Chapter 576 | His Bestie

Chapter 576: 576 | His Bestie

The door closed behind Park, and the room stayed frozen for another three seconds before Theo exhaled loud enough to qualify as a weather event.

"That was the most stressful thing I’ve ever sat through," he said, "and I watched my mom explain to my dad why the garage door was melted."

Percy was already writing in his notebook, transcribing something from memory with the focus of a man documenting a war crime. "She knew about the verification gap. That should have been buried in administrative review. Someone on the inside fed her that timeline specifically to establish a paper trail discrepancy."

"Percy." Sloane’s voice carried from the far end of the table. "Breathe."

"I am breathing. I’m also noting that Director Park’s folio contained six pages when the standard incident review packet runs eleven to fourteen, which means she either condensed aggressively or she brought a curated selection designed to apply pressure to specific testimony points." He looked up. "Lukas. You were the specific testimony point."

"I noticed."

"You also improvised past the prepared narrative and introduced a secondary security concern that redirected her investigative priority."

"Also noticed that."

Percy’s pen stopped. His blue hair caught the conference room lights as he tilted his head, studying me with the expression of someone recalibrating a threat assessment they’d thought was already complete. "That was either very intelligent or catastrophically reckless."

"Why not both?" Felicity pushed off from her chair, stretching her arms above her head in a way that pulled her uniform blouse tight across her chest and made approximately three people in the room very aware of the movement. "Lukas does his best work when he’s being simultaneously smart and stupid. It’s kind of his whole vibe."

Camille snorted. "That tracks."

Diane stood, and the room’s attention reorganized around her the way it always did. She smoothed her blazer with fingers that had stopped trembling sometime in the last thirty seconds, the professional mask fully restored now that the threat had exited the building. "Individual statements. Park wants them before she leaves campus. Percy, you’re first, given that your documentation is apparently already halfway complete."

"Three-quarters," Percy said, and gathered his materials.

Theo followed him toward the door, clapping a hand on my shoulder as he passed. "Glad you’re not dead, man. Would’ve sucked to lose the only other person in this class who thinks training at five AM is a reasonable choice."

"It’s a deeply unreasonable choice. I just make it anyway."

"That’s the spirit." He grinned and vanished into the hallway with Percy, leaving the conference room feeling suddenly too large for the people still in it.

Petra rose with the grace of someone whose family name was on buildings, her planner tucked under her arm like a weapon she might need to deploy. Her emerald eyes found mine across the table, and what passed between us was too complicated for the audience. "Mr. Belmont. Try not to improvise any additional security breaches before the end of the day."

"No promises."

Her lips twitched. Just barely. "I’ll note your non-commitment in my records." She swept out, heels clicking against the polished floor with a rhythm that made Camille’s Precision Read track her all the way to the door.

Camille waited until Petra was gone before speaking. "The Lang girl has opinions about you."

"Everyone has opinions about me."

"Not like that." Camille’s two-tone hair caught the light as she turned, and her gaze was sharp enough to cut through whatever performance I might have been running. "She looked at you the way I look at a target I haven’t decided to shoot yet. Interested but holding back. Something’s going on there."

Sloane’s attention shifted. Through the bond, I felt her curiosity spike alongside something darker that she was trying not to let surface. "Camille."

"What? I’m just observing. Rivet gives me good pattern recognition." Camille shrugged, already moving toward the door. "I’m going to get my statement done before Park decides to audit my family’s contractor licenses. Lukas. Don’t die again while I’m gone."

"I’ll add it to the list."

She left, and then it was just Diane, Sloane, Felicity, and me in a conference room that suddenly felt very small and very warm.

Felicity bounced on her heels, and I watched Diane’s attention track the movement with the professional assessment of someone who ran the highest-grossing Hero PR agency in California and had spent two decades reading people for a living. Felicity was oblivious to the assessment, or appeared to be, which with Felicity could mean either one.

"Okay so." Felicity turned to Diane with the full force of her Smoke and Mirrors presence, her blonde hair catching the light and her blue eyes wide with enthusiasm that seemed entirely genuine. "I don’t think we’ve properly met? I’m Felicity. Felicity Hardy. Lukas’s bestie."

Diane’s expression didn’t change. "His bestie."

"Oh, totally." Felicity beamed. "We’re super close now."

I watched this happen with the dawning horror of a man seeing a car accident in slow motion while standing directly in the impact zone.

Diane’s eyes moved to me. Her drawl came out sweet as poison. "Super close, you say."

"So close. Besties for real." Felicity stepped closer to Diane with complete confidence, and I realized with growing dread that she was running some kind of play. The specific way she’d angled her body, the subtle emphasis on words like close and bonded, the frequency with which her hand kept finding reasons to gesture toward me. "I was actually hoping we could talk? Like, properly? I feel like anyone who raised Lukas must be super interesting, and I want to know all the embarrassing childhood stories."

"Do you."

"All of them. Every single one." Felicity’s smile was radiant. "I’m making a mental archive. For future reference. You know how it is."

I did not know how it was. I was beginning to understand how it was, and what I was understanding made my survival instincts light up like Christmas.

Felicity was positioning herself. The daughter of entertainment industry parents, the girl who read rooms faster than most people registered they were in them, had assessed the situation and decided her optimal path forward involved establishing a relationship with my guardian. Which meant she was thinking about me in terms that went past bestie and into territory that was going to get very complicated very fast if she kept standing that close to Diane and making implications with her body language.

Diane knew.