Page 42 of Mayhem

The answer bothered him more than if I’d threatened him directly. He stood too fast, chair scraping behind him, and started toward the desk with the kind of angry movement people used when they wanted the room to remember they still had choices. Echo didn’t move until he reached into the drawer.

Then she was out of the chair.

She caught his wrist before his hand disappeared inside, twisted just enough to force him forward, and shut the drawer with her other hand. Callum swore and tried to pull away. Echo increased the pressure until his knees bent, her voice staying level while she told him that whatever he thought he needed from the drawer was going to make the afternoon worse.

He stopped fighting and Echo released him immediately. She stepped back and returned to the chair while Callum rubbed his wrist and stared at her like he’d only just realized the woman Hunter sent wasn’t there for decoration.

“Now,” she said, settling back into the same position, “do you want to keep protecting your mother by making this debt bigger, or do you want to pay what you promised and make sure nobody needs to involve her again?”

Callum looked at me one last time. I shrugged. Ten minutes later, he handed over a temporary credential and the authentication sequence we needed to pull the list before the token expired.

Echo waited until we were outside the building before she looked at me. “He was going for a second phone.”

“I know.”

“You were going to let him get it.”

“I wanted to see what you did.”

Her mouth curved slowly as we headed back toward the center of campus. “That’s cute.”

I let her have that one. She’d earned it.

By the time we crossed back through the center of campus, Echo had stopped pretending she wasn’t pleased with herself. She didn’t bounce or grin like Malakai would have if somebody handed him an excuse to be difficult; with her, satisfaction showed up in the looseness around her mouth and the way she stopped digging her hands into her jacket pockets like she was waiting for something else to go wrong. She had the credential sequence saved where Callum couldn’t revoke it before we used it, Hunter had what he’d sent us for, and she’d managed the entire collection without turning the room into a cleanup problem. I understood why Malakai kept talking about her now. What interested me was how naturally she understood the structure underneath the debt.

Echo glanced over when I didn’t say anything for too long. “You going to report back that I managed an entire conversation without stabbing anyone, or are you still deciding whether the wrist counts?”

“It doesn’t.”

“Good. I’d hate for Hunter to dock my employee review.”

I almost smiled. She had spent the walk back trying to turn the assignment into something casual, but she’d also asked twice whether the temporary credential would be enough and once whether Callum could remotely invalidate the authentication sequence before we reached the lounge. She cared about the outcome. More than that, she understood the debt itself in a way most people needed explained to them several times before they stopped treating favors like promises between friends.

“You ran your own books for years,” I said as we cut behind the humanities building instead of taking the crowded main path. “How often did somebody decide they didn’t owe you anymore once it was time to pay?”

Echo made a quiet sound of disgust. “Constantly, until people figured out I wasn’t interested in debating memory loss. The first few were always the worst because everybody watches what happens when someone refuses. If they walk away clean, congratulations, you don’t have a network anymore. You have a suggestion box.”

That answer was cleaner than anything Callum had managed in twenty minutes. “So what did you do?”

“It depended on what they owed.” She looked toward me then, probably checking whether I was asking because I actually wanted the answer. “If it was information, I took something better. If it was access, I found another route and made sure the person who fucked me over lost more than they would’ve given me. Money was boring. People usually paid money once they realized the alternative was me getting creative.”

“You liked the creative part.”

“I like competence.” Her mouth curved slightly. “Mine, preferably.”

There it was again. Malakai would have pushed until she threatened him. I didn’t need to. Echo talked plenty when she thought the subject was worth her time, and the more she gave without being cornered into it, the easier she was to read. She liked systems because systems could be learned, broken apart, and rebuilt around whatever she wanted. People were messier, but she treated them the same way once she found the pressure point.

We reached the side entrance to the law building, and I caught her arm before she could pull the door open. Echo looked down at my hand, then up at me, expression sharpening immediately.

“You bleeding?”

She followed my gaze to the faint red smear along the side of her hand. Callum must have caught her against the drawer when she twisted him down. It wasn’t much, barely more than a shallow scrape across one knuckle, but she hadn’t noticed it. Echo rubbed her thumb over the spot and shrugged. “Apparently.”

I took her wrist before she could wipe it on her jeans. “Hold still.”

Her eyebrows lifted, but she let me turn her hand over. The cut was shallow, already slowing, and there was a dark streak of dust or grease near the base of her thumb from Callum’s desk. I wiped it away with my thumb, then kept hold of her hand a little longer than necessary.

Echo noticed.