Chapter 574 | I Require a Legal Opinion

Chapter 574: 574 | I Require a Legal Opinion

Blair Davenport stared at the words she had just sent until the screen dimmed and went black in her hand.

Go to sleep, Monroe.

She had typed it as an order. Reading it back in the dark, it sounded far too much like a goodnight, which was an entirely different category of message and one she had never sent to anyone in eighteen years.

She considered unsending it.

The app allowed that for fifteen minutes, and she had read the terms of service twice in September when a Ruby boy kept messaging her about study groups.

She left it. Unsending a goodnight would mean admitting it had been a goodnight in the first place.

The penthouse sat silent around her, every surface clean and expensive and untouched. Moonlight came through the floor-to-ceiling glass and laid a pale stripe across the bed, across the white duvet she had not slept under yet, across her own bare legs where they stuck out from the hem of the grey crew neck.

The sweater was enormous on her. It fell to the middle of her thighs, and the sleeves had to be shoved up twice to free her hands, and the collar slid off one shoulder whenever she moved.

Under it she wore a black lace set her stylist had picked out in Paris last spring, a set nobody had ever seen, and she had chosen it tonight for reasons she refused to examine.

The sweater still smelled faintly of lavender soap, which meant it smelled of Ayame’s shower, which meant Monroe had been in Ayame’s apartment wearing it, which meant a great many things Blair did not intend to think about before breakfast.

She pulled it off over her head and folded it into a neat square on the nightstand.

Thirty seconds later she put it back on. The room was cold, and the climate control was set to sixty-eight because her father believed warmth made people soft, and she had not changed the setting in six weeks because changing it would mean he was right.

She lay back against the pillows and tried to sleep, and her brain immediately replayed the hallway under the sprinkler in high definition.

Monroe’s back against the wall. Her own fist wrapped in his tie, the silk scorching between her knuckles. His hand on her waist pulling her in until her hips pressed into his, until she could feel exactly what she was doing to him through two layers of uniform. He had called her princess in a low rough voice, and her ears had betrayed her in front of the entire Theory East corridor.

Blair rolled onto her stomach and pressed her face into the pillow until the memory stopped. It did not stop. It skipped forward to his bedroom doorway instead, to the Love girl sitting in his lap with her bare back to the door and her wet skirt rucked up around her thighs, kissing his palm and looking straight at Blair while she did it.

The pillowcase began to smoke under her cheek. She sat up and slapped it out with her hand.

Sleep was clearly off the table for the evening.

She slid out of bed and padded across the cold floor to her desk, knelt, and pried up the false bottom of the second drawer with her thumbnail.

Two hundred and fourteen paperbacks looked back at her, spines cracked and pages soft from rereading, every one of them hidden from her father, her sister, the housekeeping staff, and nine years of Misato Ayame’s terrifying observational skills.

She pulled out number one hundred and twelve, a story about a duke and a governess, and flipped to the Chapter she knew best.

The governess stood at a window and told her maid she was not in love with the duke. She said it four times in two pages while the maid poured tea and said nothing.

Blair threw the book across the room. It bounced off the window and landed spine-up on the rug.

The real problem, the one she kept circling and refusing to land on, was that she had nobody to tell. She had a nine-page notarized contract sitting in a lawyer’s server in San Francisco, a sweater that was technically stolen property, and a ferry railing in her memory that still felt warm. She had no one on earth to say any of it to.

She could not tell Misato. The contract was about Misato, and tomorrow at breakfast Blair would have to hand it to her across a table, and Misato would read Clause Fifteen and then look up with those green eyes. Blair had been dreading those green eyes since eleven forty-seven.

Cassandra would listen to the entire story with her head tilted and then send a follow-up email with a subject line about emotional liabilities. She would probably attach a spreadsheet.

Her father was not a person you told things to. Her father was a person you reported to, and Blair had stopped reporting anything real to him around the age of twelve, after the piano and the stage and the fire.

Her mother had left when Blair was seven and had never once called. That option did not exist.

Blair sat on the rug next to the thrown book and looked at her phone.

Fox had opened the cc within four minutes. Blair knew this because she had checked the read receipt eleven times. Fox had not replied to Blair directly, which meant Fox had forwarded it to Monroe and then called him, because Monroe’s typing bubble had gone suspiciously still for six full minutes.

Belle Fox. A lottery admission from rural Oregon who wore knockoff gold necklaces and stole bacon off other people’s plates and kept a spreadsheet tracking which women had left marks on which parts of Monroe’s body. The girl had a tab titled Davenport Variable. Blair had seen it over her shoulder on the ferry.

Blair Davenport did not call people like Belle Fox at two in the morning.

She called Belle Fox at two in the morning.

The line rang once before it connected, which told Blair the lottery girl had been staring at her phone too.

"Davenport, it’s two eleven, and I’m already billing you for this call in fifteen-minute increments."

"I require a legal opinion." Blair kept her spine straight even though nobody could see it. "Regarding the enforceability of Clause Eleven, subsection B."