Chapter 594: A Question of Motive
Chapter 594: A Question of Motive
The physical conditioning assessment was designed to break people.
Two hours of sustained load testing in a facility that smelled like recycled air and corporate ambition. Treadmills that adjusted incline based on heartrate. Resistance machines calibrated to push every muscle group past comfortable output. Recovery intervals measured in seconds rather than minutes.
Helena stood behind a glass partition with a datapad, recording everything. Two other Olympus Rising staff flanked her. Lab coats. Clipboards. The kind of people who looked at a human body and saw a spreadsheet.
I gave them exactly what a high-performing C-Rank with A-Rank potential should produce. Slightly above expected numbers. Enough to impress without raising flags. The treadmill topped out at a pace that would have winded me six months ago. Now it felt like a warm-up jog, and keeping my breathing deliberately ragged took more effort than the actual running.
Nel monitored my output from inside my skull.
Heart rate displayed at one hundred forty-two. Actual resting equivalent given hidden stats is approximately sixty-eight. The discrepancy is notable. Try sweating more.
I wiped my forehead with my shirt and made a show of leaning on my knees between sets.
"Impressive recovery time for someone who fought a national tournament forty-eight hours ago," one of the lab coats said through the intercom. "Your VO2 max is testing at the ninety-third percentile for your age group."
"Clean living and good genetics," I said between fake gasps.
Helena’s stylus tapped the datapad. She didn’t look convinced.
Two hours later, I walked out of the assessment facility with a towel around my neck and legs that felt fine but looked like they should be shaking. The hallway was empty except for the ambient hum of the building’s ventilation system and the distant muffled sound of a training exercise on a lower floor.
My phone vibrated.
Natalia. A single message.
How was the assessment?
Boring. They made me run on a treadmill for an hour.
Did you hold back?
Obviously.
Good. Emi says hi. She made muffins. They’re terrible. She cried when Raphael spit his out. Now she’s making more muffins to fix the first batch of muffins.
I smiled at the phone screen. Stood there in a corporate hallway three hundred miles from home, smiling at a message about terrible muffins.
Tell Emi I’ll eat all of them when I get back. Even the bad ones.
You’ll eat mine first.
Yours aren’t food. Yours are more like weapons.
Sleep with both eyes open tonight.
I pocketed the phone. The pendant sat warm against my sternum. Natalia’s emotions hummed through the Covenant bond. Calm. Watchful. The barest edge of something possessive that never fully went away.
Maki materialized on my shoulder in cat form. She’d been hiding in my shadow through the entire assessment, which was her preferred mode of existence when bored.
"Master smells like synthetic rubber and lies."
"I was on a treadmill."
"Maki can tell when Master is faking exhaustion. Master’s breathing pattern changes. It becomes too regular. Like someone reading lines from a script."
"Thanks for the acting notes."
"Maki is merely protecting her investment."
I scratched behind her ears. She purred so hard her entire body vibrated against my neck.
The rooftop garden occupied the forty-seventh floor of the Olympus Rising tower.
Getting there required bypassing three security checkpoints, two locked stairwell doors, and a maintenance corridor that smelled like machine oil and forgotten good intentions. The fact that Reyna navigated this route regularly said something about how badly she needed a place that wasn’t monitored by cameras or branded with a corporate logo.
I pushed through the final door at 9:47 PM.
The garden wasn’t really a garden. More like nature’s hostile takeover of a corporate rooftop. Planters that someone had abandoned years ago now overflowed with wild growth. Ivy crawled across concrete barriers. Small trees grew from cracks in the foundation where rainwater collected. The whole space existed in defiance of the building it sat on, chaotic and unmanaged and absolutely beautiful.
New Vein City glittered below like a circuit board someone had dropped into the ocean. The harbor lights reflected across dark water. Wind pushed through the rooftop vegetation and carried the scent of salt and warm stone.
Reyna sat on the edge of a concrete planter with her legs dangling over a forty-seven-story drop. She’d changed out of her training clothes into jeans with holes at the knees, a leather jacket over a black tank top, and unlaced combat boots. Her crimson hair hung loose around her shoulders instead of the braid she wore during the day.
This wasn’t La Sirena. This was the girl underneath.
She heard me before I spoke. Turned her head just enough that her profile caught the city lights, green eyes reflecting New Vein’s skyline.
"Took you long enough."
"Your secret path involves three security doors and a hallway that tried to give me tetanus."
"Keeps the tourists out."
I sat beside her on the planter. The concrete was warm from the day’s heat. Below us, the city breathed in its particular rhythm of traffic and distant music and the occasional wail of a Hunter patrol responding to something that shouldn’t exist.
Maki dropped from my shoulder and padded across the rooftop, nose twitching as she investigated every plant with the focused intensity of a weapons inspector.
Reyna watched the cat.
"Your pet has two tails."
"You mentioned that this morning."
"Still weird."
"She grows on you."
"Like fungus?"
"That’s literally what Natalia said."
Reyna’s expression didn’t change at Natalia’s name. But something in the way she held her shoulders shifted. A slight rotation inward. The body language of someone preparing for information they already expected.
"You talk about her a lot."
"She’s important."
"I know." Reyna pulled one knee up to her chest and wrapped her arms around it. The leather jacket creaked. "Veronica showed me footage of the tournament. The moment where Kuzmina created that ice dragon and sent it screaming across the arena at me." Her lips twitched. "That girl wanted to kill me. Like, genuinely. Not tournament-style. She wanted me dead and buried and forgotten."
"That’s how she shows affection."
"Pendejo, that’s how she shows murder."
I laughed. Couldn’t help it. The sound bounced off the concrete barriers and dissolved into the city noise below.
Reyna watched me laugh with an expression I couldn’t fully read. Something between fascination and hunger and the particular confusion of someone encountering an emotion they don’t have a name for yet.
"Can I ask you something?"
"You’re going to anyway."
"Why did you come tonight?"