Chapter 663 | The Good Corner

Chapter 663: 663 | The Good Corner

The run back to Lin’s took seven minutes. I landed in the alley behind the laundromat, pulled off the Faceless Veil, and felt it dissolve back into inventory with that strange tingling sensation that I still hadn’t gotten used to. The boots Dralun had given me clunked against the pavement as I walked the last two blocks at a normal pace, like a normal person who had definitely been getting coffee and not running across rooftops with a snake-girl criminal.

Lin’s was dark except for the light above the stairs. I pushed through the door, heard the bell ring overhead, and climbed the black stairs to the office. The pressed-tin ceiling caught the sound of my footsteps and scattered it around the room.

Ophelia was still at her desk, parasol folded and leaning against her chair, Mr. Stitches relocated to her lap. She looked up when I came through the door, and her eyes went immediately to my hands.

"Where’s my latte?"

I stopped. Looked at my empty hands. Looked back at Ophelia.

"The line was really long."

"The line at a coffee shop. At midnight. On a Wednesday."

"It’s a popular coffee shop."

"Name it."

"The one on... the corner."

"Which corner?"

"The good corner."

Ophelia’s eyes narrowed. Her fingers stroked Mr. Stitches’s head in a way that felt distinctly threatening, even though the bear was made of cotton and buttons.

"Negative three hundred points," she said. "For lying. And for making me wait. And for having something on your collar that smells like strawberries, which is a flavor I do not associate with coffee."

My hand went to my collar before I could stop it. There was a faint pink smear on the fabric, exactly where Lamia’s fingers had gripped it.

"I can explain."

"I don’t want you to explain. I want you to bring me a latte tomorrow, and I want it to be perfect, and I want you to never mention the strawberry thing again." She turned back to her phone, dismissing me with a gesture that would have been imperious if her corset hadn’t been slightly askew and her drill curls hadn’t been drooping from the late hour. "Dralun’s been back for twenty minutes. He said to tell you that you walk too loud in those boots and that you need to practice being quieter."

"Did he say anything else?"

"He said the stoop on Ninth Street is fixed and that Mrs. Alvarez is still complaining." She paused, and something shifted in her expression, something that looked almost like curiosity beneath the gothic armor. "He also said that you’re smarter than you look, and that if you keep making the right decisions, he might stop calling you ’kid’ by Christmas."

"That’s high praise from Dralun."

"It’s the highest praise I’ve ever heard him give a provisional." She looked at me again, and her eyes were sharp behind the smudged eyeliner, cutting through the theatrical boredom like she’d just remembered she was capable of genuine observation. "Whatever you did tonight, it was the right call. Even if your collar smells like lip gloss."

I didn’t know how to respond to that, so I just nodded and walked to my desk. The laptop was still open to the raccoon report, and the tiny plastic skeleton Ophelia had placed there was still holding its sign that said "WORK HARDER" in letters she’d written with a silver gel pen.

I sat down. The chair creaked beneath me, the same spot that always creaked, and the boots felt heavy on my feet. Heavier than they had been when I was running across rooftops, heavier than they’d been in that pawn shop where Lamia had grabbed my arm and practically vibrated with excitement over a jade hairpin. The second heartbeat had settled back into its usual rhythm, quiet and patient and waiting for the next thing.

My phone buzzed. A message from Sloane lit up the screen, her name appearing with the contact photo I’d never bothered to change—her mid-explosion during a training session, hair wild, grinning like she’d just won something.

"I can feel you. You’re happy about something. What happened?"

I looked at the phone for a long moment, then glanced at the window where Ophelia’s bat stickers caught the streetlight. Then I typed back:

"Fixed a stoop. Helped a neighbor. Wore some boots that are half a size too big."

Three dots appeared almost immediately. Then:

"That’s not what happy feels like through the bond. That’s what satisfied feels like. What did you actually do?"

I smiled. Typed:

"Ask me tomorrow. I’ll tell you everything."

A pause. Then:

"You better. Love you. Sleep."

"Love you too."

I put the phone face down on the desk and looked at the window. Ophelia’s bat stickers caught the light from the streetlamp outside, and the water stain on the ceiling was still shaped like Ohio, and somewhere out in the Eastside, a girl with scales and safety-pinned boots was sliding toward a building where a jade hairpin sat behind a Buddha covered in cobwebs.

The interface flickered in the corner of my vision. Side Quest Updated: The Frictionless Thief. Objective: Continue assisting Lamia with nocturnal redistribution activities. Reward: Variable. Warning: The local Hero (Dralun) is aware of these activities. Approach with appropriate discretion.

I closed the notification and leaned back in my chair. The boots were definitely too big, and my collar still smelled like strawberries, and Ophelia was definitely going to deduct more points tomorrow when she noticed the smear hadn’t washed out.

But Socorro Vega was going to get her hairpin back. And Teodor had his pocket watch. And somewhere in this district, a dragon in a bronze-scaled body was probably already planning the next thing that needed fixing, the next railing bolt that needed replacing, the next person who needed someone to show up at minute one instead of minute fourteen.

The ranking system wouldn’t count any of it. The Hero Network would never report it. The Strand agencies with their sponsorship deals and their quarterly updates would never know that any of it happened.

But the Eastside would know. And that was enough.