Chapter 576 | The Mechanism is a Lottery Kid

Chapter 576: 576 | The Mechanism is a Lottery Kid

"Fine."

The keyboard went quiet too. "Two weeks after the fruit cup, he messed up with me. Bad. He made a promise about a buff and didn’t keep it, and I walked out of his room ready to never speak to him again. I had the whole revenge spreadsheet built. Then he showed up at my door after a gate with a bite in his shoulder, and instead of asking me for anything, he made me sit down and talk first. He wanted to know if I actually wanted it or if I just needed it."

Blair said nothing. Her thumb found the bleach spot on the sleeve again and rubbed at it.

"Nobody had ever asked me that." Belle’s voice went thin at the edges and then steadied. "Every boy in Burns who bought me dinner had a number in his head before the bread came out. I knew what I owed before I knew what I ordered. And this idiot looked at me like the bill didn’t exist. I tried to invoice him for it afterward, because I didn’t know what else to do with my hands."

"You invoice everyone, Fox."

"Yeah. Ask yourself why." A long pause stretched across the line. "You and me, we grew up on opposite ends of the same problem. I had nothing and had to pay for everything. You had everything, and your dad made you pay for it anyway. Neither of us knows what to do when somebody hands us something and walks away without a receipt."

Blair’s eyes stung. She blamed the dry air in the penthouse and the late hour.

The rug beneath her had a dark scorched patch now, the size of her palm, and she stared at it rather than at anything inside her own chest. Her father had once looked at a scorch mark like this on the conservatory piano, and he had told her that control was the only thing she would ever be allowed to own. She had been twelve. The piano had cost more than Fox’s childhood home, she suspected, and he had replaced it within the week without ever mentioning it again.

"He will want something." Her voice came out flat. "Everyone wants something from a Davenport."

"He wants you to stop running." Belle crunched another chip.

Blair pressed her free palm against her eyes. Behind her lids she saw the bedroom again, unwanted and in perfect detail. Love had been in his lap. Monroe’s hand had sat open on Love’s hip like it belonged there. His eyes had found Blair over Love’s shoulder, and he had not looked guilty at all.

He had looked at Blair like she was late to something.

"She sat in his lap and kissed his hand while looking at me." Blair heard the crack in her own voice and could not stop it. "She did that on purpose, Fox."

"Of course she did it on purpose. You’d been circling her boyfriend like a shark for weeks." Belle didn’t sound remotely sorry. "Naomi’s the nicest person on this island, and she still bit. That should tell you how obvious you are."

"I am not obvious."

"You melted his doorframe, Davenport."

Blair dropped back flat onto the rug and stared up at the moonlight. Her hair spread around her head in a red mess she would never let a stylist see. The lace bra under the sweater was a soft black set from a boutique on Rue Saint-Honoré, chosen by a woman who had asked who it was for, and Blair had told her to mind her commission.

"Fox."

"Still here."

"What happens on Thursday?"

Belle didn’t answer right away. Blair heard her shift, a creak of bedsprings, and then the rustle of blankets pulled up.

"Honestly? I think he’ll sit there in a chair and let you talk. He’ll let you and Naomi go at each other for a while, and he won’t take a side, because he never does. Then he’ll say one sentence, and you’ll both want to strangle him, and then everybody will agree with it." Belle sighed. "It’s infuriating to watch. You’ve seen him do it in briefings."

Blair had seen it. She had watched him do it over lunch about Monterey, with his chair tipped back on two legs and his tie loose. He had let Ayame and Blair snarl at each other across the table for a full four minutes. Then he had said a single line about the shelf being a grinder, and somehow Blair had found herself nodding before she remembered she disagreed.

She crossed out the word somehow in her head, because Davenports did not accept somehow. There was always a mechanism. The mechanism here was a lottery kid who looked at people long enough to understand what they were afraid of.

"I will not be managed."

"Nobody’s managing you. That’s the problem." Belle yawned into the phone. "You keep waiting for him to make you an offer you can refuse. He won’t. He’ll just stand there, and you’ll have to decide."

"I already decided. There is a nine-page contract."

"The contract decides what happens if you lose. You haven’t decided what you want if you win."

Blair went very still on the rug.

The scorch mark under her hand had stopped smoking. Her heart thudded hard against the lace cup, and she could feel the pulse in her throat where his mouth had been in the hallway under the sprinklers. He had kissed her pulse in the cave, too, pressed flat against the stone with her thigh caught between his legs. She had told him the cave never happened, and he had told her he had already forgotten it.

He had lied, and she had known he was lying. She had been grateful anyway.

"I want..." Blair stopped. The words stuck in her mouth like a bone.

"Go on." Belle’s voice went gentle. "Practice on me. I’m a spreadsheet with legs, I won’t judge."

"You will absolutely judge."

"I’ll judge internally. Out loud I’ll be supportive."

Blair closed her eyes. The penthouse was so quiet that she could hear the fridge in the kitchen, forty feet away, cycling on. Her own breathing sounded loud and uneven.

"I want him to look at me the way he looks at Love."