Chapter 695 | The Chair Knows

Chapter 695: 695 | The Chair Knows

There were agency placements twice a week and conditioning with Steele every Monday, Tuesday and Thursday.

There was Dravid’s Combat Theory and Mercy’s Hero Law. There was Crane’s Brand Management, plus Radiant’s Hero Basics when he showed up, Steele’s tactical exercises when he didn’t.

There were Aspect Development labs, and coordination meetings with Petra that had gone from hostile negotiations to something I wasn’t ready to name. Felicity’s room on Tuesday nights had become a standing arrangement neither of us brought up in daylight.

Camille met me at Field Epsilon every Thursday at five and hit me until something in her chest loosened enough for her to say what she actually wanted to say. Hiro met me at Field Zeta on alternate evenings, where he taught me the leg kick I couldn’t check and I taught him the forward pressure he couldn’t handle.

And always the Eastside, where Dralun filed nine-word reports and Ophelia kept a point system that had become the most complex accounting document in California, and Grandma Lin fed everyone who came through her door, because that was what the Eastside did when the ranking system forgot it existed.

I had forty-seven families on a ledger and a card with nine Branded signatures in a dragon’s vest pocket. I had a gala later this month, where Grande Dame would give the keynote and Diane would wear heels that added three inches to an authority that didn’t need any help. I had a strange old-gold residue on a picture frame that the System couldn’t explain and the second heartbeat couldn’t stop reaching for.

I had a Commission advisory that said observe but do not restrict, written by a director who’d broken people with twenty years of lying experience, and who had looked at me across a conference table and decided I was worth the trouble of not breaking.

And in six weeks, nine hundred people would watch me demonstrate abilities my file said I didn’t have, in a costume designed to be hard to photograph, with a half-mask over a face four million people had already seen in gold.

The gap between Lukas Belmont, Registered Rare-Tier Channeler, and whatever I actually was had never been wider.

Sunday dinner at Lin’s had turned into the one fixed point in my week that nothing could move.

The fourth one started the same way the first three had. Grandma Lin pointed at a chair without looking up from her cleaver, and Ophelia’s cousin Vivian from Alhambra leaned across the table with the intensity of a prosecutor who’d forgotten she was supposed to be eating. I sat in a seat that didn’t belong to me while everyone pretended this was normal.

"So you work with Ophelia." Vivian had the same grey eyes as her cousin and none of the theatrical defenses. Ophelia threw drama around like a smokescreen. Vivian came straight at you. "In the office. Above this restaurant. For a dragon."

"That’s accurate."

"And you’re from Halloran."

"Also accurate."

"The hero academy on the hill. The one that costs more per semester than my car."

"Your car is very affordable."

Ophelia kicked me under the table. I deserved it.

Vivian was twenty-four, processed insurance claims in Alhambra, and had driven ninety minutes for the specific purpose of interrogating whoever her baby cousin had been texting at two in the morning for the past month. She wore a blazer over a sundress, like she hadn’t decided whether this was a professional evaluation or a family dinner, and her bun was pulled tight enough to give me sympathy pains in my own scalp. The resemblance stopped at the eyes. Everything about Vivian said competent and unconvinced, and everything about Ophelia said look at my parasol and ignore the fact that I’m gathering intelligence.

"Ophelia says you bring her lattes."

"Oat milk with lavender and an extra shot."

"Every day."

"Most days. She docks points when I forget."

Vivian’s eyes narrowed. "Points."

"I’m currently at negative eight hundred and twelve." I reached for the congee Grandma Lin had put in front of me with the special aggression she saved for people she hadn’t decided to trust yet. "The system’s complicated. I don’t fully understand it. Mr. Stitches keeps the books."

"Mr. Stitches."

"Her bear."

Ophelia’s face had gone the exact shade of pink that meant she wanted to send her bats out and drop everyone in the room into a depressive spiral. Her platform shoe found my shin again, harder, and I could feel the bruise forming in real time. Demigod would have it gone by morning. That wasn’t the point.

"He’s joking," Ophelia said through her teeth. "He does that. He thinks he’s funny. He’s not funny. Tell her you’re not funny."

"I’m not funny."

"See? Not funny."

Vivian looked back and forth between us like she’d just watched a whole tennis match in three sentences and was already plotting where the next volley would land.

"You text her at two in the morning."

"She texts me at two in the morning. I answer because I have bad sleep habits and she threatened to station bats outside my window."

"Gloom bats."

"Very sad ones. They’d depress my hallmates."

"Your hallmates at Halloran."

"One of them analyzes everything. The other one disappears when you look straight at him. It’s a dynamic."

Grandma Lin came out of the kitchen with a plate of char siu and set it in front of me hard enough to rattle the table. She said something in Cantonese to Ophelia, who translated with visible reluctance.

"She says you look thin."

"I weigh the same as last week."

"She says you look thin anyway. Eat."

I ate. The char siu was perfect, honey-glazed and falling apart, and I’d stopped asking myself why Grandma Lin fed me like a personal project about three weeks ago. The restaurant hummed around us, the Sunday crowd long since used to working around the family table in the corner. Mrs. Petrosyan was here with her husband, and Tomás sat at the counter with a newspaper he wasn’t reading. Ramón had his usual spot by the window, his eyes on the street like somebody who’d lived on the Eastside long enough to know that watching was the minimum requirement for surviving it.

The Eastside had absorbed me. I didn’t have a better word for what the last three weeks had done. I had routes now, and regulars who expected to see me. I had a standing order at the croissant station and a standing argument with Ophelia about latte temperature. Every Thursday at five, back on campus, Camille hit me until her shoulders dropped and she could say whatever she’d been holding since Tuesday.

The Fitzgerald estate had been ten years of feeling like a guest in somebody else’s house. The Eastside was five weeks of feeling like I’d always lived here and had simply forgotten.

Vivian was still watching me. Her eyes went to Ophelia, came back to me, then moved to the chair at the head of the table, the one Grandma Lin had put me in when I walked in.

"That’s Dralun’s chair."

Ophelia went rigid.

"Grandma." Vivian’s voice had the weight of somebody who’d just realized she was missing context. "Why is the boy in Dralun’s chair?"

Grandma Lin didn’t look up from the kitchen doorway. She said something in Cantonese that put Ophelia’s face through four expressions in two seconds, ending on horrified understanding. Then she vanished into the back without another word.

"What did she say?"

"Nothing." Ophelia stabbed her congee with her spoon like it had insulted her. "She said nothing. Eat your char siu."

"Ophelia."

"I said nothing."

Vivian’s smile was the smile of a predator that had spotted a limp. "Ophelia Lin. What did Grandma say about the boy in Dralun’s chair?"

The pink started at Ophelia’s ears and spread into her cheeks, then down her throat and past her collar. Her corset did nothing to hide it. If anything, the boning pushed everything up into the candlelight, so the blush ran all the way down to the pale swell of her breasts where the black lace edged them, and every breath she took made it worse. Her bats, which had been circling lazily near the ceiling, dropped six inches and started orbiting her head in tight, agitated loops.

"She said." Ophelia’s voice came out strangled. "She said the chair knows who belongs in it."