Chapter 585 | It’s Supposed to Make You Feel Watched [CASTLE BONUS]

Chapter 585: 585 | It’s Supposed to Make You Feel Watched [CASTLE BONUS]

The thing about Vivienne Cross is that she says "I’m not going to ask" and somehow makes it sound worse than an interrogation. Most people threaten you by promising to dig. She threatened me by promising not to.

"That’s supposed to make me feel better?" I said.

"No. It’s supposed to make you feel watched." She said it warm, like a compliment, and stepped closer until the grey cardigan brushed the doorframe. "Those are different feelings. People confuse them all the time."

Up close she smelled like nothing, which was somehow the most unsettling thing about her. Every other woman in my life came with a scent I’d catalogued against my will. Sloane and her vanilla and scorched cotton. Diane and her expensive botanical thing. Felicity and her vanilla-and-floral. Petra and the cleanser. Camille and cardamom. Rina and chamomile and wool. Vivienne wore nothing at all, and I understood after half a second that this was also on purpose, because a woman whose entire game was reading signals wasn’t about to hand anyone a signal for free.

The Oracle Feed pulled up her profile before I could stop it.

〘 Vivienne Cross. Legendary. Cipher / Cascade / Resonance Read / Static Field. Temptation Gauge: 12% — Curious. Note: subject is running her own read on you in real time. Her read is more accurate than mine. I find this concerning. 〙

Great. When the System finds something concerning, that’s my cue to walk backward into a wall and stay there.

"Twelve percent," I said, mostly to myself.

Vivienne’s smile didn’t move but something behind her eyes did. "You just did the thing," she said. "Eyes left. Lips moving. You read something that isn’t in the room."

"I zone out."

"You zone out at fixed intervals with fixed left-drift and your pupils don’t dilate the way a daydreaming person’s do. A daydream loses focus. You gain it." She let that sit. "Whatever you’re reading, it’s giving you information. I’ve watched Percy do the version where he mutters and it’s the same tell wearing a different coat."

I kept my face doing the thing faces are supposed to do when they’re not confirming that a dating-sim interface just told me a girl was more dangerous than the dating-sim interface.

"You should get some sleep," I said. "Classes Wednesday."

"That’s a deflection. A good one. You lower your voice at the end so it lands like a decision instead of an escape." She tilted her head the other way, which meant she was recataloguing me from a new angle, which meant I was standing in a hallway getting biopsied by a seventeen-year-old in a cardigan. "I’m going to tell you something, and I want you to notice that I’m telling you instead of using it."

"That sounds like a threat."

"It’s a courtesy. I have very few of those, so pay attention." She pulled her right hand from the cardigan pocket and turned it palm-up between us, and a faint blue crackle danced across her fingertips, gone before I could decide if I’d imagined it. "The Cipher I put on you in the plaza. Standard protocol is I drop it once the read goes familiar. I’ve dropped every mark I’ve ever placed. Friends, opponents, my own mother once when I was nine and wanted to know if she was lying about a trip to Verano. Familiar means I don’t need it live anymore."

"And mine went familiar."

"Yours never does." She closed her hand and the blue died. "I check it eleven, twelve times a day. Every time I expect it to have resolved into a shape I recognize, and every time there’s the second signal underneath, offset, patient, and I don’t know what it is, so I keep the mark. It’s the first one I’ve never dropped." She looked up at me with those clear green eyes and I understood that she wasn’t flirting, wasn’t playing, wasn’t doing the thing Felicity did or the thing Petra did with the composure crumbling underneath. She was just telling me the truth because the truth was the most interesting object in the hallway. "You’re the first person in years I can’t finish reading. I don’t know if that’s going to be the best thing that’s ever happened to me or the thing that gets me killed. I’ve decided not to decide yet. It’s more fun this way."

The Oracle Feed pinged, quiet.

〘 Note: she means every word. This is not a manipulation vector. This is genuine. Genuine is worse. I want to be clear that genuine is worse. 〙

"You know how insane that sounds," I said.

"I know exactly how insane it sounds. I chose the words that would make you feel it." She stepped back, one clean pace, and the pressure at the base of my skull eased half a degree. "You’ll notice I’m leaving now. I got what I came for."

"Which was?"

"Confirmation that the wrongness is still there when you’re standing in front of me and not in the middle of a burning building. It is. Louder, actually. That’s new data. I collect new data the way Ortega collects wall fractures." She turned to go, then paused with the same deliberate spacing Rina had used, except where Rina paused because she was afraid, Vivienne paused because she wanted me to spend the next hour wondering why. "Saturday. Field Zeta. Rina asked you to help her find her ceiling."

The floor dropped out of my stomach by about an inch. "You were listening to that too."

"I was here for eleven minutes. She was in there for nine of them." Vivienne’s smile finally moved, just at the corner, and it was worse than the still version. "I’m not going to come. I want that on the record. But I want you to know that I know, because knowing things and choosing not to use them is the only way I’ve ever found to make someone trust me faster than they should." She looked at me one more time. "Goodnight, Lukas. Your read got louder tonight. I’ll keep checking."

And then she walked off down the hall toward the female wing with her hands back in her cardigan pockets, blonde hair catching the corridor light, footfalls falling exactly a half-beat off from where a person’s footfalls should fall, which I only noticed because she wanted me to notice it, which meant she’d walked wrong on purpose so I’d spend the rest of the night thinking about how she walked.

I stood in my doorway for a while.

"She marked me," I said out loud, to nobody.

〘 Correct. Stage 1 Cipher, right posterior shoulder. Dormant. Undetectable by standard scan. She has held it eleven days. 〙

"Can you get rid of it?"