Chapter 5 The Price of Silence

[Seraphina's POV]

I make it through exactly one class before I start lying to people.

Camille catches my sleeve outside the East Hall, breathless and grinning, already mid-sentence about a study group, a professor who assigns too much reading, something about the color scheme for the mating ceremony she wants my opinion on. I tell her I have a migraine. I tell her I need to find my advisor. I tell her anything that isn't I can't look at you without thinking about the way his mouth felt when he said my name wrong.

By the third excuse she stops asking. I catch the flicker of hurt on her face before she smooths it into something polite, and I hate myself for putting it there.

She doesn't deserve this. Whatever this is.

I spend the free period in the library instead, at a table angled so I can watch both exits, a textbook open in front of me that I'm not reading. My hand keeps drifting to the place on my wrist where his fingers touched mine, like I can still feel the burn of it under my skin.

He is the enemy, I tell myself. He stood in that dining room and did nothing.

My body doesn't seem to have gotten the memo.

I'm still arguing with myself when the burner phone buzzes once, twice, against my hip. A single line, no signature.

Service road behind the greenhouse. Fifteen minutes.

Sterling.

I close the textbook and go.

The service road is exactly as advertised — gravel, unlit, screened from the main path by a hedge of dead rosebushes that the groundskeepers haven't bothered to pull. His car is already there, engine off, headlights dark. I get in without a word.

He doesn't look at me. He's got a tablet propped against the wheel, thumb dragging through what looks like campus security footage, sped up, silent.

"Report," he says, after a silence long enough to make my skin itch.

"I've made contact with all three of them. Vane, Frost, Vance." Julian's inner circle rattles off my tongue easier than his name does. "I'm rooming with Camille. I have a seat at their table."

"That's a start." He doesn't sound impressed. "What have you got that we can use?"

"It's been one day, Sterling."

"One day in which you were photographed alone with the Crown Heir in the Conservatory courtyard for eleven minutes." He finally turns the tablet toward me. Grainy, night-vision footage — me and Julian, ten feet apart, frozen in the fog. "Care to explain what that was?"

My stomach drops through the floor of the car. "He followed me outside. I told him to leave."

"You didn't walk away."

"I couldn't—" I stop myself. I couldn't move is not an answer Sterling will accept, and it isn't one I want to examine too closely myself. "He was fishing. Trying to find out who I am. I gave him nothing."

Sterling studies me the way he studies everything — like a variable he hasn't finished solving. "You understand what happens if the Crown Heir decides you're worth his personal attention. You stop being invisible. Every guard on that campus starts looking twice at the scholarship girl who caught his eye."

"I know how to handle myself."

"Do you." He sets the tablet face-down on the dash, and something in the gesture makes my pulse pick up before he even says it. "Because I'd hate for anything to interfere with Clara's care."

The name lands like a dropped stone.

"What about Clara."

"She had an incident two nights ago. Nothing catastrophic — a seizure, they think triggered by an adjustment to the stasis regulation on Pod B. She's stable." He says it so evenly it takes a second for the words to reassemble into something horrifying. "But stable isn't the same as safe, Seraphina, and stasis pods that age don't run on good intentions. They run on a budget line that the Directorate reviews quarterly. A budget line with your name attached to it, as the field asset whose work justifies the expense."

"You're saying if I don't produce results, they pull her funding."

"I'm saying the review board doesn't fund sentiment. It funds outcomes." He finally looks at me, and there's nothing in his face I can use — no cruelty, no apology, just flat administrative patience. "You have ninety days to give me something that proves House Vane's operation is worth the Directorate's continued investment in this case. Photographs. Recordings. A name inside the syndicate willing to talk. Anything I can put in front of the board that isn't a photo of you standing in the fog with their heir."

"She's twelve years old." My voice cracks on it. "She didn't ask for any of this."

"Neither did you, and yet here we are." Not unkind, exactly. Just true, in the way that hurts worse than cruelty would. "I'm not the one who decides what she's worth to the people signing the checks. I'm just telling you what I know before it becomes your problem instead of mine."

I stare out the windshield at the dead hedge, willing my hands to stop shaking. "And if I get you what you need?"

"Then Clara stays exactly where she is. Monitored. Cared for. Alive." He starts the engine, which I've learned by now means the conversation is over whether or not I'm finished with it. "And if you don't — if you let yourself get tangled up in whatever that footage was — then I stop being able to promise you that. Budgets don't care about mate bonds, Seraphina. Neither do I."

I go still. "That's not what that was."

"I didn't say it was anything." His eyes flick to me, and for one unguarded second I see something almost like warning in them — not for the Directorate's sake, but for mine. "I'm only telling you what it looks like from where I sit. Ninety days. Don't make me explain to a review board why the girl I recommended for this assignment got distracted by a pretty face and a crown."

He reaches across me and pops my door open. Dismissed, same as always.