Chapter 580 | He’s My Field Lead

Chapter 580: 580 | He’s My Field Lead

Johnathan did not turn his head. He kept his eyes on his daughter, and when he spoke, his voice carried across the pad without any effort, like a man who had never once in his life needed to repeat himself.

"Clause Fourteen waives your claim on Ayame. Clause Fifteen indemnifies the Ayame household against the company." He turned a page. "Against its officers. You wrote your own father into a liability clause, Blair."

Blair’s jaw worked. The circle of dry concrete around her feet grew another inch.

"I wrote what was fair."

"You wrote it at midnight. Through Harrington, on the corporate retainer." Johnathan lowered the pages an inch. "Harrington’s managing partner called me at three because he assumed I had lost my mind. I explained that I had not, and that my daughter apparently had."

Misato’s hand tightened on mine hard enough to grind the small bones in my fingers.

Johnathan finally turned his head. His gaze passed over Vale without stopping, passed over me as if I were a lamppost, and landed on Misato in her captain’s hoodie and sleep shorts, her ponytail crooked, her bare knees scraped from the switchbacks.

"Ayame." He said her name the way a man reads a line item. "Your mother is in the car at the bottom of the hill. She’d like a word before she flies back with us."

Misato went rigid beside me.

"She has a shift tomorrow," Misato said. "She doesn’t fly with you."

"She does today."

The seventh ring in my skull went off like a car alarm, white and hot and ugly, because Blair had made a sound I had heard once before in a collapsed cave. It was small and broken, and she shoved it back down her throat before it finished.

"You can’t." Blair’s voice cracked. "Clause Fifteen covers her. It’s notarized."

"It is a private contract between two students of the academy." Johnathan folded the pages in half and then in half again. "Signed by a girl who has no authority over my payroll and a boy who has no authority over anything."

Okay. That one I took personally.

Vale took a sip of coffee and made a soft noise of appreciation, either for the coffee or for the monologue. I could not tell which, and I suspected he wanted it that way.

Cassandra stepped forward. Her heels clicked on the wet concrete, and she stopped close enough that I could smell her perfume, something expensive that a private perfumer had mixed specifically to make men forget what they were saying. She held the paper cup out toward me.

"You look cold, Mr. Monroe. Take this. It’s Earl Grey, and I haven’t touched it."

I looked at the cup. I looked at her nude manicure, at her ice-blue eyes, at the smile that sat on her mouth without ever reaching higher.

In the book, Cassandra Davenport collected people. You accepted a favor, a gift, a cup of tea on a cold morning, and the contract wrote itself into your bones, and one day you woke up doing her laundry with a smile on your face and no memory of saying yes. Forty-seven people on her string, according to the author, and every one of them had probably been cold once.

If Cassandra Davenport offers you help, count your fingers after.

"I’m good," I said. "I drink my tea black, like my future."

Cassandra’s smile did not move, but her eyes changed. A tiny adjustment happened behind them, the look of a woman revising a file she had already marked closed.

"How disappointing," she said. "I’d heard you were hungry."

"I’m starving. I just don’t eat off strangers’ plates."

Behind me, Vale laughed into his mug. Actually laughed. It was the real one, the laugh from the car on the 101, and it rolled across the helipad and made Johnathan Davenport turn his head for the first time.

"Dominic." Johnathan said it the way other men say a disease. "I assumed you would have the decency to stay out of family business."

"I’m not in your family business." Vale pushed off the lamppost and pulled his sunglasses down his nose, letting both mismatched eyes show over the frames. "I’m in my student’s business. He happens to be standing in your family’s driveway."

"Then remove him."

"I could." Vale took another sip. "But he came uphill on his own, and I make a policy of rewarding cardio."

Misato let go of my hand.

I felt the absence before I saw her move. She walked past me onto the pad in her hoodie and her scraped knees, and she did not look at Johnathan. She walked straight to Blair and stopped in front of her, close enough to touch, and the two of them stood there on the wet concrete, the captain in pajamas and the heiress in my sweater, nine years of debt hanging in the inch of air between them.

Blair’s lip trembled. She clenched her teeth to stop it.

"I was going to give it to you at breakfast," Blair said. "I wanted to watch you read it."

"You wrote me into a contract against your own father." Misato’s voice was very steady and very soft. "At midnight."

"You bled for me for nine years." Blair’s eyes were wet and furious. "I paid you back in insults. It was overdue."

Misato reached up and fixed the collar of my crew neck where it had twisted against Blair’s throat. She tugged it straight with two sharp pulls, the same motion she used on her ponytail when she needed her hands to do something useful, and Blair stood still and let her.

Then Misato turned around and faced Johnathan Davenport with her back to his daughter.

"My mother doesn’t get on your helicopter."

Johnathan regarded her for a long moment. The rotors had stopped entirely now, and the only sound on the hill was the wind coming up off the cliffs and the faint tick of the concrete cooling under Blair’s bare feet.

"Miss Ayame," he said, "you have a very short memory for who pays your tuition."

"She has a very long one," I said, "for who stopped."

Every head on the pad turned toward me. Johnathan’s, Cassandra’s, Blair’s. Even Vale tilted his mug in my direction like a man raising a toast at a wedding he expected to end in a fistfight.

I shoved my hands in my pockets and found Hikaru’s sticky note there, the one that said Eat this. I rubbed my thumb over the paper and felt the seven rings pull at the back of my skull, six steady and one blazing white.

Johnathan Davenport finally looked at me. "And you are?"

Blair answered before I could.

"He’s my field lead."