Chapter 598 | A Front-Row Seat

Chapter 598: 598 | A Front-Row Seat

Diane’s mouth pressed into a line that had nothing to do with warmth. She and Isabelle Crane went back four years, to a Hero gala where Crane had watched Diane work a room with the specific expression of a rival cataloging a threat. They were not friends. They occupied adjacent territory in the same industry, and they respected each other in the way two apex predators respected each other, which meant they stayed out of each other’s kill zones and made polite conversation at conferences.

Isabelle Crane did not call Diane Fitzgerald for polite conversation.

Diane picked up. "Isabelle."

"Diane." Crane’s voice carried the warmth of someone who had learned to weaponize charm and had never once put the weapon down. "I trust you’re managing the last three weeks with your usual grace."

"I’m managing." Diane leaned back. "You didn’t call to check on my grace."

"I did not." A pause, the kind Crane used to make people lean in. Diane did not lean in, because she had invented that pause and used it on people better than Isabelle Crane. "Ashby put your boy in Fitzgerald Media."

Diane went still. Not the still of surprise. The still of a person recalculating an entire board.

"His placement is the Eastside," she said. "Dralun. Metro Seven."

"That’s the community service contract. The observational placement, the one that pairs first-years with agencies for two-day rotations after the Crucible." Crane’s voice held something now, an edge of genuine interest under the performance. "That one goes to you. Fitzgerald Media Group. Your office. Your staff. Your supervision."

The cold water in Diane’s chest changed direction.

She had raised Lukas for nine years. Folded him into a house that ran on Hero PR before breakfast, fed him at tables where she killed press releases and fixed approval metrics and trained him, without meaning to train him, in every structural failure of the celebrity machine. He had absorbed it the way children absorbed first languages. He understood her industry from the inside in a way that almost no Halloran student could claim.

But he had never worked in her building. Never sat at a desk under her authority with her staff watching him and her evaluation hanging over whatever he decided to do next. He had been her ward. He had been, more recently and more quietly, something neither of them would name before sunset. He had never once been her employee.

Ashby had looked at that entire arrangement and decided the best placement for Lukas Belmont was the one that put him directly under Diane’s operational control.

"He’s testing me," Diane said. The sentence came out flatter than she meant it to.

"He’s testing both of you." Crane sounded pleased, the specific pleasure of someone watching chess when both players were about to lose something. "I sat in that room this morning. I heard the whole thing. Ashby put your name on that placement with the same expression he uses when he’s already finished the game. Cole called it a curriculum recommendation. Radiant objected. Ashby overruled him in four sentences and went back to his tea like the conversation had already been settled."

"Radiant objected." Diane filed that away in a drawer she was starting to keep specifically for things involving the number one Hero and the boy she was raising, the one whose name seemed to exist on Radiant’s radar longer and with more substance than Diane could fully explain without answers she didn’t have.

"Radiant’s had a file on your boy since before he arrived. Longest first-year file in fourteen years." Crane let that sit, and Diane heard, underneath the gossip, the sharper thing that ran underneath—the reason for the call, which was never just the call itself. Isabelle Crane was not warning her out of friendship or professional sympathy or because she thought Diane couldn’t survive the surprise.

She was doing what Diane herself did with information, which was to spend it strategically, to place it in someone’s hand at the exact moment it would produce the most useful reaction, and Diane understood that perfectly because she had done the same thing to three agency clients just this quarter.

"I thought you’d want to know before Monday. Consider it professional courtesy. We are, after all, in the same business."

"We are," Diane agreed slowly, carefully, watching the statement for weight before she released it. "Which is why I know courtesy isn’t your first language, Isabelle. What do you want."

A soft laugh rippled through the connection, warm and knowing, the sound of someone who had just been complimented and was deciding how to accept it. "I want a front-row seat when your boy walks into your office and discovers his guardian is his supervisor. That’s the whole thing. I’ve spent eleven years watching Heroes be managed, sugar. I have never once watched a Fitzgerald get managed. It’s going to be the most entertaining thing that happens on that campus all semester, and I would like to observe it, purely for research purposes."

"You teach Hero Brand Management." Diane’s tone sharpened slightly, not quite an accusation but close enough that they both heard it.

"I teach the study of how power presents itself, Diane." The warmth returned to Crane’s voice, settled there like a deliberate choice, and under it ran the genuine curiosity that Diane recognized immediately because she had the same disease, the same compulsion to watch how a situation moved when the people in it thought they were in control.

"Your boy walked onto national television three weeks after manifesting and talked about symbols like he’d been raised inside the machine. Because he was. By you. And now the machine is going to look at him with your face on it, with your authority written into every interaction, and I want to see what he does when the person evaluating him is the person who’s been keeping his file since he was eight years old."

Diane looked at the photograph on the corner of her desk. Herself and Reina, twenty years younger, at the academy, before either of them knew what the industry would cost. It was the only personal item she kept in the office. She had never told Lukas it was there.

"He’ll do fine," Diane said. "He’ll do better than fine. That’s the problem."

"That’s always the problem with the interesting ones." Crane’s tone shifted, became almost gentle, which was the most dangerous version of Isabelle Crane there was.

"Take care of yourself, Diane. And take care of him. Radiant isn’t the only one with a file."