Page 48 of Mayhem

Malakai stopped playing with my pen. I felt the shift beside me without looking at him, but I kept my attention on Hunter because I had a feeling we were not done.

“What about Devon and Maren?”

That took another few seconds, mostly because I was annoyed he had a point. Devon had already started showing up around me without asking permission. Maren had helped pull names for Priya without hesitating. If somebody had tried the same thing with either of them this morning, I would have done exactly what I had done for Priya and complained afterward when Hunter explained another institutional consequence nobody had included in orientation.

“They’re mine too,” I said. “If that’s the language you people use, then fine. All three.”

Hunter stared at me long enough to make it obvious he had expected at least some resistance once the responsibility became real. “You understand that one of them can create a problem you have nothing to do with and still drag it to your door.”

“I heard you the first time. I’m not agreeing because I think they’re incapable of fucking up. Everybody fucks up. I’m agreeing because if somebody comes for them, they’re already going to end up dealing with me. We may as well save everyone the confusion.”

That seemed to satisfy something in Hunter, although satisfaction on him looked annoyingly similar to concern. He picked his pen back up and opened the folder in front of him again, dismissing the conversation without pretending the decision had been casual just because I had made it quickly.

I reached for my own pen at the same time and found Malakai still holding it. He looked at me for a moment, quieter than he had been since we walked in, then set it carefully on top of my book instead of making me fight him for it.

That was strange enough that I looked at him.

He grinned before I could ask, ruining whatever had almost happened. “Your boots are still ugly.”

I shoved him off the arm of my chair with both hands. He caught himself against the side table, laughing while I opened my book again, and Hunter told us both to shut the fuck up without lifting his head.

hunter

By midafternoon, I had answered three calls about Friday’s dinner, denied a lower house permission to use one of the Quorum rooms for a private meeting, and sent two names back to Ronan because whoever had given them to him had lied badly enough that I was offended on principle. None of it required much thought. Aldrich produced the same kinds of problems every week: people borrowing authority they did not have, people testing borders they understood perfectly well, people convincing themselves an old family name would protect them from a new mistake. Most of it could be handled with a call, a warning, or somebody being reminded exactly whose permission they had forgotten to ask for.

Echo Matthews was becoming considerably less convenient.

Her file had been open beside my laptop since lunch. I had stopped pretending otherwise after the third time I returned to it between other matters. Her school history was clean. Her transfer paperwork was cleaner. Every address existed, every listed employer existed, every reference answered the way they were supposed to, and somehow the whole thing became less convincing the longer I looked at it.

People left residue. Families especially. Property records, old employers, court filings, tax documents, professional licenses, school registrations, marriages, divorces, debts, business partnerships, someone’s name buried in the minutes of a town council meeting because they had complained about a fence fifteen years earlier. Echo’s current life had enough of that to look ordinary from a distance. The farther backward I pushed, the thinner it became.

The four fathers were the worst part.

I had started with Matthews because it was the name attached to Echo and expected to find one branch that eventually explained the rest. Instead, every route split. One father appeared under a business registration that had started later than his age suggested it should have. Another had employment records that looked normal until they stopped for several years and resumed somewhere else without anything connecting the gap. One had enough legitimate documentation to pass any ordinary search while still managing to tell me almost nothing about who he had been before Echo entered his life. The fourth was worse. Too many names brushed the same records without staying attached long enough to build a history.

Somebody had cleaned this.

I leaned back and rubbed my thumb once along the edge of the trackpad before opening the property search again. Ronan had sent me two older addresses connected loosely to the Matthews name, both useless. One led to a rental complex demolished more than a decade ago. The other belonged to a holding company that had changed hands twice before Echo was old enough to sign anything. I widened the search instead of following her directly, looking at names that had appeared beside the family rather than inside it.

That was where Primrose surfaced.

It was barely anything. A property reference from years ago, one of those old archived records that had survived because somebody had digitized a municipal index without caring whether the information still mattered. The Matthews name appeared in a linked document, then disappeared again beneath an identifier that did not match anything in Echo’s current file. Primrose could have been a street, a district, a company, or somebody’s badly named development project. The record did not give me enough to decide.

I copied the identifier into a separate note and ran it through the Quorum archive.

Nothing.

I tried the broader family database and got an access error so fast it irritated me.

That was more interesting.

My phone buzzed against the desk before I could chase it. Ronan had sent the updated Friday seating list with three corrections marked and a note that Desmond’s people had expanded the Voss side again. I read it once, sent back approval for the two changes that mattered, and told him to leave the third alone until I knew why the name had been added. A second message came in from security about Colson’s people testing the south lot again. I forwarded it to the person responsible for nights and told him I was done warning them.

Then I looked back at Primrose.

The access error remained.

I closed the laptop before I wasted another hour forcing a door I did not yet understand and gathered the folder beside it. Echo had already managed to turn one morning into three separate problems, and I had another one waiting upstairs because apparently I had reached the point in my life where returning a pair of ugly boots counted as strategy.