Chapter 704 | The Most Valuable Woman in This Building

Chapter 704: 704 | The Most Valuable Woman in This Building

Petra’s jaw worked once. He was right. She hated that he was right, because being right about institutional risk was supposed to be her job.

"So you came to my room. To my door. At two-thirty in the morning. To protect my family from a paper trail."

"To protect everyone from a paper trail. Including the twenty-three kids in a dragon’s blue spiral notebook."

Twenty-three children. Something cold moved through Petra’s chest that had nothing to do with the November air leaking through her window frame.

She picked up the card with two fingers, the way she handled a contract before deciding whether to sign it. The pulp felt ordinary and thin, the sort of stock that rotted in a drawer within a year. She turned it over and found nothing on the back but the number and a faint crease where someone had folded and unfolded it, the nervous habit of a person deciding whether to make a call.

"Twenty-three." She said it aloud because saying it made it real, and real was the only register Petra Lang trusted. "How many are still alive?"

"Fourteen in the district. Six moved. Three dead. Two in attacks the Commission filed as unidentified multi-Aspect. One from something nobody can name."

Petra set the card down beside her planner. The emerald pen lay parallel to the planner’s spine at the angle she set every evening before bed, and the card broke the geometry of her desk in a way that felt permanent.

She thought about Mateo. She had read the incident report. She read every incident report Lukas filed, because she was his co-representative and that was her job, for no other reason, and she would burn anyone who suggested otherwise. A five-year-old with bone spurs, in a dinosaur hoodie his mother had sewn from discount felt at two in the morning after double shifts. Spurs that would start shedding in a few years, the way keratin always shed, the way natural biological processes did not care whether what they produced made a child valuable to someone who should not be valuing them.

Shedding.

And someone was buying what they shed. Collecting it. Storing it beside business cards in a container that soaked nine children’s fear into the paper. Storing it with the kind of cataloging that suggested routine. Procedure. Repeat business.

The cold in Petra’s chest spread outward until she could not tell where it ended and her actual body heat began.

"I’ll run the query." Her voice landed flat and exactly right, the voice Margot Lang had spent eighteen years building in her only daughter. "The black-violet signature will return a list. If the database holds a match within registered parameters, I’ll have a name by Thursday morning. If it falls outside registered parameters, the absence itself is data worth having."

"Thank you."

Two words, and they hit her in the sternum like one of Camille Ortega’s rivets, because Lukas Belmont did not say thank you to her. He hadn’t in twenty-two days, or in the twenty-two days before that. He performed gratitude the way he performed everything, angles showing, the real thing buried under humor and the particular charm that made every woman in the cohort drop thirty IQ points when he walked in. This thank you arrived stripped of all that. There were only the words and his eyes, the amber catching her lamplight until her own bedroom felt like somewhere she had never been.

Petra opened her mouth to say something about confidentiality protocols, or the proper chain of custody for a card that might be evidence in an active federal investigation.

What came out was: "Twenty-two days."

The room went quiet.

Lukas didn’t move. His eyes stayed on hers, and the distance between them was six feet and closing, because her legs were carrying her toward him before her brain had signed off on it.

"You signed a federal document with my name on it." Her voice dropped into the register she used only when the performance had cracked open and the real Petra was standing in the wreckage. "You let me attach my family’s reputation to your file. You let me kiss you in a conference room that still smelled like Odette’s perfume, and you tasted like honesty, and I spent eleven hours working out the molecular composition of that taste when I should have been studying for Mercy’s exam."

Three feet.

"And then you left. You walked down a hallway and you did not come back. For twenty-two days I watched you eat breakfast with Hardy and train with Ortega, and the only time you sat in a room with me was when the brief required it. You called me co-representative. You were professional and you were correct, and I wanted to put a crystalline javelin through your stupid perfect collar."

Two feet.

"I am Petra Lang." She stopped close enough to see the pulse in his throat and the fading mark on his collarbone, which she knew was Fitzgerald’s, because she kept a record of everything about him without permission and hated herself for keeping it. "My father runs a company that holds eleven government contracts. My mother’s signature closes inquiries that would end careers. I was conjuring at eight, with private instructors who cost more than your dragon’s entire annual budget. I did not even take the entrance exam, because the recommendation pathway exists for people like me. I am the most valuable woman in this building."

She laid one hand flat on his chest, over the sternum, over the place where, the last time she had stood this close to him, she had been too angry to notice anything.

Something under his pulse pressed against her palm. A second beat, offset and patient, that had no business being there.

"My father says I’m the best catch in the state." It came out quiet and furious, and young in a way she would never forgive herself for. "And you left me for twenty-two days."