misato was running toward him in her pajamas.

"She signed something last night," I said. "It protects your mother."

Misato stopped.

She stopped so hard that I overshot her by three steps and had to turn around, and by the time I did, her face had gone completely blank. I had seen that blankness once before, outside my apartment door, on a night when a handprint bloomed purple on her cheek.

"Say that again."

"Clause Fifteen covers your household. Employment, housing, and compensation all fall under it. Blair indemnified it personally, including against her own father."

The wind came up off the cliffs and pulled a loose strand of lime hair across her mouth. She did not move it. Her hands hung at her sides, and her fingers twitched once, and I watched nine years of keeping her head down for a paycheck run headfirst into one paragraph of legal language written by the girl whose sister had slapped her across a kitchen.

"She can’t do that," Misato said.

"She did it anyway. She woke up a notary."

"She can’t do that, because now he knows." Her voice came out flat, but her eyes had gone wet at the edges. "He doesn’t punish the person who breaks the rule. He punishes whoever the person was trying to protect."

Oh. Well. Cool.

I grabbed her hand, and this time I did the pulling.

We came over the top of the hill at five forty-two, and the helicopter was already down. Rotor wash flattened the ornamental grass along the edge of the pad and threw a fine spray of dew into my face. The machine itself was black and silver, and the Davenport crest sat on the door in platinum paint that probably cost more than Naomi’s father’s boat engine, Belle’s mother’s rent, and my entire tuition combined, which I realized was a group of three and decided not to care about because I was about to get murdered.

The rotors wound down into a slow whine. The door was open.

Four people stood on the pad, and I knew every single one of them.

Dominic Vale leaned against a lamppost at the edge of the concrete in his expensive jacket and designer sunglasses, holding a coffee mug that read WORLD’S OKAYEST HUNTER. He looked bored. Vale always looked bored when he was standing exactly where he needed to be, which meant he had gotten here ten minutes before me, left me a note that said run, and then strolled uphill to watch.

Blair stood in the middle of the pad, barefoot.

She was wearing my grey crew neck. It swallowed her to mid-thigh, the cuffs pulled down over her knuckles, and the bleach spot from the boba incident sat on her left wrist where Belle had promised it would. Her short red hair was flattened on one side from a pillow she had not slept on. The concrete around her bare feet had gone dark and dry in a perfect circle while the rest of the pad stayed wet. Steam curled off her shoulders in thin ribbons.

Her chin was up. Her spine was straight. Her hands were shaking inside my sleeves.

Johnathan Davenport stood six feet in front of her, holding nine pages of paper.

He was exactly what the novel had promised and somehow worse in person. He was tall, silver at the temples, and wore a charcoal suit that sat on him like armor someone had tailored for a funeral. His eyes were the same ice blue as Blair’s, but on him the color had no warmth hidden underneath. He held the contract between two fingers, the way a man holds a receipt he intends to dispute.

And beside him, Cassandra.

Cassandra Davenport stood five-eleven in heels on a wet helipad and made it look like a runway. She wore a cream silk blouse under a camel coat, one button more undone than proper, and her hair was pinned into a braided crown that had survived a helicopter ride without a single strand out of place. A Patek Philippe caught the light on her wrist. She held a paper cup of tea in one manicured hand, and she smiled when she saw me.

I had read about that smile. In the novel, it meant she was about to lie.

"Mr. Monroe," Cassandra said. "You’re out of breath."

"Your family keeps scheduling things uphill."